I often hear different opinions on what coaches should and shouldn’t do.  One example is whether or not coaches should lead.  One common opinion is that coaches are not leaders.

My opinion may be a bit controversial.

I believe that a coach is whatever she/he needs to be to help their teams get to the next level.  I believe that great coaches are also great leaders, though they are not formally in leadership roles with those they are coaching.

Some organizations are in such a state that they need someone to demonstrate leadership in order to even begin to understand what a leader does in their context, and in such a state that no one available is ready to step up.  In such places, no amount of Socratic questioning, facilitating, dialog, or other hands-off techniques will help them in a reasonable time.  In such places, I imagine those with more strict coach role definitions would declare “they are not ready for <improvement x>”.  I would take a different approach – I might temporarily take on a leadership role to demonstrate, and then hand off the role to a team member.

Important considerations when taking on a leadership role as a coach

When you do this, you are removing your coach hat, and putting on a borrowed leadership hat.  Set expectations clearly:

• this is a temporary, brief, time-boxed situation with specific goals including demonstration and mentoring
• a primary goal of this endeavor is to hand over the leadership role as quickly as possible to a team member
• a primary goal is to put the coach hat back on as soon as possible and to break dependencies on the coach as leader

If you are a coach, you may already be taking on leadership roles

Do you facilitate meetings early in an engagement, such as discovery workshops or other things?  You are acting in a leadership role already.  As I describe above, it is a time-boxed endeavor with pretty clear expectations.  But it is leadership.  The more explicit and accountable the leadership role you take on, the more slippery the slope becomes, but with careful expectations management and a clear plan for transitioning the role to a team member, teams can benefit from your experience and leadership.

Turn them away?

Some believe that the role of the coach is very explicit and that there are clear boundaries, and that some people just aren’t “ready to be helped”.  I don’t.  I believe that I “work on/with the person in front of me,”  in the middle of the problems they have, and that rules sometimes need to be bent to help them in the best way.  If they want to change, and improve, I will do whatever I need to help them.

An example

A team is the first in its organization (a very large organization) to try scrum.  The team is 1 of four working on a large project.  No one on any of the four teams has any experience with scrum, and the culture until now was one of multi-tasking, multiple bosses (“I have five bosses, Bob, five”), and fear of rocking boats/exposing information.  There is little clear leadership.

An approach that worked really well in this situation in multiple organizations for me was to take on a leadership role for a time-boxed period, with the explicit goals of transferring the role to a team member as quickly as possible.  Taking on a scrum master role for a few sprints allowed me – someone with little need to fear breaking with tradition – to facilitate decisions, challenge rules, expose elephants, and more.  Team members saw that all of these things resulted in more success, and a natural scrum master emerged and took on the role, allowing me to focus on pure coaching.

As more teams started trying scrum, there was a new leadership gap – at the program level.  I took on the uber scrum master role – again for a brief time with explicit goals to transfer the role to someone on the team as soon as possible.  The results were repeated – this time at the program level – and the results were teams that functioned effectively as an agile program.

Taking on these roles was a risk…it is a slippery slope to start upon to take on accountable leadership roles.  However, in some places, drastic learning must take place, and in such places, arriving at some answers via questioning and facilitation would take unreasonable amounts of time.  In such places, demonstration and mentoring can be combined with coaching to turn lights on.  More on this topic in my coaching courage post.

What do you think?  I’d love to continue this discussion