This time a week ago I was hanging upside down from a rope tied to my waist, my head barely ten feet above the ground, with my inner voice yelling, “Get back up, you look like an idiot. Get up. Get up. GET UP!”
The fall itself was embarrassing. I was stressed and pushing well beyond my meagre limits, and as a result lost concentration and did something stupid, positioning my leg behind the rope that I was attached to. When the inevitable fall came, through a mixture of fatigue and lack of ability, the rope flipped me upside down unceremoniously leaving me uncomfortably dangling above one of Britain’s best climbing coaches. The fall hurt nothing but my pride, the adrenaline getting me back onto the wall and up to my previous position in seconds. There was no way I wasn’t going to improve on that performance.
Spending three hours with a professional coach reminded me a lot about the role of the coach in a team. I’ve done plenty of coaching in my time — albeit not of climbers — and hired talented people whose entire role is to coach business practices (primarily Agile disciplines). But yet in those three hours I’ve reaffirmed and reset some of my own beliefs.
A coach’s overriding responsibility is to improve the performance of the team.
As it happens, I’ve been asked my position on the role and tasks of agile coaches a lot recently, and this gave me a new position to answer from. In the past, I’ve argued that Agile coaches (Scrum Masters included), should be a specific role, not conflated with others in the team. A coach isn’t a development manager and isn’t a lead engineer. It’s not a part time role, and takes a specifically different skillset and mindset. The downside is that these coaches, individuals who are primarily hired for their team fit, can often just become an administrative support to a team. I can’t stress how wrong this is.
In my coaching session I was asked to walk through and demonstrate my own practices. How did I prepare for a climbing session? How did I warm up? I walked through these activities, coaching the coach on my own processes. He joined in the exercises with me, questioning as we went and gave feedback at the end of the session. Given that we’d had a coaching session six months before, it was noticeable that he didn’t take me back through his own exercises, as if I was at the same level of competence I had been half a year before.
This was a striking difference. Coaches and managers (agile and otherwise) can often feel like they’re running through the motions, walking their team through the same process and ensuring they don’t deviate from the agreed standards. Standup: check. Retrospective: check. Drinks in the pub on Friday to bond: check.
But if this is the route that they take, they’re not only misusing their own skills — they’re coaches, not automatons — but also demeaning the skill and maturity of their team. If the team has been told how to do something before, the coach should be checking in on their understanding and capacity to improve, not checking boxes on the same old processes.
As we progressed through the session, another key role of the coach became clear. Never at any point did I feel like I wasn’t fully supported and encouraged to perform. My coach was there, literally yelling encouragement. And as much as I like to feel like a resilient and strong-minded individual, beset with a slight sense of British discomfort at public attention, it did make a difference. Knowing that I was being observed, and that even if I failed someone had my back, was energising and drove me harder than if I had been alone.The coach subsumes themselves into the performance of the team, and lives your success with you.
This then, leads to perhaps my most important insight. The third responsibility of the coach is to reset your limits. We each come to believe in our own capacity — whether it’s “I can only climb a 6B”, or “We can only deliver 50 story points this week” or perhaps, “I’m a designer, not a developer”, we are ill-equipped to push our own mental limitations further. We may surprise ourselves with an incremental improvement, whereas a coach will push us way beyond, enticing us to aim for significant improvements.
In my case, this was the biggest and most surprising benefit of the coaching. For me, a novice climber, the ‘competition wall’, a terrifying, overhanging monolith designed to test the limits of the best climbers, was not a challenge I had been willing to consider. Maybe next year. Maybe when I could climb 6C easily. Maybe when I was stronger. Maybe when I’d had more coaching.
But I wasn’t allowed to get away with any of these maybes. “I really want to see you try the comp wall. Just give it a try. See if you can get to that metal strip”. That metal strip was half way, about 7 metres off the ground. Clearly, there was no way that I’d be able to make it, but what choice did I have? I was being forced to attack my own limits.
And you know what? I fell off that wall so many times, never making it to that damn metal strip. No heroic swell of orchestral music as I defy all your expectations, just failure after failure until I was exhausted and again dangling from the end of a rope. But what I had done in that time was to reframe my own expectations of myself. Now I’ve been on the comp wall. I’ve made it nearly halfway. I suffered and fought and threw myself at that wall, and one day I’ll get up it. Now I have a goal, way in excess of what I would have conjured on my own.
This then is the sine qua non of coaching. As an external actor you have enormous responsibility to your team. You must, as a very basic competence, ensure that they are behaving appropriately and are given timely feedback. You must trust them, as adults, to take responsibility for their own improvements, not becoming a support act or administrative crutch. It is not, no matter how good it makes you feel, your job to make the tea, or take the meeting notes. You have to support them ceaselessly, encouraging them to achieve and nurturing them when they fail (this is the moment to make tea).
Your critical responsibility is to allow your team to reframe their own expectations of themselves.
Your job is to improve the performance of the team.