The Curse of Tech Coaching

Since I started coaching, I’ve been thinking about the conditions that make such exercise possible and worthwhile. Over time, I’ve come to think there are a set of conditions that, if they are not met (and they are hard to meet), coaching can easily become very inefficient or even harmful.

Conditions

The next part of the article explores some of the conditions that contribute to a successful tech coaching. I’ve split them into the ones that should be met at a team level and the ones that apply at organization level. As this is a very opinionated article, please assume almost every sentence starts with IMHO 😅.

Team level

Room for Productivity Drop

Coaching involves investing some time because the coach will start snooping around, asking questions and having conversations. After a while, at some point the team will be disrupted taking time to stop and learn new ways of doing things. Such new ways may be more productive in the future, but the learning period takes a hit on productivity (even when it happens with someone holding the team’s hand).

Changing the way of working of a team or their mindset also takes a lot of time in conversations like 1:1s, team agreements or similar, which may not be directly mapped to a team delivering features to the users/stakeholders. Nobody said that dealing with our natural resistance to change was gonna be easy.

Motivation

This simple, the whole team needs to be motivated by the coaching, or at least a very big part of the team. Stumping a coach into a team where she or he is not welcome is a recipe for disaster. BTW, When I say the whole team I mean the whole team (PM included, very important).

Reasonable knowledge gap

You can’t coach and help people grow from a technical point of view if you don’t have a significant body of knowledge (theoretical or methodological, whatever) that you can bring to them in a pedagogical way.

If the gap is not enough, you can still contribute with unbiased external opinions and facilitation. It’s always good to have an extra pair of fresh eyes to provide feedback and tips, but the impact is way smaller and hence the value retrieved from the exercise.

Time commitment

Coaching can’t be a one-time thing, significant change in ways of working requires patience and consistency. So the team should be able to commit for a sustained period of time to be coached.

Organization level

Alignment

Coaches have their own agenda, and yes, you have to meet the coachees where they are and so on, but without alignment between my agenda and the company’s agenda, I just would be an agent of chaos (even with the best of my intentions).

Room for growth on practices

This one came as a surprise to me. Looks like it may happen that because of your coaching a team starts to ask unusual questions (as per their previous normality) and expect more from their peers who have not been coached and this stresses the system (I see this as an example of curse of knowledge bias, where we expect people around us to know what we know, even if we acquired that knowledge recently).

For example, demanding an AB test before making a decision or asking for whys which were not requested before can be seen as unnatural requests by parts of the organization if they are receiving them for the first time out of the blue. If both sides of the conversation are part of the coaching it’s easier to work on that, but that’s not always the case and it could easily happen that the resistance to change leaves things “as they were” (so no AB test, let’s just make the change) creating frustration on the coached team, who may start wondering how cool would it be to work in a company which really does AB Tests.

Anyway, the company needs to create space for the team to apply their new learnings, otherwise they will get frustrated (not to mention it sounds like a waste of money to invest on learning something you are not planning to use).

Room for economic growth

Plain simple, if you upskill people they can contribute more to your company… but the same applies to the rest of the market. So, if you are in the employee side be ready to increase your salary expenditures after a successful coaching or be aware that you risk yourself of losing some of those employees as they may now have access to a new kind of positions with a higher salary range (sounds crazy and like an exaggeration, but I know of a company who paid good money for coaching just to see a bunch of employees fly away afterwards).

Budget

Coaches, because of the required knowledge gap, are usually expensive (compared to the coachees). If the company is not comfortable with this difference (for equity reasons for example), this can be a deal breaker (been in this situation)

Sponsorship

Coaching will only happen if you have sponsors, the higher in the hierarchy the better. If there’s a new CTO/Director/Manager who wants to change practices, awesome! Those persons probably manage the budget and it’s just a matter of time they add enough critical mass to the teams/pressure to the system to make the system welcome a coach. Also, if those are the persons requesting your services, you probably already have tech and cultural practices aligned (otherwise they would be talking to another coach).

I guess sponsorship coming from inside the team it’s a little bit harder if possible at all, as those people have to “fight for the budget”. In fact, this has never been the case for me, so far I’ve always been hired as a coach by people in upper management of the company (1 Head of and 3 CTOs, they consulted with the teams, but they made the decision to hire me, not the teams).

Coaching is ephemeral

OK, so we’re done with all the conditions. Now what? Well… to make it worse, if you are lucky to find yourself in a situation where those conditions occur, then you have to cope with the fact that coaching is an ephemeral exercise:

• If you are successful, then people learn from you until they bridge the gap and your coaching is not needed anymore. Even if the gap has not been covered, at some point your impact will decrease, as explained by Prescott’s Pickle Principle: “Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered” from Gerald Weinberg Secrets of Consulting. The principle can also be translated in other words to “the longer you work with a client, the less effective you get”.
• On the other hand, if you are not successful with your coaching (or too slow as per your customer expectations)… well, that will probably not last long.

So… hereby the curse, from a coach point of view, it’s not easy to find the spot for a good coaching setup and when you find it you know it has an expiry date tag 🥵.

And this is it, I wanted to share my learnings and to warn my potential customers (to whom I recommend reading this), as I didn’t realize about all those circumstances until I got myself half-way through 🤣.

And to end on a good note, coaching is one of the most beautiful jobs I’ve had, if not the most. Helping people grow, provoking aha moments and bonding with them is immensely fulfilling, worth the headache to find situations where the aforementioned conditions are met - and please let me know if you have them and are looking for a coach 😬

Thanks - Manu Rivero, for pointing me towards the Prescott’s Pickle Principle and reviewing the article 🤗

Hero image created with Microsoft Designer.