Agile Coaching and Overworked Leaders
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A manager requests 30 minutes to talk with me—is 9 am tomorrow ok? His email was sent just after 9 pm. He goes ahead and sends a calendar invite for 9 am. I’m not sure what we’ll be discussing.
Another manager and I have been going back and forth in emails about challenges her team is facing. Her calendar is booked solid, and her emails are often sent after 7pm. Our calendars sync up five days later to talk in a call, so we’re making do with emails until then.
A third manager and her team lead reply to an email I sent recapping our earlier discussion points and next steps. Their emails were sent between 10-11pm.
The organization is juggling many important initiatives. Delivery seems slows, and status meetings are frequent. Based on their calendars and email timestamps, leaders are working long hours and even on the weekends trying to keep up with everything going on. It sounds like their teams are working extra hours too.
It’s a tough spot to be in as a leader. Their time is consumed by their teams, stakeholders, peers, boss… and endless emails. “Agile” is not the organization’s goal right now. Talking with an Agile Coach seems low priority.
It’s easy for an Agile Coach to say that there’s too much work in progress. That prioritization is needed to stop some work and say “not yet” to starting more. Embrace the constraints. Leaders may agree with these ideas in theory. But organizational pressure to reduce costs and fear of layoffs loom in the back of their minds. These fears make it easier to write off reducing WIP as a theoretical concept that won’t work in this situation. Fear invited itself to the dance, and Agile Coaches need to figure out what to do with it.
The Agile Coach’s first challenge with overworked leaders is be getting time with them.
Overworked leaders are not likely to reach out for help unless they have a good relationship with an Agile Coach or recognize what they can provide. Yet, if asked, a leader might be interested in hearing ideas on how to do the following:
Enhance product delivery flow
Ensure team performance
Identify waste/bottlenecks and remove them
Innovate product ideas
Enable visibility of product outcomes and ability to shift priorities
Lower defects and increase productivity of teams
Increase customer satisfaction with products
Navigate change better and increase resilience
Increase trust and reduce destructive conflict
Improve accountability
Those outcomes listed speak to results that an Agile Coach can help achieve across teams and organizationally. Agile Coaches may see opportunities to improve delivery that others cannot see for themselves; we can help the leaders know what to focus on. That list doesn’t even touch on the personal benefits a leader may receive from partnering with an Agile Coach, like reduced stress and ability to develop and apply their strengths.
In order to connect with these overworked leaders, we need to find out what outcomes (business and personal) matter to them now and focus our efforts on those goals. They need quick wins to build their trust in you and allow them to take a step back from the whirlwind of work. My Nitty-Gritty Practices of Agile Coaching workshop helps Agile Coaches recognize what practices to focus on in order to achieve particular outcomes (I find the Agile Fluency™ Model to be another helpful resource for this).
There’s a human element to connecting with leaders that I also find important. Sometimes as Agile Coaches we let people know it’s ok to not be ok and offer to be a trusted ear. Change can be painful at a personal level. Recently I’ve offered workshops on change models to talk about what leaders and teams may be experiencing around change and provide language to express it. Showing empathy in our communications as Agile Coaches can go a long way in enabling leaders to work with us more effectively through change.
