Ep. 146: The Role of Agile Coaches in Modern Organizations

In this episode of Definitely, Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock explore the role of agile coaches in organizations. They discuss the evolution of coaching in business, drawing parallels with sports coaching, and examine the value coaches bring to modern organizations. The conversation delves into the challenges faced by agile coaches, the importance of objectivity, and the future of coaching in the business world.

This week´s takeaways:

• Organizational coaches provide valuable objectivity by observing the system from the outside, offering insights that those within the system might miss.
• While the term "agile coach" may evolve, the need for nurturing support to help organizations improve and adapt remains crucial in today's business landscape.
• There are strong parallels between coaching in high-performing sports teams and successful businesses, with coached organizations generally outperforming those without coaching support.

Don’t miss this conversation about the enduring necessity and transformative potential of Agile coaching

Chapters

• 0:04 Role of Agile Coaches in Organizations
• 10:29 Agile Coaches in Peak Performance

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello Dave, how are you doing?

Dave: 0:14

Peter, how are you doing? I'm kind of looking forward to this conversation, because it's an open-ended question that we're trying to address today, isn't it?

Peter: 0:21

It is it is. That's probably why we've been struggling and going back and forth a little bit, trying to work out where on earth this conversation will end up, because there are a lot of different avenues and directions that you could take this. So what is the topic today? As we get into this.

Dave: 0:34

The post-it that we're starting with is the agile coach's role in an organization.

Peter: 0:40

Which is an interesting one, and we've talked, I think, a fair bit on previous podcasts about sort of the direction we've seen the industry take. That I think today we wanted to talk a bit more about sort of what the intent is essentially Like. What is a coach really trying to expect it to do in an organization? Why do we need coaches anyway?

Dave: 1:02

Yeah, and I guess part of that question is do we expect, as we move to the next focus in terms of continuous improvement and organizational success and so on, that the role of the agile coach will disappear?

Peter: 1:16

And I think the role of like this, the organizational coach, the one who's helping the organization work out how do I improve the organization, how do I help the organization understand what's working, what's not working, how to improve, how to start to move forward and get better, I think that role still exists. It's, I think, the role of an agile coach in particular, which I always one of the things I've always thought about is that the so an agile coach is a coach who is very tailored towards driving the organization towards a particular direction, whereas a coach coach, like a lawyer coach, is just trying to make you the best you can possibly be.

Dave: 1:58

I feel like so I feel a lot more strongly than perhaps you do, cause when you're describing that, it feels like you're quite tentative about what the role is or whether or not we're going to see agile coaches going forward, and I think I take a slightly different view in that when I look at organizations like 100 years ago, they were all bringing in Taylorism, consultants, time and motion studies and so on, and that one was to help organizations become much more effective at getting work out whether you call that efficiency or whatever it is.

Dave: 2:28

And it's really focused on the process and how to build product. And I think what's been happening in the last multiple decades is we're shifting away from that mechanistic, physical product world into a digital world which has a very different sort of problems to solve, where it goes to the next level. And that next level is you're not just dealing with processes, where the people are wardens of that process, but we're going into a place where the technology is your enabler, but it's the people brings that magical quality that allows companies to be successful. And so now you need not time and motion studies to make the process as effective and efficient as possible, but you need people who understand people and human dynamics and all of the things that we think of as an agile coach being able to influence in an organization. How do not just the processes work together to make the business successful, but the people interacting with those processes to make something successful. So, in short, if you really believe everything's going into this people process, well, you're going to need somebody driving the people side.

Peter: 3:35

Yes.

Peter: 3:35

So I think actually, when now we start to talk about it from that point of view, I would say for knowledge, work, yes, this is definitely by far the best way to approach that and having somebody who can come in and act as the coach and the mentor and the teacher who's going to help you work out how to do that with the people you have in your context and develop that capability for the moving.

Peter: 3:56

There is almost a necessity in the world that we live in today to be able to access those markets and just simply the ease of access to that market, so that 100% I believe that there's that role. I often think more broadly if we start to think about organizations as a whole not all organizations are solely in that, about organizations as a whole. Not all organizations are solely in that, and there's going to be parts of those organizations which are, for example, a little bit of time I've spent in consumer packaged goods and looking at there's parts of that organization with what they're doing in mass manufacturing and distributing things across a stream where the application of theory of constraints and lean practices directly is the right way to approach the problem, just simply because what you're looking for is where's the waste in the system, how can I start to look at improving flow through the system? And that's that in that where I've got. Basically, how can I make that system better to the point that that is a very, very good way to approach that.

Dave: 5:05

So, and I think of that as sort of nurturing the organization and I feel that great agile coaches.

Dave: 5:11

The last few decades have taken that role and nurtured organizations to perform at a higher level and do lots of things that we talk about all the time and we don't want to spend a ton of time on it. So, as I look forward, I don't know that they'll all get called agile coaches anymore, because I think that role, unfortunately, has really been diluted and the credibility has either been lost or the trust has broken something there, and I'm not sure it's going to recover necessarily. I think something new will potentially emerge.

Dave: 5:41

And I don't think we need to go into the details of why that's happening too much, but just recognize. I guess the takeaway is are we going to have agile coaches? We need that nurturing support in an organization. Are they all going to get called agile coaches? Probably not.

Peter: 5:55

Yeah, and I think there's still that role that is needed in organizations. I think coaching is incredibly valuable to the organization to be able to help work out. Where are the ways I can improve? How can I improve? Bringing the right practices and tools and methods to the table, helping people get better at the work that they're doing and what's in front of them, what they see coming and understanding and becoming, as you put, more results driven and, as I was saying, like improving the productivity of the organization we're talking about a bit.

Dave: 6:33

Well, I mean, my kind of starting point in all of these conversations is to look at high performing sports teams. And yes, I'm kind of English and very definitely interested in the Euros.

Peter: 6:46

I'm English too and I'm like this, but may or may not, Well, I okay, but not a football fan, right.

Dave: 6:53

But anyway, where I'm coming from on that is what always amazes me is the amount of respect and given to coaches of sports teams or coaching individuals, tennis players, whatever it might be and the influence that they have and the expectation that in order to be successful, you're going to need a great coach that can help you do that. That and in fact, the whole ecosystem where, if you go and you've got small kids playing, you know sports in the community there's a coach. There's a whole kind of ecosystem building coaches up through right from the ground up. And yet in business, which is a highly competitive kind of domain, there isn't this expectation that great businesses have great coaches for want of a better word that you know, nurture and drive and help the whole be better than the sum of its parts.

Peter: 7:44

Yes, yeah, though I mean there's plenty of evidence that having great coaching or having organizations that have a coaching culture do perform better and they do have better results. So there's plenty of evidence to show that. But I would agree that you don't see this desire. I mean, I was having a conversation just this week with somebody talking about their teams and if he goes, asks the team leads, if I get you a coach to help you work out how to improve or look at how you can work through some of these problems, would you want that? He said no, I'd rather have another developer. You can work through some of these problems.

Dave: 8:21

Would you want that? He said no, I'd rather have another developer. Yeah, and that one just stuns me because if, if you think of a football team and the somebody would say I'd rather have another football player than a coach, that way, if you don't have a coach, that's weird. I mean, it's essential to the ingredient of a successful team in, certainly in in currently, let me put it that way and I think some of that comes to where you started before, where that trust has been broken.

Peter: 8:48

If people have had bad coaches, or they've seen bad results from coaching, or they've worked with people who've gone through a two-day course and then basically come in and said well, you've got to meet for 15 minutes. Now the last 16 minutes you've got to stop. Now it's like you're doing it wrong. Yeah, that type of thing is not.

Dave: 9:12

Every time you say that, I feel like you're getting at me, because I think my two-day courses do very, very well, but they're not going to produce coaches after two days that I can guarantee.

Peter: 9:25

Yes, and that's kind of the point I mean, coaching had delivered a lot more than two years, a lot more than two years, and a lot more than two years too, yeah, and I'm still learning.

Peter: 9:33

it's uh, there's, there's, so there's so much more to it than that and uh, so that I think that's where some of this comes from, or some of what we're just describing is that it's a there's a lot to learn, and almost the definition is such a broad definition and people aren't necessarily aware of that or that different coaches are going to have strengths in different areas and they're more suited to different engagements and the different layers of the organization. So I mean, it's interesting Well.

Dave: 10:04

I think, if we go back to the original question of the agile coach's role in an organization, I think if I kind of wrap up our conversation so far is for peak performance, you need a coach. If we were speaking about sports teams, for peak performance, you need a coach. If we were speaking about sports teams, for peak performance, you need a coach. We talk about businesses, organizations. For peak performance, you need a coaching capability. Let's put it that way in terms of helping things.

Dave: 10:29

Now, what I find quite interesting because we've spent a lot of time working with agile practices, methodologies and so on, and lean and roughly speaking, lean now, and there's plenty of things in lean which are around people but when you think of lean, when people start talking about lean and lean, six sigma and lean and removing waste and so on, process improvement becomes the primary topic. So I think of lean as being a real kind of central focus. There is process efficiency, improvement in that process to make it as efficient as possible. I'd argue that that agile mindset is much more about the people in the process than or the knowledge work that you were talking about, effectiveness of that, of that sort of organization.

Peter: 11:14

I think it borrows heavily from Lean, I mean, obviously. I mean that's well-written and known about it. But I agree that there is a deeper focus in the agile space around the people aspect of it, Like how do we help them improve on a daily basis? How do you start to look at work and optimize how you approach it and look at things in different ways and bring the right tools to the problem to start to work out how do I solve this differently? Which takes us to the value there of the coach being that they are sitting outside watching and observing and bringing that objective viewpoint. So they're looking at this and that's why they can help, because they're there to see that, and it's very hard when you're in the system to really be able to understand what's causing things and to be able to respond to them.

Dave: 12:11

I think that's a really important point that you're just describing there, because when you're in the system versus observing the system from outside, very like you can be the same person, but if you observe somebody else's system, you're going to see a whole bunch of things differently. I mean, I always find it very interesting when you have that conversation you go back to your own organization and you recognize all the things you've just been looking at somewhere else. I go blast. We're doing that as well.

Peter: 12:39

Yeah, no, no, for sure. It's interesting where you see these things that crop up. It can be very, yeah, eye-opening.

Dave: 12:46

Well, humbling as well, and I think that's part of that. You know, how do you?

Peter: 12:50

so I think that if the importance of an agile coach's role in an organization is to be outside the system looking in yeah, of an agile coach's role in an organization is to be outside the system looking in, yeah, so they can provide that objective advice and guidance and to help people understand where and how to approve, like, what sort of things should we be looking for? I think those are all very critical elements of what that role is, and so I think there's still that need for that role. I think it's an essential role. I think it brings a lot of. I think organizations benefit greatly from it, and we see that day in, day out with organizations we work with. I mean it's where do we like, where does it go from here?

Dave: 13:33

Well, if I so it's quite an interesting one. I think the need is only going to grow. So the risk is that the current what we're seeing in some parts of the market, which is a, is to sort of pump up that role of the agile coach again. I think that honestly, that that they had a chance the agile community, all of us involved in that agile community, had a chance to to change something there that maybe we didn't quite get to for various reasons, um, but I do think that role is essential going forward. So it's going to have to be reinvented or it's re-brought into an organization, and I think a lot of it. There is going to be quieter than it has been in the past. It won't be that trumpets and fanfare. It'll be coaches that get their head down and bring peak performance to the parts of the organization they work in.

Peter: 14:33

Yes, so if we're going to sum this up, three points out of all of that.

Dave: 14:40

I feel like I've spoken quite a bit on this one. How about you throw in a point? I'll throw in a point and then you can close it out Sure.

Peter: 14:47

So I think my point would be around having an organizational coach, somebody who is helping the organization work out how and where to improve, is very, very valuable. Making sure that they're the right coach for your organization and how you're operating, I think, is a key piece, and understanding that objectivity, that ability to sit outside the system and help observe and identify where those problems are, is absolutely critical, I feel like you've picked up quite a few things, so maybe let me focus on one thing, which is I'm spending more and more time trying to draw parallels with team sports and peak performance and the role coaches play in team sports versus organizations businesses.

Dave: 15:32

I think there's something to be learned from that. So we've touched on it a few things, and I love that idea of what you just mentioned now the coach sitting outside the system observing that. That, being outside looking in, hugely important. I love the idea of nurturing the organization to bring peak performance out of them. Um, I think those two things sort of sit under that and I think there's a lot potentially we can learn from that sort of high performing teams perspective.

Peter: 15:59

Yeah, I would agree. I think the other piece that we would pull out of this for me is around what the benefit the organizations get from having the coach there. That organizations that do have coaches do perform better in the marketplace in general, and that coaches help with a number of aspects of the organization we were debating this somewhat beforehand around and they help with improving, driving towards results. They help with improving productivity of the organization in certain ways, but they're there to help strengthen the organization and improve the way that the organization in certain ways, and that they're there to help strengthen the organization and improve the way that the organization performs. So I think that there's this, there's this benefit there that we can definitely.

Dave: 16:46

I the way I would describe what you're saying and I think this and I'm just going to leverage that whole team performance sports piece in sports, you know when things are succeeding or failing really fast, we see a game to game, whatever it is in in the, in the standings at the end of a season and so on and I think in business the more time the organization can focus on.

Peter: 17:08

What does peak performance look like will make it so much easier to recognize when your coach is influencing that because, like you say, the studies are clear coached organizations outperform non-coached organizations but then it gets really fuzzy and unclear as to exactly what that means and where they influence this being here yeah, because it's often less clear in an organization what exactly does success mean and what was the influence of this? How did this help improve it? Totally agree, yeah, yeah, cool. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap up for today. So contact us as always at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom, and don't forget to hit subscribe. So thank you, dave. Interesting conversation it's been a pleasure as always, Peter.

Dave: 17:54

Until next time.

Peter: 17:55

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.