The coaching arc is a list of steps a business coach should consider at every stage of their engagement. For the sake of simplicity, let’s suppose that you’re working as a coach at the domain/business unit level of the organization.
- Contracting/coaching agreements
- Walk the Gemba
- Share observations and receive feedback
- Priorities and plan
- Do the activities
- Impact assessment
- Gather qualitative and quantitative feedback
- Extend or end
- Share learnings
Let’s break each one of the steps down.
1. Contracting/coaching agreements
Contracting, or drafting coaching agreements, is essential for setting expectations. During this step, set up a session with the sponsor or individual who asked for your support to ask them about the expected outcomes and success measures. These measures should constantly support you in measuring your impact and understanding which activities are helpful and which ones aren’t. In the coaching agreement, discuss the roles and responsibilities of yourself and the key players (domain leads, team leads, other supporting functions such as QA and design) with the help of a RACI matrix and/or Delegation Poker. The agreements you come up with during contracting aren’t meant to be written in stone. It’s good practice to discuss any potential changes to your initial agreements, with the necessary roles, and amend the existing contract. While contracting, you also want to discuss a timebox that will bring clarity on the length of the engagement in relation to the job you’re expected to do. Having such coaching agreements explicitly defined and transparently available sets you up for your engagement.
2. Walk the Gemba
“Walk the Gemba” is a phrase that comes from the Lean management philosophy. It means seeing where the real work happens. In lean manufacturing, individuals would go to the factory floor where the production was being done, to silently walk along the value stream, spot patterns, and document observations about the process without interrupting the current work. In day-to-day business, this would mean assessing the context in which you are operating by gathering first-hand evidence of how teams and individuals are doing their work. (Physically or virtually) Sit in on meetings and sessions to compare the documented value stream with what happens in practice. Gather baseline data related to your success measure(s) so that you can see the delta during and after your engagement. For example, if one of your success measures is to reduce TTM (time to market) while maintaining the quality of the deliverables of a domain, you can start baselining the lead time, cycle time, and defects-to-bugs ratio during your Gemba walk. The idea here is to see whether you can hit your target measures for those metrics, over the next weeks.
3. Share observations and receive feedback
Once you’ve walked the Gemba and collected some data, take some time to digest them for yourself and come up with the next steps to make this data actionable. Brainstorm and collect your ideas, then share them with the domain lead after asking them for their assessment of the situation. Do this during one of the regular 1:1 calls that you both share. Sharing your findings after hearing their thoughts allows them to remain unbiased. Once you’ve both had a chance to discuss, think about how you can make those insights actionable. Do you need to fine-tune or adjust any of your engagement’s success criteria to reflect reality? Suggest targets for the baseline data that you’ve gathered. In the previous example of attempting to reduce TTM while maintaining quality, you may set a target lead time of 6 days, cycle time of 5 days, and defects-to-bugs ratio of better than 1:5, compared to the baseline data of 10 days, 6 days, and 4:5. While setting the targets, discuss the time horizon over which you expect to hit those targets and the reasons behind them. Bear in mind that although this is step 3 in the coaching arc, it’s good practice to do this step regularly every one or two weeks.
4. Priorities and plan
Once you have your baseline and target measures, discuss the priorities of your success measures. Which one is the most important to achieve? Which one is the least? Think short-, mid-, and long-term. If the agreed duration of your engagement is only a few months, and the short-term priority is to reduce TTM while the long-term priority is to improve user retention, revenue, and referral, then focus on reducing the TTM. Clarify your priorities with your sponsor and come up with a plan for how you are going to hit your target measures of success.
5. Do the activities
This step is simple – execute! Don’t forget to include short feedback loops (product reviews, retrospectives, 1:1 calls, etc) while executing your plan. While executing, always be open to changing what and how you do things as you understand the context better and uncover previously unknown details. Remaining agile in your approach de-risks your approach and helps form better relationships with those in the organization, by being seen as a partner helping the organization deliver value rather than someone who has come to carry out a plan at all costs.
6. Impact assessment
Regularly (as frequently as the data allows you) check whether your activities, such as training, workshops, sessions, and 1:1 coaching are moving the needle on the success measures in the right way. Checking once every week or two is good practice. If, for example, you are giving the domain a Kanban and Lean workshop to help them understand the different levers they can play around with in their process to improve TTM, it will take the teams a few weeks to understand the concepts and put them into practice. In such a situation, you probably won’t be able to see the TTM reduction until a month or two after the workshop. Identifying leading indicators in such cases can help you assess impact sooner, rather than waiting 2 months to see if the activity (Kanban workshop) moved the needle on your success measure (TTM reduction).
Having done the contracting and agreeing on the measures of success early on should make this step relatively simple. Sometimes, after you’ve kicked off your engagement, you may realize that there may be more relevant success measures to aim for (because the initial Gemba walk wasn’t long or detailed enough to give you those insights). In that case, go back to step 3 where you share your observations with the domain lead and discuss whether it would make sense to change the measures of success. Then follow steps 4-9. If your success criteria are still relevant – review whether you were able to achieve your targets. Look beyond them to see how the domain and the rest of the organization benefited from your efforts. Document your impact.
7. Gather and review feedback
In addition to assessing impact, gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback from the people you worked with, can give further indications of the degree to which you are positively impacting the organization. Gather feedback (via 1:1 calls, surveys, votes, etc) from the domain leads, team leads, and team members on the challenges you helped resolve, activities that you did, and the result of those activities. When assessing impact, the qualitative feedback is often left behind – this is an important piece to show the connections you’ve made and the trust you’ve built. Reading words of gratitude and confirmation supports one’s motivation in a job as much as hitting certain target success measures.
8. Extend or end
You’ve come to the end of the intially-planned engagment duration. Once you’ve assessed your impact and gathered additional feedback, use the data to discuss the challenges and opportunities that exist for the domain. Are there new challenges or opportunities that would warrant a renewed engagment? Do you have other priorities beyond support for this domain? Have such discussions with the domain lead in a transparent manner, share your thoughts, and hear their’s. Once you make your decision, share it with them, providing the appropriate reasons. Either define new success criteria for a new phase of engagement or end engagement when the initial timebox is met.
If you extend the engagement, start with step 1 again and go through the coaching arc. Treat it like a new mission, even though you have the benefit of having a lot of the context and relationship-building in place already.
If you decide to end the engagement, it’s often a good idea to have a few follow-up chats planned with the domain lead to see how the situation develops after you’ve left. Sometimes, the lagging indicators can often come into fruition after your engagement ends. Other times, the situation can deteriorate fairly quickly if the teams haven’t been supported in independently evolving through the stages of team development. Having a couple of follow-up chats with the domain lead after your engagement ends allows you to see how the situation develops, further advice the domain lead, or consider the context for a renewed mission with them. It also provides the domain with a sense of continuous support, and helps you build better relationships with the domain leads and other individuals you’ve worked with.
9. Share learnings
Lastly, share your learnings with your peers or team members. Doing so allows you to synthesize your experiences more deeply and benefits your team members from learning about a new situation and the result of your approach. The protégé effect comes into play, where teaching someone else allows yourself to better learn from your own experiences. Sharing your general experiences with your team allows you to build deeper relationships with them and has the added benefit of increasing psychological safety in the team by making them feel more comfortable sharing their own experiences. This snowball effect contributes to a postive feedback loop for the entire team.
Rahul Bhattacharya 