Coaching Advice for the Agile Executive
Over the past 15 years we have witnessed a growing presence of millions of small businesses (and start ups) surfing the waves of Digital Disruption and using Agile frameworks to enter multiple market sectors.
These seemingly small contenders proved to have a significant aggregate effect that has taken away a large part of big players’ profit and market share over the past decade, causing financial turbulence for many and even leading to bankruptcy of some of them.
Their ability to closely follow shifts in market trends, quickly respond to changes in customers’ appetite and demands, gather feedback on their value delivery and re-align their pipelines, with unprecedented speed has shaken and crumbled the foundation of old-school business leadership forever.
Today, leading an Agile enterprise is no longer a luxury that an enterprise may or may not afford. It is now a definitive decision of whether or not that enterprise wants to continue to exist in the market and thrive through the turbulence of a very bumpy 21st century that has been heralding one paradigm shift after another over the past two decades.
An executive leader is accountable for the needed cultural and leadership transformation of the enterprise towards a holistic incremental implementation of Agile concepts and methods in all “relevant” areas in order to provide the organization with the needed flexibility and speed in embracing market changes and harvesting opportunities out of the inherent risk that market volatility presents.
Despite all these fancy wording and hyped set up, it is actually a very pragmatic, realistic set of responsibilities and prescriptive cascading changes that need to be put in place and kicked into motion to make it happen.
I have provided the key steps in Agile transformation of an enterprise in another article (and can provide actionable advice and consultation if asked), but in this article, I would like to focus on key success factors for an Agile executive when leading the Enterprise Agile Leadership through the transformation stage, and later through the sustainment and improvement.
The Agile Executive should serve the Enterprise Agile Leadership team as their Agile Coach which would combine the expertise needed as a Coach and as an Agile advocate and guide.
Coaching your Enterprise Agile Leadership team starts after they all have completed their executive workshops and training on the fundamentals of Agile methodology and have obtained a bare-minimum understanding of enterprise level Agile scaling.
You may think that some of the following recommendations would not apply to your Enterprise Agile Leadership team as they may sound more applicable to a team of teenagers being coached on a school initiative and you would not expect to see those behaviours among your very senior members of the team. Believe me, as I have witnessed it happen many times, nothing brings out the child inside any of us better than coming face to face with ambiguities and challenges of dealing with a totally new subject, especially the one that can define a “make or break” for your enterprises lifeline.
Let’s take a closer look:
- Start by telling yourself that you are not there to “Answer” your Executive Agile Leadership team’s questions! You are coaching them to “Question” the answers they think they already have!
Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot resolve problems by using the same mindset that created them in the first place”. Allow me to update that into “We cannot resolve new problems by using the same resolutions that solved the old ones”.
Assumption is the mother of all mess-ups and nothing can lure them into a trap better than their false confidence about being able use a “traditional” approach to resolve a “new” problem. They need to keep an Agile and flexible mind and be willing and ready to re-evaluate their understanding of each new scenario and to re-assess and re-calibrate their existing solutions to adapt and upgrade into a matching resolution, for themselves and the entire chain of command inside their areas.
- Ask them the right sequence of questions to guide them toward in finding their own answers.
Your carefully crafted questions need to bring up the “Now What?” or “What’s Next?” in their minds to give them a premonition on whether their newly proposed approach would hold water or fall apart when it comes in contact with the reality of the situation.
Make sure each answer they provide goes through that filter multiple times until it is obvious that they have arrived at the actual implementation layer of the idea and it is ready to be put into action.
Avoid boxing-them-in with “Sniper Questioning” (i.e., instead of pushing them into a corner by close-cut and pointed questions, ask them open-ended ones so they can have freedom of thought when they stop for a moment to deliberate on what you asked. Let their minds roam free and come back with fresh insights).
Get them to feel safe and comfortable answering your questions, as it should carry no blame or finger-pointing in it! (Try to avoid cornering them into a defensive stance! You are not there to judge them or to get them to feel embarrassed from their past situations).
Give them space between your questions so they can explore ideas and revisit them without getting pressed for immediate answers. You want their answers to have quality and impact.
German’s have a very interesting position in the enterprises that provide coaching to the staff:
The Director of Critical Questions, which is responsible for well designed questions that would bring the most engaged, most functional answers to teams’ problems, through asking the most effective questions.
While it is important to lead your teams’ train of thoughts by asking good questions, avoid falling into Analysis-Paralysis. Spending too much time on perfecting your questions would keep you away from engaging the team early in the process and would delay your help to their self discovery and solution finding.
Question your own questioning by asking the Executive Agile Leadership team to provide you with their feedback on how they see your coaching is helping them collaborate and brainstorm better. Use that feedback to adjust the direction, density, or distance of your questions.
- Help them properly identify and prioritize the problems.
When the Agile Transformation kick-starts, the range and diversity of questions and ambiguities can be overwhelming for your Executive Agile Leadership team . This will directly affect their ability to correctly identify and priorities the issues they want to resolve.
Your line of smart questions will help them to identify the most pressing and painful problems that they want to resolve and to prioritize them based on their impact and the reward behind resolving them.
- Actively listen to their ideas and self-corrections to get them to open-up and collaborate with one another during your working sessions.
As a CXO leading the charge, your days are hectically filled with too many interruptions. Every second of your day is filled with some kind of engagement. But when you are with your Executive Agile Leadership team, create an isolated and un-interrupted environment for yourself and all of the attendees so all of you are there with your 100% of attention.
- Actively pay attention to their body language and compare it with what they say.
Do they match? Does it seem the body shows reluctance or is in denial of what is being said? If you suspect a mismatch, ask for more elaboration and watch the body confirm an alignment or lack there of, between verbal and non-verbal ques.
Use that to break through the “BS” they may be delivering to you instead of a real answer and adjust the direction of your next question to reveal the hidden problems.
- Actively share your feedback with them but stay neutral.
Let your Executive Agile Leadership team know what you have noticed and interpreted through listening to their responses. Let them use this to re-align their mind and body in the next round of conversation.
Help them get this vision that it is perfectly fine to have doubts and what has come to their minds is half-cooked and may not perfectly land on its feet. Once the idea is out in the open, the entire team can collaborate to enrich and solidify it.
Make sure your feedback is not wrapped around your opinion on what they should do to resolve their issues. You want to help them re-align their efforts, not to get a ready-made answer and drop further efforts altogether.
Also consciously refrain from trying to manipulate them into accepting and incorporating your ideas as their resolutions. They may or may not notice it and may or may not show resentment, but this can create a crack inside your Executive Agile Leadership team that can widen later and eat all of your efforts for breakfast.
- Direct the team towards Actions and Outcomes.
If your Executive Agile Leadership team is struggling with pinpointing the real problems, a Root-Cause Analysis can help them dig deep under the covers and find out the base of their issues.
As you have experienced before, this approach will lead to uncovering new problems that were hidden under the facade so far, but this is also the main reason for your efforts: to help them uncover the real impediments and synchronize their efforts to find resolutions for them.
- Do not Mentor when you are Coaching the Executive Agile Leadership team.
You may be the subject matter expert in the field that the current problem is posing as an impediment in, but you should refrain from sharing your ideas while you are coaching them!
The last thing you need is a team of senior executives following you around asking for your help every time they are stuck behind a problem. You do not want to deprive them of the needed Agile maturity they can gain by putting their collaborative minds together and brainstorming on resolutions.
- Mentor them when you are absolutely needed as a Mentor.
There comes a time when the Executive Agile Leadership team is getting frustrated with the complexity of the problem they are dealing with, and the stalemate is taking too much time and a hint or insight from you would provide them with the needed push to help them get out of the pit and scroll forward.
Before you act as their Mentor, make sure they have truly exhausted all of their options and ran out of ideas. Also make sure they are aware that you are temporarily changing your role from their Coach to their Mentor, because they are asking for it, and you will switch back when they are on their feet again.
You should also make sure your internal urge to share your expertise is not getting amplified by their laziness and quest for free answers and saving themselves the hardship and effort of finding their own solutions. This is a serious trap as sometimes it seems the answer is dancing in front of their eyes and they still cannot see it.
Makes sure not to push for an “Instant Victory” despite the mounting pressure from the board to come up with “Quick Wins” that they can boast about. It is okay for the team to come up with a few early wrong ideas and get them cooked through trials. No one has ever been right all of the time and from the beginning.
- Get the Executive Agile Leadership team to turn their ideas into actionable solutions.
Have someone record the ideas and suggestions and then get your Executive Agile Leadership team to define Action Items and assign owners and expected outcomes for each. Then get them to use that tracker table to monitor their progress and outcome.
An action item that is left mid-air will turn back into a fading idea that would be lost amidst the busy day and the un-resolved issue that was supposed to be addressed by it will continue to exist, which will now have more time to grow into a more painful obstacle to return to.
- Facilitate instead of Coaching when that is what they need.
When you see that the Executive Agile Leadership team is well underway to identify the problems and brainstorm towards resolutions, just act as a facilitator of what they do and provide them with the safe environment to openly share their ideas and to discuss and synchronize their efforts on hammering out resolutions for them.
- Celebrate Achievements Together, Own Failures Together.
Recognise the relentless effort from your Executive Agile Leadership team to break through their existing assumptions and challenging their status quo and to synchronize their collaborative efforts to map out and implement the needed Enterprise Agile Transformation.
Celebrate their victories and bring-in and re-assess their failures for analysis and solutioning.
Keep this at heart as per the most fundamental understanding of Agile methodology, “People” are not at fault when something breaks or fails. It is the “Process” that has failed to deliver. We need to target the “Process” and fix it so it will provide a smooth function playing its part inside our Value Streams.
Conclusion:
Agile Executives’ greatest tool and their gateway into their Executive Agile Leadership team’s universe is the power of Active Listening and Smart Questioning.
Agile Executives are in relentless pursuit of mastering the art of “reading between the lines” and “reading behind the minds”, to help extract their teams’ true concerns and pain points, beyond what they are able to articulate, and to guide their efforts in self-realization and empowered collaboration toward resolving them.
This would not only solidify the true essence of leadership during the Enterprise Agile Transformation but would also create a strong bond between the leader and the team, that would cascade down through the entire organizational chart all the way to the trenches where the products and services are being put together and presented to the customers through the delivery pipelines.
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