- Resisting the Urge to Provide Unsolicited Expertise
- Handling Explicit Requests for Expertise
- Sharing the “Minimum Viable” Amount of Expertise
- We All Have Blind Spots
- Applying a Coaching Mindset to Teaching
- Creating a Self-Serve Knowledge-Sharing Environment
- Guidelines for Sharing Feedback and Expertise
- Additional Considerations for Sharing Feedback and Expertise
- Receiving Feedback as a Coach
- Chapter Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Handling Explicit Requests for Expertise
You don’t always have a chance to withhold your expertise, because the coachee may start the conversation with some variation of “I need your expert opinion.” In our experience, many people have not yet experienced Professional Coaching. When people are not familiar with Professional Coaching, they will most likely be approaching us purely for our Agile expertise. They may feel a need to validate a decision they have already made or to get “the answer” to their problem.
Here are four methods for handling explicit requests for expertise: reducing the number of requests by proactively educating people on the value of coaching, applying the “redirecting” coaching technique, applying the “highlighting” coaching technique, and sharing expertise using a coaching mindset.
Proactively Raising Awareness of the Value of Coaching
People often have unrealistic expectations of Agile experts. We find that people often approach coaches with situations such as: “We keep pushing work to the next Sprint and the kind of work we do can’t be broken down further. What’s the right thing to do?” The only information the coachee has provided is that work is getting pushed, and they believe that the work can’t be broken down further. It would take a magician to determine what would work in this situation given this limited information. And even if the coach goes into expert/problem-solving mode, whatever they come up with might work for them personally given their skills and experience, but it may not work for the coachee and others involved, given their skills and experience.
By helping coachees understand the value of coaching prior to engaging with them, you can help them understand that you are not a magician who can conjure the solution to every problem that involves Agile. You can also increase the chances that they approach you for your coaching skill rather than just your expertise.
Here are some ways to help people understand the value of coaching:
Send people a one-page description of what coaching is, how it works, and its potential value (example provided in Appendix B).
At the beginning of any interaction with a new organization, team, or individual, introduce coaching agreements, as covered in Chapter 8.
Offer a demonstration of coaching.
Model coaching through the day-to-day use of your coaching skills.
Coaching Technique: Redirecting
When you receive a direct request to provide expertise or do some work the requester could do, such as “What do you think I should do?” or “Can you run the retrospective for my team?” a skillful redirect can move the conversation to a coaching conversation. Redirecting has three parts: (1) directly acknowledging the request; (2) temporarily redirecting to coaching to explore what’s behind the request; and (3) determining what the coachee would like to do next, which may include the original request.
The first part is to acknowledge the request. When someone makes a request, they usually do it because they think that is the best course of action. If you ignore the request or deny the request, they may become impatient with you or feel that you are being dismissive. When you acknowledge a request, you reassure the coachee you heard their request and that you will consider it as a possible option.
The acknowledgment needs to be paired up with the temporary redirect to coaching, or else you may not end up doing any coaching. As an example: “I would be happy to share my thoughts. Before I do that, I’m wondering what you are already considering.” Here’s another example: “I’d be happy to run your retrospective. What is it you think I will bring to the retrospective that will help?” This response will give both of you more insight into where the coachee may be stuck in solving the issue on their own.
The last part of redirecting is giving the coachee freedom to return to their original request if they want to. This is done by including their original request in any discussion of possible options for moving forward. Including their original request demonstrates your belief in and respect for people’s freedom to make their own choices. Ultimately, the coachee may still want you to do what they originally requested, but you will have now explored the possibility of the coachee finding solutions on their own.
Example dialog:
Manager: “Could you teach my team how to use planning poker?”
There may be a good reason for the team to learn and use planning poker. Alternatively, coaching may reveal that the real issue is that the manager thinks the estimates the team is coming up with are too large. In that case, teaching the team planning poker, when they may already know it, is likely to leave the original issue unresolved at best and aggravate the team at worst.
Coach: “I’d be happy to teach them planning poker. What makes this something that needs to be addressed right now?”
The coach has acknowledged the request and pivoted to a coaching conversation. It may be that the conversation ends right back where it started, but at least the coach has created an opportunity to see if the coachee can find a solution on their own.
Manager: “Well, I don’t think they are doing planning poker right because their estimates always seem to come out too high and then they don’t get the work done in time.”
From this answer, it seems that the manager may not understand the purpose of planning poker or may not understand the use of story points (or both). The coach may need to detour into teaching or mentoring at some point. But it looks like the coachee may have surfaced the real issue.
Let’s say that during the course of the conversation, the coachee has come up with a number of paths forward. Let’s rejoin the conversation a bit later on and see how the last step of circling back and leaving the choice with the coachee looks.
Coach: “You mentioned having me teach the team planning poker, having the Product Owner run a user story workshop, and resetting stakeholder expectations on delivery dates. What are you leaning toward?”
By including the original request, the coach is leaving the choice with the coachee and letting them know they can trust the coach and that the coach is not trying to trick them or get out of providing help.
Coaching Technique: Highlighting
While requesting your opinion, coachees often express potential solutions in the request without recognizing them as such potential solutions. They may have a blind spot or perceive a constraint. This is a good opportunity to act as a mirror. If you are truly listening rather than trying to solve the coachee’s problem, you can more easily notice and highlight these potential solutions for the coachee to consider.
We call this highlighting. First, acknowledge the coachee’s request, then highlight the potential solutions they mentioned. Finally, switch to asking a coaching question.
For instance, if they ask, “Do you think I should do A or B?” you can say, “I’m happy to share my thoughts, but I’d like to explore a little more first. It sounds like you are considering A and B. What’s keeping you from doing one of these?”
Here are some key phrases that indicate that the coachee may be dismissing potential solutions or perceiving constraints as immovable.
“What would you do?”
“I could do A or B, but what’s the right thing to do?”
“We can’t do X because we would need to do Y first.”
Example dialog:
Product Owner: “We keep pushing stories into the next Sprint. I guess we could take on fewer stories, put in more hours, or split the stories, but what’s the right way to fix this?”
Coach: “I can share my thoughts, but I’m not in your shoes. You mentioned taking on fewer stories, or putting in more hours and splitting stories. I’m curious, what’s keeping you from picking one of these options?”
A common situation is that the coachee knows what needs to change but thinks of it as an immovable constraint. For example:
Senior Leader: “I’d like to use Scrum here, but we can’t because we don’t have cross-functional teams. Is there another Agile framework that might work?”
Coach: “We can certainly discuss other frameworks. You mentioned that you’d like to use Scrum, and that it would require cross-functional teams to do so. I’m wondering, what’s keeping you from moving to cross-functional teams?”
As with redirecting, make sure to circle back and give them the option of getting your opinion on the subject.
Sharing Expertise with a Professional Coaching Mindset
If you are working with a team that may benefit from a practice such as the Kanban Method, but they have never heard of it, no amount of Professional Coaching is going to result in someone spontaneously saying, “Great question! Let’s visualize, limit our work in progress, make policies explicit, and implement feedback loops. Let’s also collect data and graph our lead times, throughput, and cumulative flow to better understand our delivery capability.” In cases like these, you should absolutely offer your knowledge. Try “Here is something that you may find useful in this situation” rather than “This is what you need to do.”
When providing Agile expertise, including sharing observations and setting expectations, it is possible to do so with a Professional Coaching mindset. Table 4.1 outlines an approach that preserves the coachee’s trust in you, preserves their ability to make their own choices, and supports their learning and growth.
Table 4.1 Sharing Expertise with a Professional Coaching Mindset
Step |
Description |
Example |
|---|---|---|
Sense the Need |
Notice that the coachee may benefit from information they don’t currently have. |
A coach is working with a Product Owner who is having trouble splitting a user story. |
Offer Your Expertise |
Ask for permission to share your expertise, to confirm that receiving your expertise is the coachee’s choice. |
Coach: “I have an idea here that may help. Would you like to hear it?” Coachee: “Yes, I would.” |
Articulate Your Expertise |
Unless it is already known, explain your background in the area being discussed. This gives the coachee context to help them decide how or if they will incorporate what you share with them. |
Coach: “I’ve helped a number of Product Owners from a variety of industries to split user stories. I’ve also created some games to illustrate writing and splitting user stories.” |
Ask Context Questions |
You may need to ask questions to better choose which experiences or examples will be most relevant to a situation. |
Coach: “What area of the business is the user story for?” Coachee: “Credit card transaction processing.” |
Provide the Relevant Examples or Experiences |
Try to provide multiple experiences or options. Giving more choices will reinforce that the coachee decides. |
Based on the answer to the context question, the coach provided examples of how other companies had split payment processing stories by customer size and credit card machine capabilities. |
Return to the Coaching Mode |
Avoid questions that limit the coachee’s choice, such as “What do you think of my idea?” If you act as if the coachee had the information you just provided all along, you will likely feel less attached to it. |
Coach: “What are you leaning toward doing?” |
Maintain Neutrality to Preserve the Coachee’s Choice
Whenever you share expertise, remain neutral about the information you share. That is, offer it as something that worked for the people involved in their particular circumstances. By staying neutral, you enable the coachee to make a choice without being influenced by your personal opinion.
Be careful not to show any preference for the options you share or the choice the coachee makes. Your preference can show in many ways: your tone of voice, your choice of words, your facial expression and body language. Don’t get excited when they pick what you feel is the “best” or “correct” option. Don’t show disappointment when they go in a different direction from what you had hoped. Remember, it is their choice, and they are the ones who will carry it out and live with the outcome. The more you influence someone’s choice, the more you own it and take on responsibility for the outcome.
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Figure 4.1 Offering expertise like pieces of a puzzle
As shown in Figure 4.1, think of sharing expertise as offering puzzle pieces that the coachee may be looking for. Imagine holding them out, saying, “I found these puzzle pieces.” If the coachee takes a puzzle piece from you, act as though they always had that piece. You may ask, “What are you leaning toward doing next?” Perhaps they move immediately to next steps or perhaps they still need to consider how best to incorporate that piece based on their unique circumstances.
When the coachee doesn’t take what you offer, accept this and find a way to return to exploring. For instance: “Now that we’ve been discussing this for a bit, what do you suppose remains to be uncovered?”
Wait to the Last Responsible Moment
It can be tempting to offer expertise as soon as you see the opportunity. Alternatively, if you wait too long, the coachee may become frustrated. Our recommendation is to stay in a pure coaching mode for as long as you can, but to monitor the coachee for signs of frustration. If you are coaching and they are making good progress, there’s no need to switch over to providing expertise.