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Join Brian and Agile coaching expert Vinnie Gills as they tackle the complexities of being an Agile coach and working with and among teams. Discover key strategies for overcoming conflicts and enhancing teamwork within the coaching community. Overview In this insightful episode, Brian and Vinnie Gill dive deep into the often overlooked challenges that arise in Agile coaching. They discuss the common pain points and conflicts that can disrupt professional relationships and share effective strategies for creating a more cohesive and supportive coaching environment. Listeners will gain valuable insights into recognizing and leveraging personal and collective strengths and weaknesses, ensuring that Agile coaches not only preach transformative practices but also embody them in their interactions. Tune in to learn how to foster strong, productive relationships within your Agile coaching community. Listen Now to Discover: [1:10] - Brian welcomes business agility coach and speaker Vinnie Gill.[8:07] - Vinnie unpacks the reasons behind the high number of reports about challenging Agilists, highlighting the traits that contribute to their tough demeanor.[10:12] - Vinnie emphasizes the critical importance of 'starting with why' to forge stronger and more effective working relationships.[13:58] - Vinnie talks about the importance of coaches applying their own methods to themselves, sharing a real-life example of this practice in action.[17:14] - Brian invites listeners to deepen their coaching skills by joining him or Lance Dacy in an Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®. [18:49] - Vinnie explains the counterproductive coaching anti-archetypes she has encountered, shedding light on common pitfalls to avoid in coaching roles.[20:03] - Brian describes how Mountain Goat Software approaches empathy as a team of individuals.[22:15] - Discover how Vinnie takes empathy further by recommending the addition of compassion to enhance team interactions and support.[23:43] - Explore with Brian the critical role of deliberately designing a team's social contract to enhance collaboration and team dynamics.[27:00] - Vinnie delves into how understanding and leveraging both our strengths and weaknesses can lead to greater personal and professional growth.[27:31] - Vinnie underscores the critical need for mental health and self-care among agile coaches to safeguard against burnout and maintain peak performance.[31:28] - Brian shares a big thank you to Vinnie for joining him on the show.[32:00] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.[32:20] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email. References and resources mentioned in the show: Vinnie GillVinnie’s Agile 2023 Speech#54 Unlocking Agile’s Power in the World of Data Science with Lance Dacy#89: Transformational One-on-Ones with Avipaul BhandariAdvanced Certified ScrumMaster®Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors CommunitySubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Vinnie Gill is an experienced agile coach with a diverse background that spans continents and industries—from mining and finance to education and the public sector. With over 20 years in project and business management roles and a commitment to transformative education and agile practices, she excels at leading organizational change and fostering growth at the enterprise level. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:53.038)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the fabulous Vinnie Gill with us. Welcome in, Vinnie. Vinnie (01:08.879)Hi Brian, thank you for having me. Brian (01:10.83)Absolutely. I'm very excited to have you here. Vinnie is a business agility coach. She has really a lot of stuff that makes her unique and interesting. She's based out of Scotland, but has worked in Europe and Australia. She's kind of worked all over. She also has a background that comes from a little bit more of a project management background before she got involved with kind of the Scrum world. She's been in leadership. She's kind of done a lot of different things and she crossed our path because of last year's Agile conference. She had a really interesting talk there that we thought would be an interesting dynamic for us to talk about. So her topic was about working with Agile coaches and kind of what it's like to be around other Agile coaches and what kind of led you to that? that topic, Vinny, how did you get involved? What kind of sparked your interest in kind of the complicating factors of working with other agile coaches? Vinnie (02:17.839)So I guess, Brian, for me, why this topic, right? I guess I do have a lot of ideas. Like I am an ideas person, but I feel like this is the most authentic one that I can talk to. And I feel like the most connected topic that I'm able to speak. Funnily enough, when I do submit conference talks, I do submit more than one, but this one actually always keeps getting picked. So clearly I think... It is a hot topic. I've also built in a lot of humor as well in the talk because I think sometimes it's really good to take a look and laugh at yourself. But you're asking why this topic. So to answer your question, I feel that we also suffer the same symptoms from the people, the teams and leaders that we coach. So. while the topic may be working with other agile coaches, the drama, it is applicable to every single team. Brian (03:23.054)Yeah, it's kind of more just working with each other, right? Just anytime you work with other human beings, you kind of have some of these same issues. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Yeah, and you know, the conference talk thing, you know, it's such a crazy scatter shot kind of thing. You know, you're right. You know, we submit multiple topics. We submit multiple ideas of things that we're passionate about at the time. And you never know which one's going to get picked, if any. I always tell people that last year's Agile conference was the first one that I had gotten picked to speak at and I spoke with Mike and so I kind of had a cheat code, right? Because who's not going to pick a talk that has Mike Cohn in it? But it's kind of, you never know what people are going to find interesting or what they think is something that the... The attendees are going to find interesting in this day and age as well. Have you had some, I mean, I'm guessing that you've had some moments in working with other coaches or moments in working with teams that weren't, I guess as my British friends will say, we're less than ideal. Vinnie (04:45.679)Why Brian, that's very polite where you're putting it. Brian (04:47.598)I always get a kick out of that. There was a company I worked with that was in the UK and we had some problems that were going back and forth and that's the way they phrase things was, yeah, this situation is less than ideal. And that was their very polite way of saying, yeah, there's a problem. Vinnie (05:09.871)Right. Yes, I have. And obviously, I think we all have. Not I think. I know for sure we all have. But the thing is, we're always on the pedestal, right? Because we're this flag barrier of how we should be and how we should behave and how we should treat people. Because that's what we coach. Agile or agility isn't only about frameworks. Those are practices and to enable those, you need to have the behaviors, you need to have the mindset. And we coach these things. So the important thing, I guess, for us is to, how are we showing up for ourselves? How are we mirroring the behaviors that we are promoting? Brian (06:01.806)That's an excellent point. I mean, if we're trying to kind of teach this to others and say, hey, here's the agile manifesto and here's our values and principles and we should work as a team, but then we're working with other agile coaches and we're kind of working on our own and our own silos. And we're not really, we don't necessarily even get along with the other agile coaches that we have. that are around us, we're demonstrating what we really believe, right? Vinnie (06:38.863)Yeah, this is correct, right? It always starts with us. And I've always said this time and time again, you can't change other people. The only thing you can do is change yourself. So if you're pointing at one finger, there's four fingers pointing back at yourself, right? And it's very common with the people that I've worked with. If you, for example, work with a leader or a true story that you've asked, I've recently... and set up a Scrum Master Community of Practice. And I just said, you know, we're starting off this new Community of Practice. It's how we're going to be. Let's just focus on ourselves. Let's mirror the behaviors and the change that we want to be because this is all that we can control. And that's me learning the hard way through, you know, my years of... or your experience. And immediately after that it went, but what about the POs? The POs really need it. And I was like, did I not just say this? And you work with another leader and they go like, oh, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. But this person doesn't do this. And this is like, no, no, no, no, no. Just focus on yourself. Be clear on what you want to be. And if you want that behavior from somebody else, demonstrate that behavior. Brian (08:01.678)Such good advice, yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about some of the, because I know in your talk, you talked about some of the pain points that come along with just working with other Agile coaches. Are there any kind of unique pain points that you would think are specific to working with Agile coaches, or are these kind of all, would they kind of apply to any close working relationship? Vinnie (08:25.743)So I'm so glad you asked this question, Brian, because this talk, I've retired it for this year. I'm not submitting it to any conferences this year because it gets picked over my other talks. And I would like to do some other talks. I mean, I'm at version six or version seven of this talk. And for the agile conference that you watched, I did the extended version. Sometimes I have the Speedy Gonzales version. Brian (08:54.798) Hahaha. Vinnie (08:55.023)But it is a talk that grows. No two talks are the same. And what I actually do is I collect metrics. So every time I do the talk, I'm collecting data. I'm collecting evidence. The first question I usually ask is, have you worked with a challenging Agilist? And the aggregate that I got from the last six talks, and I'm actually looking at it, is It's about 94%. 94 % says, yes, they have worked with a challenging Agilist, right? So an Agile team, Agile person, an Agile leader, a product person, right? And the small percentage that said that, you know, no, they haven't had any problems. They were mostly lone ranges. or they actually held the contract to deliver, which means they hired other people. So they had essay. So those are pretty high statistics. The other question that I ask is, in one word, describe what you find most difficult about working with them. And the word cloud that keeps coming up again and again, because the word cloud just zoots. Brian (10:03.374)Yeah. Vinnie (10:20.143)does its magic and has this, you know, the big word is actually ego, Brian. It's ego followed by don't want to change, controlling and fake. Brian (10:38.638)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who would have thought that Agilist have an ego, huh? Um, but yeah, fake, fake. That's that hurts. Right. I mean that, I mean, we're, we're trying to be transparent about things and, uh, yeah, I could completely see that, that, you know, that would be a huge pain point if we feel like the, the others who are on our side, on our team are, are being fake about things and not being transparent about stuff. That's, that's terrible. Vinnie (11:07.183)Yeah, and I suppose the kicker here is this is not what other people are saying about us. This is what we are saying about each other. Brian (11:16.494)Yeah. Yeah. Wow. OK. So yeah, there's some pain points. There's definitely some things there that we could do better that are less than ideal. And if that's given, if we have those kind of problems inherent in our relationships and our working relationships without their Agilist, I know you also talk about some kind of tools and techniques to make our coaching group a little bit more cohesive. So what have you found there? How have you found ways to kind of bring that coaching unit together? Vinnie (11:59.823)So what I did is I basically started with the why. Why is it important that we need to work with each other? And quite aptly, I pointed out that it's a hard job. You're going in there and you're trying to introduce a different way of working. And that's hard. You're taking those decisions. You're being passionate about it. You're having those challenging conversations. So ultimately, you know, it is complex. It can be highly political. I mean, it always is. And so it's really important to have somebody who has our backs. And that's the why, right? And then it goes on, you're up. And then the next one is to understand the system that you're in. What does your system of coaches look like? They're, you know, permanent. um, you know, different types of employment, so permanent contract consultant, and then you've got the different coach levels like team program enterprise, and then you've got the different management types, you know, that you're trying to integrate. So you've in some companies and I've been in companies like this where you have a mix of all kinds. And also you have, you know, some companies where you might just have a couple of agile coaches. So understanding the system and. who your colleagues are are really important. I predominantly am a contractor and sometimes I'm a consultant, but I always look to leverage the relationships that I already have on site. So if they're a product person, if they're a Scrum Master, they're all one of us. We're all each other, you know, even product people. And I know this is split between product people and not agile people and Kanban people are not. this and that, but hey, we're all after the same goal here, you know? So I don't buy this whole thing by creating factions. I'm all about how we can work together. So once you find out who…
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