Managing Product Development

At SD earlier this week, I led a tutorial about coaching. Imagine my surprise when I asked people why they were there, and some of them said, “I have a person who’s not doing so well. I need to coach them.”

Uh, no. You need to give that person feedback. Feedback is information about the past, given in the present, with the goal of influencing the future. (That’s a paraphrase of What Did You Say?.) Coaching is helping people see other options, and therefor helping them increase their capacity or capability.

Feedback is something managers must do. The more collaborative the team, the more everyone on the team needs to know who to give and receive feedback. But coaching? Coaching is optional.

People choose when they want coaching. They choose their coach. It’s not acceptable to impose coaching on someone else. (Esther and I showed examples of this in Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management.)

If you’re a manager, make sure you know the difference between coaching and feedback. Otherwise you’ll confuse your team members, spend too much time with the people who provide the least value, and not coach the people who could use your coaching.

Last week at SD Best Practices, I led an experiential half-day session about coaching. A significant number of the participants thought their job was to teach the other person what to do. (I think one person actually said “lead them to enlightenment.”)

While it may be true in sports or school coaching, peer-to-peer coaching is much more about generating and discussing options than it is about the One Best Choice. Even if the manager is coaching, that’s still peer-to-peer coaching for me.

During the session, I focused the participants on coaching each other through generating options and discussing the consequences or results of those options. I learned something in the class–several people felt as if consequences was a negative word and preferred results. Ok, I can live with that

I taught several more sessions at SD, and by the time I taught my last session, several of the participants had talked to me and said virtually the same thing: “Gee, teaching someone else what to do really does occur less often than I thought it did. The things that work for me don’t necessarily work for the other person. (image of short person doing the happy dance

Sometimes when we coach at work, we explain an alternative the other person can’t consider because the other person doesn’t have the experience. But after the first few years of work, those times occur less and less often. And that’s fine.

So as you practice your coaching, don’t be afraid to go meta, and ask questions that help the other person generate alternatives and evaluate those alternatives. Be wary of giving advice as soon as you hear the problem–it’s likely that the problem being explained is not the real problem. If necessary, teach. But don’t use teaching as your first choice. The other person likely has the key to the solution inside him or her–and it’s almost always different from what you suggest.

I’m in the middle of a new activity for me: visiting colleges with Daughter#1. (She’s a senior in high school, trying to decide where she wants to attend school next year.) When I was thinking about college (university to those of you across the pond), my father told me I could go up to 300 miles away from home. I looked at a map, found the schools farthest away, sent away for catalogs, and chose which ones to apply to. It never occurred to me to visit a school. I could learn everything I needed to learn from a college catalog. (Yes, those were the days before the Web

But Daughter#1 is different from me. She needs to absorb the feel of the campus before she’s willing to make a decision. And, while I’m her mentor and sometime college coach, I need to choose when to speak and when not to–so that she makes her own decisions.

This when-to-speak problem is the same problem managers (and peers) encounter when coaching at work. When coaching, it’s much better to allow the coachee to think and discuss their possibilities, rather than imposing the coach’s perspective and options on the coachee. Inflicting help–telling people what to do–is not coaching. It’s much more of a parent-child relationship rather than a working peer-to-peer relationship.

Even here, where I am the parent, Daughter#1 still needs to make her own decisions. She needs to select the criteria by which she can evaluate her options. I can help by suggesting she do so, and by asking if such-and-such or so-and-so are part of her criteria. But I can’t make the decisions for her (and I don’t want to), and providing her my opinions all the time is inflicting help.

So I’ve been working on asking open-ended questions and asking about her criteria, and nodding a lot. It’s a little difficult, because I have strong opinions But it’s not impossible.

If you’re coaching someone, make sure you think about when to speak and when to be quiet. It may not be your preference, but make a conscious decision for the good of the coaching relationship and for the coachee. It’s worth it in the end.

We’re in the last stretch of finishing Behind Closed Doors, and now we’re fixing/regenerating pictures.

When Esther and I made the pictures originally, we wrote them on flip charts and took pictures of them. (We were talking about information on flip charts — made sense to us.) Well, it turns out the pictures are not sufficiently high contrast to use in the book.

Esther has much nicer handwriting than I do, so she redrew all the flip chart pictures. To save time, Andy delegated the eps file creation to me.

Here’s my context: I flunked cutting with scissors in Kindergarten. I successfully flunked every other art course I ever took. (In school, I received “A” for effort and whatever the not-quite-failing grade for content.) As soon as possible, I stopped doing anything with pictures.

Fast forward to today. It’s now my job to do a good job with creating eps files. Now to most of you, this does not reek of art — but to me it does. I have to look at contrast, size, rotation, cropping, all things that say “finish a piece of artwork.” Eek.

So how did Andy delegate this to me? He said, “Here, do this and that. Send ‘em to me.” He gave me feedback, explaining I needed to lower the resolution (!). This time, he didn’t say how, but what he wanted as a result. I was successful.

Ok, so this is a small task and I’m not sure I’m over my fear of creating art, but I’m a lot closer. Here’s what Andy did:

• Checked to see I was willing to do the job. (I was.)
• Bounded the work.
• Explained which tools I needed and verified I had them.
• We jointly set a time at which I would check in and verify I had done the right thing.
• Provided feedback so I would know how to modify what I thought success was.

This is almost exactly the same as our checklist for delegation in the book. (In the book, we have a few extra items: knowing when the work is too risky to delegate, and setting boundaries on schedule, cost, quality.)

One of the nicest side effects of delegating is to help other people be aware they have more capabilities than they originally considered. I’m a lot more likely to consider pictures now that I know how to create them and how to electronify them for a book. This was successful delegation–for both of us.

Managers have an obligation to coach employees to help employees obtain better performance. However, managers choose when and whom to coach. Managers also have an obligation to provide feedback — which is not a choice. Every employee deserves feedback about his/her work on a frequent (weekly) basis. I’ve never met a manager who didn’t have some employee who needed coaching about something. Coaching is a “management” skill you can learn. (I believe that on Agile teams, everyone needs to learn to coach.) In fact, I’ll be talking about how to coach at the NZ/Aus Software Development conference. (Esther and I show how to do it in the management book.)

Here’s the essence of coaching:

1. Verify the other person wants help.
2. Generate options with the other person.
3. Walk through consequences of those options. Wait for the coachee to choose an option (unless other people’s safety is at stake).
4. Create an action plan to implement those chosen options.

In the previous blog entry, I suggested that Rich may have to coach people who aren’t sure of their skills as technical leads. Coaching isn’t easy and it takes time. But without coaching, it’s harder to learn new skills. Coaching can jump-start people into working in a new and different way. In my experience, coaching all levels of managers (and a teenager who’s learning to drive is that coaching on new and specific technical skills (”Try turning the wheel that way”) is fast and easy. Coaching to change long-term behaviors or more generic skills is much harder.

I tried to coach a project manager into not growling when she received bad news. I suggested, “Look interested. Look concerned. Try to keep that look of concern, not sounds of dismay.” She was unable to do so. I suggested we generate other alternatives, and she decided a sign that said, “The lion is in,” might work. She explained her growling was a reaction and she was trying to change it but hadn’t been able to yet. After the explosion of laughter, the project staff understood what the growling meant, and were able to give her bad news.

The longer you hold a particular position in the organization, the more you need to consider coaching other people. If you become indispensable, you need to fire yourself from your current position and obtain a new one (in the same company is fine). This is true whether you’re a manager or not. Without coaching other people, you’re not planning for succession, nor are you working to increase capacity of your group, certainly parts of what managers do.