I was in a Moose Herd meeting the other day, and a question came up about coaching plans—
How do you create them?
What do yours look like?
How do you update them?
How do you communicate them?
Plans, in this case, seemed to surround—
Individual & Team plans
Organizational or systemic plans
Your own coaching plans
It made me think about my own coach's planning and plans, and I thought I’d share my perspectives on it.
Three Perspectives
In the discussion, I shared that I have three unique perspectives included in my coaching plans. They include—
My observations and intentions are things that I’ve observed and noted to work on to support my internal goals for the coaching assignment and the overall goals. Sometimes, I make these visible to my coaching client and the stakeholders, but often, I keep them private.
Stakeholder directives – are what you’re told by the person “paying” for your coaching. If you are an internal coach, then it’s often your boss and other organizational leaders. And if you’re an external coach, these are usually the contractual points you need to fix or improve in the coaching context. In other words, this is the WHY you are coaching.
Coaching client directives are the requests or pulls from the folks you are coaching. In this sense, you’re trying to find how you can be helpful to them and their goals and seek their asking/pulling you in for help. Often, you must help the team mine for these goals via brainstorming, reflection, and reviewing historical performance. You want to avoid pushing an agenda on the client as much as possible.
The best possible outcomes come from you co-creating the plan goals, outcomes, and measures with your stakeholders and coaching clients—moving from their goal or my goal to our goal.
The Secret Sauce
The secret sauce is how you effectively balance across all three and merge the potentially disparate perspectives into a cohesive plan for your coaching focus.
I’ve found it’s easy to lean too heavily into one perspective and then starve the others. For example, a common anti-pattern is to lean too heavily into the stakeholder view and virtually ignore the others. On the surface, this seems safe. It is if the stakeholder goals achieve the overall objective. However, they often have a one-sided view and miss the systemic balance required to achieve their goals.
In a word, that’s why you’re there. To—
Take the high road, which is the road less traveled.
Take the systemic view.
Balance all three perspectives into a cohesive and effective plan
And to boldly go where no coach has gone before 😉
The Super-Secret Sauce
The super-secret sauce is finding opportunities to lean more heavily into your side of the equation.
Another way of saying this is not giving them what they ask for but what they need.
As I said, a wholeness or systemic view allows you to incorporate your experience and activate your instincts when prioritizing your focus.
To use percentages, I usually prioritize my view over the other two. For example, I’ll focus 60% on what I’ve sensed and spend 20% on each Stakeholder and Client view. While this may appear to be out of balance, it allows my experience and instincts to shine through in service to what I’m sensing in the system.
Updating the “Plan”
Another question in our Herd session was how to capture the plans. Several of the Moose had extensive spreadsheets that they would create containing—
The coaching activity
The goal or proposed outcome of the coaching
How to measure goal completion
They would use it to manage their coaching activity and communicate their coaching plans and progress. It is sort of a coaching intent and status-tracking model.
I know you might find this shocking, but I don’t manage my plans that way. I take a much looser approach.
My preferred approach is to set up some loose, high-level goals with your stakeholders. Then, loosely plan the coaching actions (individuals, teams, leaders, topics/themes, shifts) necessary to achieve those goals.
Revisit daily as you coach, capturing your observations, senses/instincts, and aha’s, then adjusting your “plans” accordingly.
One of the missing pieces in all the planning is to tie some measurements to the original goals and then measure progress in real-time.
This could be as tactical as—
Are the teams improving the quality and predictability of their deliverables?
to
Is the leadership team showing a shift from traditional language to agile language in their team communication?
This high-level synchronization between the goals and progress is critical. What happens underneath is almost meaningless to anyone but you or the other coaches.
EBAC Book Canvases
I would be remiss in exploring planning without mentioning the templates I’ve created as part of the book. There are three planning-oriented canvases that you might find helpful—
Agile Coaching Agreement Canvas – this might help set up your initial agreements with your client.
Agile Coaching Client Canvas—If your client is open to it, this might be useful in gaining insight into their intentions for your coaching.
Agile Coaching Daily-Prep Canvas – might be helpful for “planning your coaching day.”
Agile Pair-Coaching Canvas – might be helpful if you’re doing any pair-coaching.
Agile Coaching Arc Canvas – is a bit tactical but might help plan more challenging coaching conversations.
You can find references to the canvases here.
Wrapping Up
The Herd conversation made me reflect on how I operated as an individual in a coaching team when coaching in pairs. I realized how fluid my plans were as I danced with the clients and organization.
When pair-coaching, I often meet twice a day (morning and lunch) with my pair partner(s) to discuss our plans for the day. The discrete coaching conversations connect to our overall plans and goals, but who and how we approach them changes in real-time.
Sometimes, we’ll agree that pairing isn’t right for this conversation later in the day.
Other times, one of us will realize we need help, so can you pair with me?
Still, other times, we instantly realized that our plans were flawed or misplaced and needed to pivot elsewhere immediately.
My discoveries and remapping of the plan seemed to be continuous.
My most important takeaway is not letting your plans drive your coaching actions. Sense and respond to your clients, and let your experience, instincts, and skills guide you. Trust that little voice inside you.
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.
It’s a challenging time for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and Change Agents. But the profession isn’t dying. It’s simply realigning around coaches with the chops, depth & breadth of experience, and skills to deliver value.
Please consider joining Peter Fischbach and me for our next Badass Agile Coaching Masterclass, beginning January 29th, 2025. Now is the time to raise your Agile Coaching competencies; there is no better way than our class.
We have significant DEI discounts available, so DM bob@rgalen.com for more info.