Picture this.
A disgruntled customer is arguing with a store employee. The customer demands to see the manager. The manager arrives and says the exact same thing as the employee. And yet suddenly, the manager’s answer is acceptable.
Have you seen this situation? Or been a part of it? (ah, my days at Barnes & Noble)
I experience this all the time in agile coaching. It’s like the second you get hired on in an organization as a full-time employee, you start to blend into the wallpaper. But bring in someone from the outside and everyone starts to pay attention.
I call this the “external effect.”
There’s something about someone shiny and new, whose job it is to be an authority – a so-called “expert” – who swoops in and saves the day, all while being paid twice as much or more than your internal employees.
I’ve been on both sides.
As the external coach, it’s a breath of fresh air. People listen to you. They believe in your ideas. You’re taken seriously. Intimidatingly so – I have to remind my clients that I’m not here to solve all of their problems but to help them help themselves: self-management is my ultimate goal, not getting them to depend on me.
Internally, it’s frustrating. When you repeat yourself over and over in many different ways and formats, when it’s multiple scrum masters on the team saying the same thing to leadership, and you’re just brushed off and not taken seriously… then you bring in an outsider who says everything you’ve been saying all along and suddenly they’re the golden child and things begin to change.
W.T.F.
So what do you do?
As the external person, enjoy. You’re in good company. According to the Scrum Alliance 2022 State of Agile Coaching report, “coaches with at least four years experience are four times more likely to be a business coach and nearly 50% more likely to be consultants” vs working as full-time employees. Please use your coaching powers for good.
As the internal person, use the external effect to your advantage. Find a coach who will help strengthen your voice and work with you to affect the changes you’ve been hoping for all along. You’ll want to find someone who is there to listen, to amplify and reflect what you already know and what you want to do, to uncover areas you might not have been thinking about, and to both learn from you and teach you some new tools and ways of thinking.
If you want that coach to be me, you know where to find me.
Photo by Yogi Purnama on Unsplash