another chapter begins

another challenge awaits

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future this week. For those of you who don’t know, this week is my last week with my current full time client. As a result, I have to decide the direction of travel for my life yet again. The market for agile coaches is not good, and I have long yearned to grow beyond this role.

Given that I am now in the West Country of England after having spent the majority of my career working with the big companies in London, I have a wealth of experience and expertise that is lacking in my geographical location. I have a few contacts in the region, and there are many networking opportunities in the area. This year, I learned to drive, and my children are to remain in nursery a few days a week. These two factors put me in a position where I can take myself to professional events and try to sell my services in the way that I did once before.

What is it that small software houses want from us coaches, though? In my previous life as a developer, I worked at many start ups owned and run by exceptional software developers with next to no business or managerial skills. There were no processes in place, and when something went wrong, behaviours reverted to adult <-> child interactions (as we would refer to them in transactional analysis). I have seen owners shout at support staff for successfully implementing practices that allowed them to work offline when on client sites; people working in complete silence with no collaboration and not allowed to use headphones; and managers ridicule developers for not knowing particular technical terms even though they understood the underlying concepts.

All of these organisations lacked an understanding of how people like to work, both as individuals and as groups. When the owners and managers were confronted with this reality, when they saw that other people had their own ideas of how to perform their roles and that those ideas were in conflict with their own, they had no way of managing either their own emotions nor the conversations they wanted to have with the staff. These managers wanted people to work in the same way they liked to work, because they fundamentally didn’t understand how anyone could work in any other way.

This kind of poor management is also a problem I’ve seen in larger organisations, where managers want everyone to work in the same way they do. There is a sense to this. After being successful enough as a developer to become a manager, it stands to reason that the ways of working they have developed are a key part of their success. Therefore, if other people copy these ways of working, then they too will be successful. Of course, that’s not quite how humans work…

As a neurodivergent human, it’s all too clear to me that the ways I like to work are nothing like the ways most people want to work, and vice versa. I can easily extrapolate that I’m not alone in having my own preferred ways of working, and I’ve certainly learned this to be true over the years from both experience and training. And this is where the value of coaching comes in. Coaches support managers by growing their understanding of how other humans work and then support teams by providing frameworks for them to explore their work with each other.

I’ve spent the last couple of months building facilitations courses to teach others how to provide the kind of support that allows people of all different personality types work together on an even footing. These courses teach everything from how to keep a meeting on track by handling distractions quickly to how to manage dysfunctional behaviour before it causes too much distress for anyone.

Marketing these is a different problem, though…