welcome to the scrum sessions podcast here in Dallas I am q and uh to my friend in Berlin Gary on hey everyone so today we want to talk about a very special topic and that is our pet peeves about agile coaches right because sometimes they can just drive you crazy so cute what’s your major major pet peeve about agile coaches well I would have too many but the first one and it’s becoming kind of an obsession for me is people who take the scrum master class and after two days the scrum Master Class they didn’t even did the test yet they didn’t even go through the exam they go on LinkedIn and they put their audio coaches well the problem with that is a they don’t have the experience B they don’t have the expertise and see they’re giving a bad name to everybody who is actually doing professional coaching so that’s my biggest one and I have a few more so go ahead my friend actually this is at the very top of my list as well and you know it’s almost like as if being a scrum Master isn’t good enough right and nothing could be further from from the truth a great scrum Master is worth the weight in gold right and you’ll always notice that as soon as you had a good one and then she or he left and you’re stuck without one for example or with a bad one so there’s nothing wrong with being a scrum Master it’s not that you’re better because you’re an adult coach right and it’s not a protected um term right it’s not a trademark so you know you’re just assuming the mantle of something that clearly you aren’t doing well and you’re skipping a major step that is actually quite helpful and you know I I once had a situation when I was a beginner I was actually it was not quite a beginner I was doing my first scaled implementation and I got into that position because nobody no experienced agile coach was available right I was a pretty good scrum mess and so they asked me to actually organize the scaling of five teams and they were like huge teams so it was about 150 people in total and then after a while it was inside of a big European um company after a while um they got their agile coaching practice members they had of that agile practice to come in and look at this project right and so we’re talking about a company that does two-digit billion euros in sales right so it’s a huge organization that most Europeans would probably recognize and so they have these special coaches that fly in from their headquarter right and they go into these different countries into the different projects and so I was like really impressed I was like wow now I’m meeting the real pros right and so we had the meeting with the project managers I was invited and those guys from the agile practice were there and so I was like oh man this is so cool I can learn so much from them and during the the talk and went on for about an hour I was like growing like something isn’t quite right and so then afterwards you know I just snuck up to one of them and said okay so what cool projects have you done before and you know what as it turned out and this was kind of their their qrf right there quick reaction force that they sent into the real big trouble this agile coach he had been the product owner of an internal website Just One internal page right where you can see what’s on the menu in in the food court right for 13 weeks that was his qualifications to become an agile coach in this quick reaction force to solve big problems and this is driving me bonkers it’s nothing wrong being a scrum Master it’s nothing wrong being a product owner it’s actually great but don’t assume the mantle of an agile coach if you don’t have the experience to back it up yeah and uh that’s actually as you know as we’re talking right now there were huge layoffs in the I.T scenario right and a lot of people include myself got into that boat right and uh it’s also confusing because I get calls from recruiters and they seem to think that an agile coach at Team level an agile coach at Enterprise level portfolio level which some prefer to use that term and scrum Masters are all the same thing right and that of course caused a lot of misunderstanding and that it’s causing confusion in the industry itself because you may hire somebody especially if you are new into this right let’s say you just want to to start doing scrum or something like that right and uh then you hire the wrong person and it’s becoming a nightmare and I always like to make the the differentiation between a consultant and a coach right because most of the time I’m hired more as a consultant right leadership which is usually the the group I work with is interested to say hey we have this thing how would you go about this right and they are not interested in the idea of coaching which is to make people realize that they have the answer they want the answers and they want the answers now right and that’s also another differentiation so another problem I have with the true coaches and I’m not saying skarmaster is not coaches but the people who have experienced coaching or even Consulting is they go to a place and I got piles of that and that they want to start coaching coaching people oh what you think about that how do you go about that you know we are now the the powerful questions and all the other lingo right and the problem is that actually irritates people greatly because they hired you because they don’t know what you do and the first thing you go there and you say is how do you feel about that what would you do about that well they don’t know so I I think a lot of times people get stuck on a certain Behavior they they say well a coach is not supposed to tell them what to do and they don’t understand that a good coach adapts to the situation so a good coach sometimes is a teacher sometimes as a mentor sometimes as a coach sometimes as a consultant and uh that’s my second pet peeve number one is people claiming that the original coaches because they took a today’s commaster class yeah and the second one is getting stuck in the stance right yeah absolutely right there are different stances and actually as a professional coach myself the value of professional coaching in my opinion is very very high but the important thing is and a lot of um these people aren’t realizing it if you actually trained as a professional coach you know that you can’t just walk around and start doing professional coaching on people that’s a big No-No that’s almost like bordering on malpractice right it’s like a therapist going around and starting to do therapy on you without any permission without any um talk about this before right so you don’t just if you actually know the stuff you don’t just go in and start bombarding people with powerful questions you make a contract first right and so this actually again shows that they don’t know what they’re doing they’ve just said oh there are a couple of powerful questions cool if you like them and you think this is interesting then learn that stuff and then you can do it properly and that especially means getting permission and not just starting to do you know Jedi mantrix on people when they just actually won’t have an answer so yeah

no it brings actually my third pet okay a lot of people con confuse coaching with being a psychologist or psychiatrist yeah and I’m neither of them you know so I think several times people come with problems that they influence work but they’re not work problems right and uh they start talking about it because you’re probably the only person who is listening and several times I said stop it stop it stop it because that’s getting into a territory that I am not qualified to cover now I also seen a lot of coaches that go there and they start dispensing advice that’s actually influences personal choices and things like that and that’s very dangerous it’s very very dangerous and so those are the three pet peeves man you’re be careful sorry to interrupt you man you’re really getting me triggered because um this is really irresponsible right I know exactly what you’re talking about and you know it it almost seems like these people um would have wished to become a psychologist or a therapist or something like this and they just jump at this opportunity and the fact of the matter is just because you’re an agile coach and you’ve done a lot of Retros or you know some team workshops or something like that you’re not qualified to treat people in these conditions right and in my experience it’s often the coaches that talk about safe spaces and you know being secure in how you communicate with other people that then you know go in and actually violate all the standards of decency but of professionalism as well if you’re not trained to be a psychological therapist please don’t start to play one as a scrum Master as an agile coach it’s an absolute No-No and you can actually do a lot of damage right there are people that really need help and so please refer them to help and don’t start trying to fix those people because they might jump off a bridge right so this is actually not even funny anymore and I’ve seen this in practice and I find it to be absolutely responsible yeah and you know it’s more it’s more common than you think and I’ll give you an example a few years ago back in 2017 we’re in Dublin for scrum Gathering right and I believe it was on Tuesday evening may have been Monday or Tuesday I don’t remember there was a gathering there at in the evening you know upstairs and the the Hotel and Conference Center and we’re talking about coaching and we broke up in different groups right and uh we are trying to simulate coaching questions and etc etc etc and we had a very good group I mean there are people with lots of experience I had over a decade of this there were a few trainers in there you know and uh we are just simulating situations right and then okay we took a break and then we came back and so what’s going to be the next scenario and then one guy comes he actually joined our group and he’s he decided to talk about problems in his marriage and all that stuff and I was like whoa and then somebody else said oh let’s talk about it I said you know what I’m out of here thank you very much guys this is not what I’m qualified to do I can talk about process Improvement I can talk about feedback I can talk about product I can talk about marketing can talk about business agility but this is not on my area seek professional help please yeah absolutely and so my second point is ah I don’t know I’m going to get some flag for that but if coaches you know coach being somebody that has more experience especially people that deem themselves to be Enterprise coaches so not so much focused on on teams being a team coach right having like let’s say five to six to eight teams or something like that where you help the scrum Masters and do some targeted interventions but people who work with managers and if they don’t know any business stuff it drives me wild I know a lot of people won’t agree and there’s nothing wrong with coming from diverse backgrounds I had hired an archaeologist and she was a great great scrum Master right and you wouldn’t have guessed it from having been trained as an archaeologist but she was great so there’s no issue with that and you know I I have a business background and let me let all of you guys in on the secret business is really easy right it’s just big words and it’s really simple stuff and I expect somebody that has a lot of experience to be able to talk to senior leaders and understand what they are talking about when they talk about cash flow when they talk about Net Present Value right you don’t have to have an accounting degree but you have to know first of all some of the Lego and then know how to talk to them because they are always data driven they are always business case driven right and then you see the senior coaches supposedly senior coaches and then just mumble in agile lingo and you just see the lights turn off in inside of the seniors senior leaders head and it’s like guys this is why why engineers get an MBA for example there’s so much free online training where you can just you know level up this stuff and then you can actually get things done because what you’re doing in that position never mind that the senior leaders aren’t interested the problem is you’re really hurting your teams and your Division and your transformation because you cannot speak in the language of the people that actually make the decisions and that is ruining you you know it’s like a diplomat uh like an ambassador to another country and he doesn’t speak the target language and he just you know creates problems all along it doesn’t make any sense you are actually the connector the interface to them and you just you need to speak the language yeah that’s a great one and I think the reason you hired are all which is they’re good at digging right I couldn’t resist safe I could not resist saying that you know I had to put that one in but Jokes Aside you are right and there is another problem too there is the problem of people who drop lingo because it’s cool to speak lingonies you know I just made that up but that’s not cool with the people that you were addressing and again it’s poor understanding of its poor situation awareness right if you’re talking to a software person you should talk one way for talking to a hardware person should talk to another way talking to a business person should talk to another way you have to communicate in their language and not the other way around they may tell you I don’t care what you call this a retrospective for me it’s called I don’t know post mortem I’m using the old the old term right you have to communicate on their language the problem is people have to understand that the principle behind something and what you call it doesn’t matter yeah right we we can you can use words in German I can I can use words in another language but if we if we know what they are it doesn’t matter right we just we just switch now another thing that it’s a pet peeve of mine is the people who work at portfolio level Enterprise level they think they’re Gods and by that I mean I like from time to time to actually go coach teams and I like to do that right I do both I do an Enterprise level portfolio level and Team level but even when I’m hired as an Enterprise coach I like to go to the teams because you have to keep your feet grounded and understand what is going on on a daily basis and I had right now that everybody is looking for a job I had people that I know uh killed there aren’t that many Enterprise jobs out there right I said well take a team coach gig I’m not gonna do that I’m an Enterprise coach I said well that is already telling me that I wouldn’t hire you for either one of the two and I seen the same problem with scrum trainers which I worked with one a few years ago when I was in DC who has been a trainer for a long time and he also told me I haven’t changed my deck in 10 years I said why not well because nothing ever changed I said well that’s funny I changed my deck every time there’s a class I make a couple chains for the next one and I think it’s the same mentality if you’re gonna say I am God because I’m an Enterprise coach I am not going to deal with the team stuff well I have news for you the people you communicate your peers and the leadership that are out there they’re a team so if you lost contacts that you are working with a team you’re not doing your job well yeah so get off of your high heels and actually understand that if you lose contact with what happens on a daily basis you are not going to be good at your job yeah absolutely and this goes for everywhere right this is about politicians that don’t know what’s going on in in people’s lives and so on yeah and so my third one um is and this might be or this is a little bit tricky um it’s specific to high level coaches that actually negotiate engagements with the customers and um what really bugs me is if they don’t tell the truth when they’re selling the engagement right so I of course understand that you know there’s always pressure to perform to sell to get the customer and so on but what a lot of people and it actually doesn’t always need to have to be the the agile coach right sometimes they are part of a larger consultancy and they don’t have any control over it but what really bugs me out and I think it creates so much damage and is the cause for a lot of failed Transformations is that an agile transformation is often being sold like a you know like a process Improvement like oh we’re gonna you know we’re gonna install the software in on the on your factory floor and it’s going to run 1.4 percent better than before right and so this is what this is to be honest this is often what the customers want to buy right because they don’t want to have this transformation where they they actually have to change themselves or the all the managers right so this is kind of what they’re expecting and this is kind of what they want and so this is being sold to them so far that’s good right you’re giving the customer what they want but actually a transformation like this is 100 guaranteed to fail right and because there is an element of um personal change for the leadership involved and you cannot have a successful transformation unless the management actually the leadership actually changes as well and maybe you know you can start off on the wrong foot and then turn around and get the involvement later on but this is just creating so much so many problems and so um what really drives me crazy is if people sell this kind of stuff if they know well that is this isn’t going to work right because some coaches do that they sell this simple transformation oh you don’t have to change nobody has to change and it’s still going to be twice the work in half the time right and in actuality what they’re setting uh what they’re creating is a setup for the customer to fail in that agile transformation and for all the scrum masses for all the product owners for all the team members for all the other coaches to really have have their lives ruined by expectations that they cannot fulfill and By changes they want to implement men that are impossible to get through yeah which brings the point it’s a practice that I’m shocked that a lot of coaches don’t do it and not to throw another lingo as a coaching contract and I would even call it a memorandum of understanding if you don’t want to use lingua right say listen what you guys want as leadership with this why you are going to do a so-called Azure transformation or why are you calling me here to fix in your words fix the transformation that’s not going well what are your expectations what you expect from this right who’s gonna say it’s done right so I think a lot of those things are easy and it’s basically a half a page thing right and it’s like okay we expect this we expect that expect Etc and you as a coach has to provide this and this and this and that and here how we’re gonna check the the progression of this thing until we call your engagement done and Etc and a lot of people don’t do that so I’ve seen people including people at portfolio and Enterprise level that just parachuting there because somebody hired them and then they start they start changing things and uh I don’t really feel that they understand what they’re changing and I’m not the only one because I being hired in situations to go fix something that was going wrong because they didn’t do the basic what I call Agile hygiene right let’s clean up the stuff before we start and that’s also for me a Mark that perhaps you shouldn’t be doing that as a career choice and if you are doing that do you have the experience and the expertise to understand why this is not going to work people are very often oh let’s jump into the portfolio coach bandwagon because there is a lot of Revenue there for me yeah but uh if the job sucks if you don’t do a good job right it’s bad for everybody yeah and especially on that level you’re actually talking about often the existence of the organization right so if it’s a huge let’s say insurance or bank or something of course it’s not going to be affected by are you messing up your uh your executive coach job right your Enterprise coach job but actually this is why leadership highest Enterprise coaches to increase their survivability and not to decreases and decrease it and you can actually do a lot of damage for everyone involved and I get it you want to make the sale you want to get paid but you know that still doesn’t make it good because you’re doing damage to everyone involved well I think the best way to make a sale it’s your reputation as being efficient as being proficient right and being professional and I think a lot of people just say okay I made the sale I’m gonna stay there for a year or whatever right and then I leave yeah yeah but uh what did you leave behind right because I’ll tell you I have reference from people who work on the past including one that became a very good friend of mine it’s on LinkedIn who said Q is the only consultant I ever met who actually cares her words not mine yeah very senior person right and she said that from my LinkedIn profile cube is the only consultant I ever met who cares so yeah you can go there and sell stuff and that’s fine right but what you leave behind is a disaster in most cases it looks bad for everybody and those people are not gonna help you find your next gig when you need a reference right so yeah you can be myopic and say okay I make a fast Buck right now but I don’t know when the next fast Buck is gonna come because nobody’s gonna help me when I need references of the quality of my work cool

very good I think we’re good for today and I have to do a daily scrum thing with few people it’s gonna be my last one before I officially leave tomorrow morning and let’s do the closing okay guys I hope you enjoyed the talk today we are very passionate about several things that affect all of us even if you’re not a coach they affect all of us so I hope to see you in the next episode of the scrum sessions Fork uh dude it was so good don’t just go off a script in the middle because it’ll just be more difficult for retouching so just start the sign off no let’s finish it okay starting again starting again ignore the first one okay guys I hope you enjoyed the podcast today uh we’ll be back soon and I’m signing off here from Dallas and back to my friend in Berlin Gary on thank you Q This was very interesting and I know we could go on for hours guys if you have any pet peeves about agile coaches then please put them into the comments because it’ll be a thrill to read them and maybe we’ll talk about them in a later episode so thank you everyone for watching and stay tuned for the next episodes take care bye-bye foreign