While I certainly wouldn’t call myself and Agile Coach, I certainly play the role of (more) Agile (ish) Advocate. And as such, I suspect I am going to have Coach-like issues to contend with. The warning signs (temptations) That Stevie Borne discussed in her session 10 Temptations of an Agile Coach (new or experienced) will then (hopefully) come in handy.

  1. Meddling – To interfere with team’s activities when you shouldn’t. Doing so takes away from the team’s ownership of the process. Instead, let them experiment and learn from their mistakes.
  2. Impatience – Remember, change takes time
  3. Mastery – When you have all the answers so you freely give them, then the team doesn’t learn to rely on themselves, the process becomes ‘yours’ not ‘theirs’ and they begin to be afraid to fail. Instead of spoonfeeding the one true solution, share with them a number of possible solutions and let them choose which one they act on. Can also ask the team how they would solve the problem.
  4. Changeful – Changing things all the time; often just for the sake of change. If you change too often, you can’t tell if something is working or not. Keep a change in place for at least two iterations. Change too much and the team focus can slide from the ‘why’ into ‘how’.
  5. Inflexibility – The opposite of changeful and can be in terms of uniformity or dogmatism. This leads to teams losing sight of the value behind practices. As a coach you need to learn new techniques that still reinforce the principles. Somethings though, like timeboxes, you need to hold fast on; but you better be able to explain why when challenged.
  6. Control – When you start speaking for the team, you remove their empowerment. And that is rather central to Agile
  7. Utopia – The belief that Agile will solve all your problems and is the only way to work is a myth. It sets up the belief that either the team is failing Agile, or it is failing them. When Coaches believe this then it sets them up for catastrophe when problems arrive. And they will.
  8. Love – Wanting everyone to love you will eventually cause people to hold back honest feedback in an effort not to hurt your feelings. You also can’t effectively play the ‘bad cop’ as they are typically un-loved
  9. Fuzziness – Problems talked about in vague terms with no path to resolutions increases the frustration around those problems. Use the 5 Whys technique to find the real problem, name it, and then solve it.
  10. Avoidance – Avoiding failure or conflict causes both the team and the coach to miss growth opportunities. Remember, some failure is ok. Likely necessary actually.