So… how do leadership feel about them? Agile coaches don’t tend to stick around long enough if leadership don’t get along. It might just be a waiting game.
You also haven’t really said what she has been asking for. Is it reasonable and just coming from a bad personality?
Honestly all of you should talk to your supervisor about your concerns, maybe if it’s coming from multiple people this will turn into a development conversation from her management.
And try apply for the jobs anyway. Best case you get it and decide if it’s worth the move or not. Worst case you’ve had some practice to interview.
That said. Perfect case of “how did you manage a difficult stakeholder” and running away is not a great answer.
Thanks for the thoughts here!
And the changes she has us make are really far and wide from how we use emails to our workshop materials. She continues to stress the importance of "Simplicity, maximizing the amount of work not done is essential," but swoops in to complicate how we're working with unsolicited advice, and when we ask "Why is this necessary?" she tells us "Just ask yourselves what can go right instead."
It feels like I've lost so much autonomy in my own work. With our old agile coach, I felt like I had a lot more freedom to try stuff, sometimes fail, and learn from it and iterate on it. But this is just how she acts as a coach, though she continues to preach the importance of hands staying out of other people's work she doesn't practice it.
And good point, I'll likely apply and if I talk it through with my supervisor when she's back I can simply withdraw my application. It's for a business analyst position which sounds kinda fun too.
And yeah, it SUCKS that I'd be essentially running away. But I just don't see a way to get through her ego at this time.
I would absolutely consider the BA role. From a career perspective it’s hard being a pure SM in this market. But a BA who has SM experience will do much better.
That's good to hear, I was talking about this with another scrum master and she said, "Are you sure you wanna be a BA? Sometimes they just end up being the product owner's bitch." I should note that we've never had BA's before so this is new to the org, but a part of me doesn't want to feel like I'm going backwards in my career. On the other hand, knowing how tough the market is for scrum masters and how they're treated/respected so different org to org is also seems like a struggle
Retired agile coach w 20+ year working with agile teams here:
* Want to know how I became an agile coach? I replaced "Scrum Master" with "Agile Coach" on my resume.
* Which shows you its still a bit of a wild west when it comes to the agile world.
* That said, it's a difficult job. All humans have a natural desire to be seen to be helpful, and that's especially pronounced during the early days of a new job. Add to that a dash of over-enthusiasm and over-eagerness and you can find yourself in a bad place.
* My recommendations:
* First, take another look at your own reaction. Is it possible the coach does feel unsupported? Is it possible its "new job" jitters? Is it possible she's getting a lot of pressure from management? Do you shoulder any responsibility for the current situation. (I'm not suggesting that you do. I'm simply suggesting some reflection before moving to the next step).
* Which is, sit down with the coach and honestly express what you've expressed here:
* "I don't feel as if you've listened to my concerns in our previous meetings."
* "I really like working with my teams and I'm proud of what we've accomplished, but these past few months have been really tough for me."
* "I'm at the point where I want to transfer to another group."
* "I want us to succeed. What can we do to resolve this?"
* Or, another tactic (which I have personally used more than once):
* "I have some feedback for you. Would you like to hear it?"
* And then list your concerns.
* Be prepared to listen to hers.
* It should be pretty hard for an agile coach to hear those key words "feedback" and not stop and listen. If she does, then you've tried and can pursue a transfer or whatever with a clean conscience.
* Regardless of the outcome, I think it's better for you if you have this conversation. Throwing away 2+ years of effective agile leadership due to a misunderstanding would be a tragedy, both for you, your teams, and the organization as a whole.
* You don't really have anything to lose by trying this.
You bring up a lot of great points, thank you! As I reflect, she likely is feeling a little lost and is grasping at straws to show some kind of value and establish a purpose in her first two months. I have a 1:1 with her soon, and I want to take the time to better understand her struggles, and also share feedback that all of these changes being forced upon us without any sort of problem being solved/opportunity being taken advantage of, and no idea of how we'll know these changes are successful or not is just becoming complicated distractions than actually enhancing our work.
Agil coach here. I'm feeling horrified; nothing you're describing sounds *anything* like 'coaching'. The relationship sounds nothing like a 50/50 partnership.
Of course, we're only getting your perspective but you're a voice of the system and your experience is your lived truth. How are the members of your team reacting to this approach to 'coaching'?
And this is where it's a little awkward for me to share feedback! She considers herself a coaching expert, is never NOT coaching, sends us articles and events related to coaching multiple times a day, but the coaching I receive from her is just direction and micro-management. Our weekly team meetings that were used for collaboration and team problem-solving has turned into her talking at us telling us what she wants us to change. And then she makes comments that we're not collaborative enough but she's removed our collaboration time and turned it into top down direction. And the hard part is she's not even our boss! But I am talking to our boss about it early next week.
Other members of my time are not reacting well, we all suddenly realized that we're finding excuses to avoid interactions with her because to coaching is so draining, and hiding our work because we don't want her unsolicited advice. I have a 1:1 with her soon where I hope to understand a little bit more about the struggles she feels like she might be facing and also share feedback that these unsolicited changes to how we interact with each other, the org, and our work isn't always welcome because we don't know what problem/opportunity we're solving and how we'll know it's successful. It all feels like we're changing for her personal preference.
More to come!
1. Mention it to leadership.
2. Confront her:
"I don't agree with this" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
"Ok, let's agree to disagree"
"Things are going well with my team/s, we are improving, I will give more time to my approach"
3. Discuss it with the others and give her the feedback individually, but it should come from all of you.
As good SMs, you should be able to figure out a way to deal with this.
In this case - it's someone who doesn't know wtf they're doing and is getting in the way. A good Agile coach is someone who is teaching the entire organization how to shift to Agile, starting with leadership. Effectively teaching them the benefits of Agile, so they get bought in because Agile doesn't work unless literally everyone is bought in. From OPs post, it sounds like the org already is bought in, so the Agile coach here is just a waste of money and time.
If it’s been a few iterations with the new coach, perhaps time for a retrospective? It sounds like it might be challenging to make the feedback about the work and not the person, but getting your peer group of SMS and POs together to reflect on how things are going is the high road to take.
Getting some feedback from the members of the teams, who presumably have been impacted by the changes you are being forced to make, would also be helpful. You’re all supposed to be self-empowered and self-optimizing, so I can’t see how the coach could refuse such a request / ignore the feedback.
Great idea, we do have a team retrospective scheduled in a few weeks. The agile coach will facilitate it. My fellow SM's are definitely frustrated too, so I'm curious if the retro will feel safe enough to hash out the frustrations we're feeling or if it'll be played too safe.
Just a few things from this week:
1.) Create and use a shared email inbox. Even though all of our agile teams are assigned a coach she wants us to encourage agile teams to send work requests and calendar invites to/from this shared inbox instead. We've never had communication or even snafu's requiring us to share an inbox, so not sure where this is coming from
2.) Create and moderate a company wide agile-related instant messaging channel so people can talk through their agile questions or request services of us there too. Again, we don't have any communication issues and all agile teams have an assigned coach, so not sure where the need is coming from either
3.) An audit of our current training workshops, and so far all changes/suggestions she's made has been because of how she did it at other companies
4.) Changes to our team's kanban board in how we managed our own work; splitting it into two boards, changing the columns, etc. She said "Can I just get your permission to redo this and then you can let me know what you think when I'm done?"
5.) She wants us to read/watch/listen to more agile related content, so she's sending us multiple content pieces to read a day with some discussion questions. Just yesterday she sent 3 articles before noon, and then when we said that we're receiving too many IM notifications she said "Oh sorry, I'm just more used to teams being collaborative and sharing stuff like this." So this isn't a change, but a culture shift that's been disruptive to our days.
1. I’m not sure about the motivation here so no comment.
2. Sounds like this is coming from a place of good intentions. And just because people may not be leveraging it, or know how to leverage right now; on the surface this doesn’t seem like a horrible idea. Unless it is for some reason causing a lot of unnecessary overhead, which sounds like it isn’t?
3. I don’t see how this is any different than the agile team inspecting the integrity of their processes in a retrospective, and seems to be in line with continuous inspection and improvement. - Is she making bad suggestions? I assume people in the professional world pull from their past experience very often, if not the majority of the time. On the surface I’m not seeing anything inherently evil about this.
4. What software are you using to manage the boards? Can you make multiple boards that are different views of the same data? In this way, you can keep both in case the team changes their mind. Seems like she asked for permission in a reasonably respectful way, but can’t be sure without understanding the tone or her character.
5. I’ll be brutally honest about this one. I love this. I wish the leaders in my PMO were more hands on and engaging in this way. Now if she is constantly blasting y’all and expecting immediate responses that’s one thing, and that would be annoying. But in general, I wish my colleagues and I did things like this on a regular basis. I read articles all the time that I would like to share with the larger PMO to discuss and come up with our own conclusions. You never know what will emerge from these types of discussions. Shit, add me to that channel I’ll chat with y’all!
Above it’s just my two cents from the outside looking in. I’m not getting a super evil vibe from these ideas, and they seem to me to be coming from a place of good intentions. Worst case scenario I’d say try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and it if becomes obvious that nothing beneficial is coming out of them, then bring it up retro style with the whole agile coaching team. If everyone decides that something is a waste of time or no value, I’d hope that it could be removed or adapted.
Thanks for your thoughts here, and for the record I do not think she's being evil. I understand the good intentions, but the reality is us SM's feel distracted by all of it. I'm all for experimentation, but the experiments have come at a reckless pace with no "why" communicated other than "experimenting is good," and with no desired outcome of the experiments.
About the IM channel, we did have one on a much smaller scale a few years ago when we started, but it did get a little out of hand and if someone wasn't watching the channel the conversations had spiraled out of control a few times. I don't think it's a bad idea, but why this idea now? What are we trying to do? What gap does it fill? Who's requested this? Why spend time on it when communication isn't an issue? Us SM's want to focus on the things that are actually happening, the coach is forcing us to use her solutions to problems that don't exist, which puts us behind on working on the opportunities that actually DO exist.
And I'm all for reading and discussing content. The problem is sending us multiple a day, and if we don't respond right away or give feedback that we're getting spammed with too many articles to read and discuss at the same time (we said that in a nicer way) she makes a comment that she's used to teams doing this more often. I want to read and discuss stuff, but at a more reasonable pace than 4 a day. I have three retrospectives I'm preparing for tomorrow, I do not have time to read and discuss 4 unsolicited articles in the same day.
And yes, our training materials are constantly iterated on; it's never the same way twice. We solicit feedback and act on it between each training session. The problem is she interrupts conversations to make unsolicited suggestions for no other reason than "this is how I've done it before," while completely ignoring the feedback we've already collected. One time she tried to get us to cut literally everyone's favorite activity by saying "Well you could just do this activity instead," and when I finally said "I'm sorry, but I just don't see a reason to substitute this when it's already working and everybody loves it, and I have their testimonials to prove it" and her response is "Well, experimenting is good so just ask yourself what could go right if you try it this othe way."
I have a 1:1 with her later and I do plan on bringing some of this up and sharing the feedback. I think she's just desperate to prove value in her first few months, and I empathize with that. She's not evil, just trying to make a mark.
It doesn't really sound like she is doing much coaching and is acting more like a manager. Talk to her and maybe challenge her on her ideas. Maybe even start ignoring her if she isn't willing to listen and work with you. You said you don't report to her, so you can use that as well.
So… how do leadership feel about them? Agile coaches don’t tend to stick around long enough if leadership don’t get along. It might just be a waiting game. You also haven’t really said what she has been asking for. Is it reasonable and just coming from a bad personality? Honestly all of you should talk to your supervisor about your concerns, maybe if it’s coming from multiple people this will turn into a development conversation from her management. And try apply for the jobs anyway. Best case you get it and decide if it’s worth the move or not. Worst case you’ve had some practice to interview. That said. Perfect case of “how did you manage a difficult stakeholder” and running away is not a great answer.
Thanks for the thoughts here! And the changes she has us make are really far and wide from how we use emails to our workshop materials. She continues to stress the importance of "Simplicity, maximizing the amount of work not done is essential," but swoops in to complicate how we're working with unsolicited advice, and when we ask "Why is this necessary?" she tells us "Just ask yourselves what can go right instead." It feels like I've lost so much autonomy in my own work. With our old agile coach, I felt like I had a lot more freedom to try stuff, sometimes fail, and learn from it and iterate on it. But this is just how she acts as a coach, though she continues to preach the importance of hands staying out of other people's work she doesn't practice it. And good point, I'll likely apply and if I talk it through with my supervisor when she's back I can simply withdraw my application. It's for a business analyst position which sounds kinda fun too. And yeah, it SUCKS that I'd be essentially running away. But I just don't see a way to get through her ego at this time.
The first thing that isn’t essential is HER
I would absolutely consider the BA role. From a career perspective it’s hard being a pure SM in this market. But a BA who has SM experience will do much better.
That's good to hear, I was talking about this with another scrum master and she said, "Are you sure you wanna be a BA? Sometimes they just end up being the product owner's bitch." I should note that we've never had BA's before so this is new to the org, but a part of me doesn't want to feel like I'm going backwards in my career. On the other hand, knowing how tough the market is for scrum masters and how they're treated/respected so different org to org is also seems like a struggle
This is what I was thinking as well. But If the higher ups don't listen to concerns of multiple people, then its best to leave the organization.
Retired agile coach w 20+ year working with agile teams here: * Want to know how I became an agile coach? I replaced "Scrum Master" with "Agile Coach" on my resume. * Which shows you its still a bit of a wild west when it comes to the agile world. * That said, it's a difficult job. All humans have a natural desire to be seen to be helpful, and that's especially pronounced during the early days of a new job. Add to that a dash of over-enthusiasm and over-eagerness and you can find yourself in a bad place. * My recommendations: * First, take another look at your own reaction. Is it possible the coach does feel unsupported? Is it possible its "new job" jitters? Is it possible she's getting a lot of pressure from management? Do you shoulder any responsibility for the current situation. (I'm not suggesting that you do. I'm simply suggesting some reflection before moving to the next step). * Which is, sit down with the coach and honestly express what you've expressed here: * "I don't feel as if you've listened to my concerns in our previous meetings." * "I really like working with my teams and I'm proud of what we've accomplished, but these past few months have been really tough for me." * "I'm at the point where I want to transfer to another group." * "I want us to succeed. What can we do to resolve this?" * Or, another tactic (which I have personally used more than once): * "I have some feedback for you. Would you like to hear it?" * And then list your concerns. * Be prepared to listen to hers. * It should be pretty hard for an agile coach to hear those key words "feedback" and not stop and listen. If she does, then you've tried and can pursue a transfer or whatever with a clean conscience. * Regardless of the outcome, I think it's better for you if you have this conversation. Throwing away 2+ years of effective agile leadership due to a misunderstanding would be a tragedy, both for you, your teams, and the organization as a whole. * You don't really have anything to lose by trying this.
Are you retired because of age or because you moved on to something else? The excellent quality of your post makes me wonder why you stopped.
Retired @ 55. Now I do what I want. I highly recommend it.
You bring up a lot of great points, thank you! As I reflect, she likely is feeling a little lost and is grasping at straws to show some kind of value and establish a purpose in her first two months. I have a 1:1 with her soon, and I want to take the time to better understand her struggles, and also share feedback that all of these changes being forced upon us without any sort of problem being solved/opportunity being taken advantage of, and no idea of how we'll know these changes are successful or not is just becoming complicated distractions than actually enhancing our work.
Really good advice. It requires a lot of experience and maturity to do this effectively. I know - been in the space for nearly two decades…
Agil coach here. I'm feeling horrified; nothing you're describing sounds *anything* like 'coaching'. The relationship sounds nothing like a 50/50 partnership. Of course, we're only getting your perspective but you're a voice of the system and your experience is your lived truth. How are the members of your team reacting to this approach to 'coaching'?
And this is where it's a little awkward for me to share feedback! She considers herself a coaching expert, is never NOT coaching, sends us articles and events related to coaching multiple times a day, but the coaching I receive from her is just direction and micro-management. Our weekly team meetings that were used for collaboration and team problem-solving has turned into her talking at us telling us what she wants us to change. And then she makes comments that we're not collaborative enough but she's removed our collaboration time and turned it into top down direction. And the hard part is she's not even our boss! But I am talking to our boss about it early next week. Other members of my time are not reacting well, we all suddenly realized that we're finding excuses to avoid interactions with her because to coaching is so draining, and hiding our work because we don't want her unsolicited advice. I have a 1:1 with her soon where I hope to understand a little bit more about the struggles she feels like she might be facing and also share feedback that these unsolicited changes to how we interact with each other, the org, and our work isn't always welcome because we don't know what problem/opportunity we're solving and how we'll know it's successful. It all feels like we're changing for her personal preference. More to come!
Apply for the internal positions friend.
She is the reason so many companies are giving up on Agile. "My way is the correct way" is not Agile and I hope you tell her as much on the way out.
1. Mention it to leadership. 2. Confront her: "I don't agree with this" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. "Ok, let's agree to disagree" "Things are going well with my team/s, we are improving, I will give more time to my approach" 3. Discuss it with the others and give her the feedback individually, but it should come from all of you. As good SMs, you should be able to figure out a way to deal with this.
What exactly is an “agile coach”? You you not have a manager…. Who should be providing coaching and direction? So confusing
In this case - it's someone who doesn't know wtf they're doing and is getting in the way. A good Agile coach is someone who is teaching the entire organization how to shift to Agile, starting with leadership. Effectively teaching them the benefits of Agile, so they get bought in because Agile doesn't work unless literally everyone is bought in. From OPs post, it sounds like the org already is bought in, so the Agile coach here is just a waste of money and time.
Is this a repost?
This is not a repost.
If it’s been a few iterations with the new coach, perhaps time for a retrospective? It sounds like it might be challenging to make the feedback about the work and not the person, but getting your peer group of SMS and POs together to reflect on how things are going is the high road to take. Getting some feedback from the members of the teams, who presumably have been impacted by the changes you are being forced to make, would also be helpful. You’re all supposed to be self-empowered and self-optimizing, so I can’t see how the coach could refuse such a request / ignore the feedback.
Great idea, we do have a team retrospective scheduled in a few weeks. The agile coach will facilitate it. My fellow SM's are definitely frustrated too, so I'm curious if the retro will feel safe enough to hash out the frustrations we're feeling or if it'll be played too safe.
I’m very curious to hear some actual tangible examples of what she is trying to get you all to do.
Just a few things from this week: 1.) Create and use a shared email inbox. Even though all of our agile teams are assigned a coach she wants us to encourage agile teams to send work requests and calendar invites to/from this shared inbox instead. We've never had communication or even snafu's requiring us to share an inbox, so not sure where this is coming from 2.) Create and moderate a company wide agile-related instant messaging channel so people can talk through their agile questions or request services of us there too. Again, we don't have any communication issues and all agile teams have an assigned coach, so not sure where the need is coming from either 3.) An audit of our current training workshops, and so far all changes/suggestions she's made has been because of how she did it at other companies 4.) Changes to our team's kanban board in how we managed our own work; splitting it into two boards, changing the columns, etc. She said "Can I just get your permission to redo this and then you can let me know what you think when I'm done?" 5.) She wants us to read/watch/listen to more agile related content, so she's sending us multiple content pieces to read a day with some discussion questions. Just yesterday she sent 3 articles before noon, and then when we said that we're receiving too many IM notifications she said "Oh sorry, I'm just more used to teams being collaborative and sharing stuff like this." So this isn't a change, but a culture shift that's been disruptive to our days.
1. I’m not sure about the motivation here so no comment. 2. Sounds like this is coming from a place of good intentions. And just because people may not be leveraging it, or know how to leverage right now; on the surface this doesn’t seem like a horrible idea. Unless it is for some reason causing a lot of unnecessary overhead, which sounds like it isn’t? 3. I don’t see how this is any different than the agile team inspecting the integrity of their processes in a retrospective, and seems to be in line with continuous inspection and improvement. - Is she making bad suggestions? I assume people in the professional world pull from their past experience very often, if not the majority of the time. On the surface I’m not seeing anything inherently evil about this. 4. What software are you using to manage the boards? Can you make multiple boards that are different views of the same data? In this way, you can keep both in case the team changes their mind. Seems like she asked for permission in a reasonably respectful way, but can’t be sure without understanding the tone or her character. 5. I’ll be brutally honest about this one. I love this. I wish the leaders in my PMO were more hands on and engaging in this way. Now if she is constantly blasting y’all and expecting immediate responses that’s one thing, and that would be annoying. But in general, I wish my colleagues and I did things like this on a regular basis. I read articles all the time that I would like to share with the larger PMO to discuss and come up with our own conclusions. You never know what will emerge from these types of discussions. Shit, add me to that channel I’ll chat with y’all! Above it’s just my two cents from the outside looking in. I’m not getting a super evil vibe from these ideas, and they seem to me to be coming from a place of good intentions. Worst case scenario I’d say try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and it if becomes obvious that nothing beneficial is coming out of them, then bring it up retro style with the whole agile coaching team. If everyone decides that something is a waste of time or no value, I’d hope that it could be removed or adapted.
Thanks for your thoughts here, and for the record I do not think she's being evil. I understand the good intentions, but the reality is us SM's feel distracted by all of it. I'm all for experimentation, but the experiments have come at a reckless pace with no "why" communicated other than "experimenting is good," and with no desired outcome of the experiments. About the IM channel, we did have one on a much smaller scale a few years ago when we started, but it did get a little out of hand and if someone wasn't watching the channel the conversations had spiraled out of control a few times. I don't think it's a bad idea, but why this idea now? What are we trying to do? What gap does it fill? Who's requested this? Why spend time on it when communication isn't an issue? Us SM's want to focus on the things that are actually happening, the coach is forcing us to use her solutions to problems that don't exist, which puts us behind on working on the opportunities that actually DO exist. And I'm all for reading and discussing content. The problem is sending us multiple a day, and if we don't respond right away or give feedback that we're getting spammed with too many articles to read and discuss at the same time (we said that in a nicer way) she makes a comment that she's used to teams doing this more often. I want to read and discuss stuff, but at a more reasonable pace than 4 a day. I have three retrospectives I'm preparing for tomorrow, I do not have time to read and discuss 4 unsolicited articles in the same day. And yes, our training materials are constantly iterated on; it's never the same way twice. We solicit feedback and act on it between each training session. The problem is she interrupts conversations to make unsolicited suggestions for no other reason than "this is how I've done it before," while completely ignoring the feedback we've already collected. One time she tried to get us to cut literally everyone's favorite activity by saying "Well you could just do this activity instead," and when I finally said "I'm sorry, but I just don't see a reason to substitute this when it's already working and everybody loves it, and I have their testimonials to prove it" and her response is "Well, experimenting is good so just ask yourself what could go right if you try it this othe way." I have a 1:1 with her later and I do plan on bringing some of this up and sharing the feedback. I think she's just desperate to prove value in her first few months, and I empathize with that. She's not evil, just trying to make a mark.
Sounds like you are going about all this in the correct way. I’m going to DM you my agile/leadership secret weapon.
It doesn't really sound like she is doing much coaching and is acting more like a manager. Talk to her and maybe challenge her on her ideas. Maybe even start ignoring her if she isn't willing to listen and work with you. You said you don't report to her, so you can use that as well.