I'm at a conference this week with my husband, where I am "just" the spouse. That means I get to go to sessions and attempt to keep my mouth shut. Hah! Lots of luck with that! On the other hand, I also get to learn about what this group thinks is important to sustain itself.
"Mentoring" is a big deal at this conference. What they call mentoring, I would call coaching. Coaching is a big deal in our community, too. I've written about this before, in
How 2 Buddy. Arlo Belshee has a great experience report from an early Agile conference,
Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner's Mind. Yes, it looks like the paper is about pairing, but it's also about coaching, where each person coaches the other.
What makes a great coaching program? Well, both people, the coach and the coachee have to get something out of it. Here are my steps for creating a coaching program.
- Make sure you have enough coaches for the people who want coaching. Insufficient coaches means you spread people too thin, which does not work, or you leave people without a coach, which is disappointing. Better to leave people without, than to spread coaches too thin. I've seen a number of organizations attempt to move to agile who don't have enough coaches. The people and teams struggle to implement what they were taught. They do not understand what to do. That's insufficient coaching.
- Set expectations about what a coach does. A coach is not a teacher, although if a coach so chooses, a coach can teach a coachee.
- Coaches help to isolate the problem. Often, when people describe the problem, the problem they see is not the real problem, but a result of the real problem.
- Coaches help the coachee evaluate potential options and the results of those potential options. A coach offers options with support. Sometimes those options come
directly from the coachee. Sometimes those options come from the coach
because the coachee cannot think of any options without help.
- Coaches help the coachee generate action items and SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timebound) goals.
- Coaching is a time-bound experience. When I coach my clients, I limit our time for a specific kind of coaching. After that coaching is over, it's okay to change the relationship to a new coaching relationship about some new issue.
- Coaches encourage. They do not evaluate anyone's efforts.
- Coaches provide feedback. They may help a coachee by catching that person doing something right. Or, by catching them before they go too far down the wrong path. Maybe they experiment together.
There are a number of coaching tools that a coach can use for feedback. The key is that the coach use them.
I often find that when I coach teams I also need to coach the individuals on the team.
Coaching does not have to be an external activity; it can be internal. And, a coach is a full-time job. You cannot coach in you free time.
So, think about the coaching you need at work. And think about the people who can provide it. Decide if you can staff coaching internally at a sufficient level. If you can, wonderful. And if not, know that now. Do not shortchange such a critical function. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
