Coaching enables self-organizing behavior.
It is easy to make an incorrect observation that coaching seems to go against self-organizing behavior. Often, I have heard the following types of statements during an Agile Transformation journey:
- “If teams are supposed to self-organize, why is the coach showing them what to do? That does not support empowerment.”
- “The coach is facilitating the team through this new process, and it looks a lot like command and control. She is keeping them within the boundaries and having them inspect and adapt and repeat. That does not demonstrate trust in the team.”
- “The coach tells me (the manager) that I must let the team figure out how to do the work, but the coach tells the team how to do the work. The coach is not practicing what he is teaching.”
The Agile Manifesto defines self-organizing teams as follows in two of its twelve principles:
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.
Let the team decide is the golden rule of core Scrum. Does coaching go against the Agile Manifesto and Scrum? No, it does not. Rather, coaching is an enabler for self-organizing teams. Coaching focuses on the first principle above to give the teams the support they need. Let me explain.
If you think of any master craftsman, the pinnacle of the craft was never reached on day 1. Many experts in their field take coaching from other masters in their craft along the way. They put in many hours of practice to get the basics right. At some point, when they have one foundational approach honed, they begin gathering techniques from other experts. Then, when they have mastered enough techniques from others, they can then freely operate as an expert and self-organize around a solution unique to the situation at hand.
Alistair Cockburn coined this the Shu-Ha-Ri method of learning, patterned after Japanese martial arts, and Martin Fowler describes it well.
Take, for example, a chef. If you want to become a chef, you could certainly try to self-organize around becoming a chef, but the results will likely not yield something that will make your taste buds dance. Starting with a recipe under the guidance of a chef to teach you is a better approach. Once you have mastered the recipe of one chef, you might try the recipes of other chefs, observing how they modify the recipe to achieve different results. At some point, you become comfortable enough to branch out on your own and modify the recipe and self-organize to your own style. You have stood on the shoulders of those before you and are now forging new, unexplored ground.
This is very similar to how teams learn new techniques in an Agile transformation. When a team is new to Agile and Scrum, they rely on a master in the craft of Agile—the Agile coach—to help them learn new behaviors and change their mindset. A team could certainly self-organize without the facilitation and guidance of a coach, but they would likely repeat lessons already learned by others. A coach will help guide the team down a path that is well-traveled and customize the journey to the team in focus. Over time, the team will perfect the pattern and build new behaviors. Self-organizing behavior will then flourish.
To summarize, coaching is not in conflict with the self-organizing team concept. Coaching provides expert guidance to the team on new techniques along its Agile journey, building new beliefs and preparing the team for self-organization.
Related Post: Overcoming the Fear of the Incapable Team
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
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