#98: Coaching the Coaches with Vinnie Gill

Join Brian and Agile coaching expert Vinnie Gills as they tackle the complexities of being an Agile coach and working with and among teams. Discover key strategies for overcoming conflicts and enhancing teamwork within the coaching community.

Overview

In this insightful episode, Brian and Vinnie Gill dive deep into the often overlooked challenges that arise in Agile coaching.

They discuss the common pain points and conflicts that can disrupt professional relationships and share effective strategies for creating a more cohesive and supportive coaching environment.

Listeners will gain valuable insights into recognizing and leveraging personal and collective strengths and weaknesses, ensuring that Agile coaches not only preach transformative practices but also embody them in their interactions. Tune in to learn how to foster strong, productive relationships within your Agile coaching community.

Listen Now to Discover:

[1:10] - Brian welcomes business agility coach and speaker Vinnie Gill.
[8:07] - Vinnie unpacks the reasons behind the high number of reports about challenging Agilists, highlighting the traits that contribute to their tough demeanor.
[10:12] - Vinnie emphasizes the critical importance of 'starting with why' to forge stronger and more effective working relationships.
[13:58] - Vinnie talks about the importance of coaches applying their own methods to themselves, sharing a real-life example of this practice in action.
[17:14] - Brian invites listeners to deepen their coaching skills by joining him or Lance Dacy in an Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®. 
[18:49] - Vinnie explains the counterproductive coaching anti-archetypes she has encountered, shedding light on common pitfalls to avoid in coaching roles.
[20:03] - Brian describes how Mountain Goat Software approaches empathy as a team of individuals.
[22:15] - Discover how Vinnie takes empathy further by recommending the addition of compassion to enhance team interactions and support.
[23:43] - Explore with Brian the critical role of deliberately designing a team's social contract to enhance collaboration and team dynamics.
[27:00] - Vinnie delves into how understanding and leveraging both our strengths and weaknesses can lead to greater personal and professional growth.
[27:31] - Vinnie underscores the critical need for mental health and self-care among agile coaches to safeguard against burnout and maintain peak performance.
[31:28] - Brian shares a big thank you to Vinnie for joining him on the show.
[32:00] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.
[32:20] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email. 

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Vinnie Gill
Vinnie’s Agile 2023 Speech
#54 Unlocking Agile’s Power in the World of Data Science with Lance Dacy
#89: Transformational One-on-Ones with Avipaul Bhandari
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Vinnie Gill is an experienced agile coach with a diverse background that spans continents and industries—from mining and finance to education and the public sector. With over 20 years in project and business management roles and a commitment to transformative education and agile practices, she excels at leading organizational change and fostering growth at the enterprise level.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:53.038)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the fabulous Vinnie Gill with us. Welcome in, Vinnie.

Vinnie (01:08.879)
Hi Brian, thank you for having me.

Brian (01:10.83)
Absolutely. I'm very excited to have you here. Vinnie is a business agility coach. She has really a lot of stuff that makes her unique and interesting. She's based out of Scotland, but has worked in Europe and Australia. She's kind of worked all over. She also has a background that comes from a little bit more of a project management background before she got involved with kind of the Scrum world. She's been in leadership. She's kind of done a lot of different things and she crossed our path because of last year's Agile conference. She had a really interesting talk there that we thought would be an interesting dynamic for us to talk about. So her topic was about working with Agile coaches and kind of what it's like to be around other Agile coaches and what kind of led you to that? that topic, Vinny, how did you get involved? What kind of sparked your interest in kind of the complicating factors of working with other agile coaches?

Vinnie (02:17.839)
So I guess, Brian, for me, why this topic, right? I guess I do have a lot of ideas. Like I am an ideas person, but I feel like this is the most authentic one that I can talk to. And I feel like the most connected topic that I'm able to speak. Funnily enough, when I do submit conference talks, I do submit more than one, but this one actually always keeps getting picked. So clearly I think... It is a hot topic. I've also built in a lot of humor as well in the talk because I think sometimes it's really good to take a look and laugh at yourself. But you're asking why this topic. So to answer your question, I feel that we also suffer the same symptoms from the people, the teams and leaders that we coach. So. while the topic may be working with other agile coaches, the drama, it is applicable to every single team.

Brian (03:23.054)
Yeah, it's kind of more just working with each other, right? Just anytime you work with other human beings, you kind of have some of these same issues. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Yeah, and you know, the conference talk thing, you know, it's such a crazy scatter shot kind of thing. You know, you're right. You know, we submit multiple topics. We submit multiple ideas of things that we're passionate about at the time. And you never know which one's going to get picked, if any. I always tell people that last year's Agile conference was the first one that I had gotten picked to speak at and I spoke with Mike and so I kind of had a cheat code, right? Because who's not going to pick a talk that has Mike Cohn in it? But it's kind of, you never know what people are going to find interesting or what they think is something that the... The attendees are going to find interesting in this day and age as well. Have you had some, I mean, I'm guessing that you've had some moments in working with other coaches or moments in working with teams that weren't, I guess as my British friends will say, we're less than ideal.

Vinnie (04:45.679)
Why Brian, that's very polite where you're putting it.

Brian (04:47.598)
I always get a kick out of that. There was a company I worked with that was in the UK and we had some problems that were going back and forth and that's the way they phrase things was, yeah, this situation is less than ideal. And that was their very polite way of saying, yeah, there's a problem.

Vinnie (05:09.871)
Right. Yes, I have. And obviously, I think we all have. Not I think. I know for sure we all have. But the thing is, we're always on the pedestal, right? Because we're this flag barrier of how we should be and how we should behave and how we should treat people. Because that's what we coach. Agile or agility isn't only about frameworks. Those are practices and to enable those, you need to have the behaviors, you need to have the mindset. And we coach these things. So the important thing, I guess, for us is to, how are we showing up for ourselves? How are we mirroring the behaviors that we are promoting?

Brian (06:01.806)
That's an excellent point. I mean, if we're trying to kind of teach this to others and say, hey, here's the agile manifesto and here's our values and principles and we should work as a team, but then we're working with other agile coaches and we're kind of working on our own and our own silos. And we're not really, we don't necessarily even get along with the other agile coaches that we have. that are around us, we're demonstrating what we really believe, right?

Vinnie (06:38.863)
Yeah, this is correct, right? It always starts with us. And I've always said this time and time again, you can't change other people. The only thing you can do is change yourself. So if you're pointing at one finger, there's four fingers pointing back at yourself, right? And it's very common with the people that I've worked with. If you, for example, work with a leader or a true story that you've asked, I've recently... and set up a Scrum Master Community of Practice. And I just said, you know, we're starting off this new Community of Practice. It's how we're going to be. Let's just focus on ourselves. Let's mirror the behaviors and the change that we want to be because this is all that we can control. And that's me learning the hard way through, you know, my years of... or your experience. And immediately after that it went, but what about the POs? The POs really need it. And I was like, did I not just say this? And you work with another leader and they go like, oh, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. But this person doesn't do this. And this is like, no, no, no, no, no. Just focus on yourself. Be clear on what you want to be. And if you want that behavior from somebody else, demonstrate that behavior.

Brian (08:01.678)
Such good advice, yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about some of the, because I know in your talk, you talked about some of the pain points that come along with just working with other Agile coaches. Are there any kind of unique pain points that you would think are specific to working with Agile coaches, or are these kind of all, would they kind of apply to any close working relationship?

Vinnie (08:25.743)
So I'm so glad you asked this question, Brian, because this talk, I've retired it for this year. I'm not submitting it to any conferences this year because it gets picked over my other talks. And I would like to do some other talks. I mean, I'm at version six or version seven of this talk. And for the agile conference that you watched, I did the extended version. Sometimes I have the Speedy Gonzales version.

Brian (08:54.798) Hahaha.

Vinnie (08:55.023)
But it is a talk that grows. No two talks are the same. And what I actually do is I collect metrics. So every time I do the talk, I'm collecting data. I'm collecting evidence. The first question I usually ask is, have you worked with a challenging Agilist? And the aggregate that I got from the last six talks, and I'm actually looking at it, is It's about 94%. 94 % says, yes, they have worked with a challenging Agilist, right? So an Agile team, Agile person, an Agile leader, a product person, right? And the small percentage that said that, you know, no, they haven't had any problems. They were mostly lone ranges. or they actually held the contract to deliver, which means they hired other people. So they had essay. So those are pretty high statistics. The other question that I ask is, in one word, describe what you find most difficult about working with them. And the word cloud that keeps coming up again and again, because the word cloud just zoots.

Brian (10:03.374)
Yeah.

Vinnie (10:20.143)
does its magic and has this, you know, the big word is actually ego, Brian. It's ego followed by don't want to change, controlling and fake.

Brian (10:38.638)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who would have thought that Agilist have an ego, huh? Um, but yeah, fake, fake. That's that hurts. Right. I mean that, I mean, we're, we're trying to be transparent about things and, uh, yeah, I could completely see that, that, you know, that would be a huge pain point if we feel like the, the others who are on our side, on our team are, are being fake about things and not being transparent about stuff. That's, that's terrible.

Vinnie (11:07.183)
Yeah, and I suppose the kicker here is this is not what other people are saying about us. This is what we are saying about each other.

Brian (11:16.494)
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. OK. So yeah, there's some pain points. There's definitely some things there that we could do better that are less than ideal. And if that's given, if we have those kind of problems inherent in our relationships and our working relationships without their Agilist, I know you also talk about some kind of tools and techniques to make our coaching group a little bit more cohesive. So what have you found there? How have you found ways to kind of bring that coaching unit together?

Vinnie (11:59.823)
So what I did is I basically started with the why. Why is it important that we need to work with each other? And quite aptly, I pointed out that it's a hard job. You're going in there and you're trying to introduce a different way of working. And that's hard. You're taking those decisions. You're being passionate about it. You're having those challenging conversations. So ultimately, you know, it is complex. It can be highly political. I mean, it always is. And so it's really important to have somebody who has our backs. And that's the why, right? And then it goes on, you're up. And then the next one is to understand the system that you're in. What does your system of coaches look like? They're, you know, permanent. um, you know, different types of employment, so permanent contract consultant, and then you've got the different coach levels like team program enterprise, and then you've got the different management types, you know, that you're trying to integrate. So you've in some companies and I've been in companies like this where you have a mix of all kinds. And also you have, you know, some companies where you might just have a couple of agile coaches. So understanding the system and. who your colleagues are are really important. I predominantly am a contractor and sometimes I'm a consultant, but I always look to leverage the relationships that I already have on site. So if they're a product person, if they're a Scrum Master, they're all one of us. We're all each other, you know, even product people. And I know this is split between product people and not agile people and Kanban people are not. this and that, but hey, we're all after the same goal here, you know? So I don't buy this whole thing by creating factions. I'm all about how we can work together. So once you find out who's in the system, try and see how you can leverage each other and use what we all have to our advantage. You know, for example, some conversations is better coming from a permanent person. Some conversations is better coming.

Brian (13:58.126)
Yeah.

Vinnie (14:22.287)
from a person that's outside. So build those relationships, make friends.

Brian (14:28.59)
Yeah, yeah, I would think there's sort of an inherent flaw or not. I don't know if I would say flaw, but there's there's inherent crack that could could could present itself in this relationship because you know we all have our preferences for how things should go and while we all follow the same kind of values and principles, the practices are very, very different. And I might come in and have a certain particular stance I always take on estimation, for example, and say, this is the way I think people should estimate, and I've found success with this. And then if I have another consultant or Agile coach that's there who feels very strongly the other way, well, now we're presenting two different conflicting opinions. And I can see how that would be really confusing for the client, right? For the person we're trying to help.

Vinnie (15:30.927)
Absolutely correct, Brian. So my question to you is if you were a coach and two leaders had two different opinions, what would your advice be to them?

Brian (15:42.51)
Yeah, I mean, we'd have to discuss it. We'd have to analyze them. We'd have to sit down and say, you know, what are the pros and cons and, you know, try to reach some kind of consensus. Yeah.

Vinnie (15:50.895)
Exactly. So a lot of the things that I'm saying in my talk is not exactly rocket science. It's just that sometimes we do not take our own advice. We don't take our advice, but we also forget about ourselves as well. We tell our teams to have fun. I tell them to go play bowling. You know, we tell leadership to go have a nice away day. By the way, I believe we're all leaders just for the record.

Brian (16:01.742)
Yeah.

Brian (16:19.95)
Yeah.

Vinnie (16:21.135)
Um, but we don't have time to have fun ourselves, right? As almost like sometimes we're always very spread thin, like Vegemite, which is this Australian thing. Um, and sometimes we eat the burnt toast. You know, we save the, the burnt stuff for ourselves. We, we forget ourselves. We coach people to have empathy, but we appear to not have empathy for each other. Right. Um.

Brian (16:33.134)
Yeah.

Vinnie (16:51.183)
So these are some of the tips and tricks we ask people to have a social contract and review them. We don't do it ourselves.

Brian (17:03.438)
Let's talk about that a little bit. So when you say that you recommend people have a social contract, what kinds of things would you just say are run in the mill, typical kind of things that you would see in a social contract between Agile coaches?

Vinnie (17:19.535)
It would be more or less the same thing that you would see in a team, right? Be aligned, you know, how do you want to talk to the client or how do we want to talk to the people that we work with? Bullying, intimidating, be transparent, respect each other's skills, look out for each other's backs, right? And maybe live the behaviors that we coach. So these are some things that we could have in our ways of working. I recently delivered a two -day practitioner course, not only delivered, my colleague Suzanne and I, who is a big fan of yours, Brian. Hey, Suzanne.

Brian (18:07.886)
Well then big shout out to her and thank you so much for listening.

Vinnie (18:15.023)
And so, you know, we, we put together this two day product practitioner course, which we're so excited about because it's not only learning the theory, you actually get to put it into practice a wee bit by wee bit. So that's what's going on. And we'd worked very hard for two months to put this whole course together. And the day before we delivered it, Suzanne was like, let's have a social contract on how we're going to. run on these two days. And so we, we did it, you know, we had each other. It's like, okay, so during the break, if there's, you know, we're running long or we're running short, this is what we're going to do. We're going to stay back. We're going to do this. Okay. Can we have lunch at different times? Um, and you know, things like, um, have fun, you know, back each other up. If there's a difficult question.

Brian (19:12.174)
Yeah, that's so good. And it's, you know, there's some stuff I've been working on around conflict just in general in teams. And I think that applies here as well. Just kind of the idea of, you know, if we can state prior to us becoming bogged down in something that's dangerous, right? We can state from the outset, hey, when this kind of thing might occur, here's how we should handle it, right? Here's how we think we want to handle these kinds of things. But establishing that in advance, I think goes a long way so that when it happens, you're not caught off guard. You're not sort of sitting around going, well, gosh, now we're in the thick of it. How do we get out of this? No, we've talked about it. We have a plan. Here's how we do it.

Vinnie (19:57.903)
Exactly. Yes. So yeah. And some of the, some of the other tips and tricks that I cover, just in case you're, you're, you're, you're interested. I do talk about, um, you know, I'm big on us having empathy with each other. I interviewed some coaches and I have a list of, um, coach anti archetypes, you know? Um, and some of them are.

Brian (20:09.294)
Yeah.

Vinnie (20:23.855)
quite funny after after serving. It's like you may have the overwhelmed coach, the coach who doesn't listen, the framework coach, the know it all coach, the coach that takes the credit. And it's my favorite, the Oreo coach, which is now you see me now you don't.

Brian (20:40.462)
Love that.

Vinnie (20:42.287)
Right. But with this coach, anti archetypes, I. You remember I talked about the word cloud, right? And we might have seen that in ourselves. And when I usually show this list of coach archetypes, I bet they're basically saying, oh, you know, that's Jim and that's Sally and that's Alex and that's Brian. But the thing is we have been this person at some situation, right? We've probably been some of it or all of it.

Brian (20:52.75)
Yeah.

Vinnie (21:17.519)
and depending on the situation, because we're human as well, but the important thing is we catch ourselves and we notice what's happening. And sometimes we behave in different ways because there are other factors that are causing us to behave in this way.

Brian (21:35.566)
Yeah. Yeah, that's such a great point. We just had, you know, for, you know, Mountain Goat Software, we're a small team. We have a small kind of group of people. And once a year we get together to have our, our kind of, you know, in -person discussions and meetings. And one of the things we talked about there was just the fact that, you know, we, like any small team of people, right? Like any small group of people were human beings. And people have bad days from time to time. And when you have a bad day, you certainly kind of expect people to understand, hey, it's not the real me, that's the bad day me. Like there's just, yes, I don't always behave as I would hope to, but that's because I have bad days from time to time. And... I'm trying to reduce, you know, those and try to reduce the way I act, uh, you know, that might be disruptive to somebody else, but that empathy, like you said, I love that word as well. Having empathy for someone else to say, Hey, that's, they're not a bad person. They're just having a bad day. Um, you know, we talked about, we've talked about on this podcast before kind of, uh, the acting thing about intent versus action, you know, like, uh, you, we observe people's actions. You know, that person did this or said this to me. Uh, and we ascribe intent to that. You know, you see that someone does something and then you, you kind of think, well, that must've been because they don't like me or that must be because, uh, you know, they have it in for me. That's intent. And what we have to kind of step back from sometimes I think is, is, um, jumping to a conclusion of what the intent is. You know, like we see it, we observe the action, but do we give people the benefit of the doubt on their intent to say, I'm sure it's not because they have it in for me. I'm sure it's not because they just don't like me. Maybe it's because they're having a bad day. Maybe it's because somebody else just yelled at them. Maybe it's because, you know, a million things, right? But if you jumped to that negative intent to say, oh, no, no, no, it just must be that they hate me. You know?

Brian (24:02.51)
then you're not really giving them the same empathy that you want others to give you when you have a bad day.

Vinnie (24:10.575)
Exactly. And you're not even giving the same empathy that you coach people and teams that you work to have for each other. Right, Brian? So it's not one. Yeah. So onto that, it's like there is empathy, but there is one actually higher than empathy, which is compassion.

Brian (24:18.51)
Yeah, absolutely.

Brian (24:27.534)
Hmm.

Vinnie (24:29.103)
So that's high on the effort and high on the engagement. It's really hard. It's not about just being nice to somebody for a few hours, you know. It's actually following up with that person and seeing how they're doing and how they are caring about them genuinely. I always find this when somebody passes away, it's always like during that couple of weeks. So I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry. but people feel this years to come, every special holiday, every best season. So it's a lot more than a few hours. But Brian, I'm curious. You mentioned about Mountain Goat Team. You have a wee team. Sorry, I'm saying wee because wee means a little bit for it.

Brian (25:17.39)
No, you're in Scotland. You are allowed to use that term. I am not, but you are.

Vinnie (25:25.071)
Of course you are, why are you not allowed? You're absolutely allowed. Do you have a social contract or somehow your teams, how you want to be and how you work together?

Brian (25:38.094)
You know, that was one of the topics in our last meeting was kind of talking about the fact that we needed to be more deliberate about what that was. So my answer is that no, we don't have it yet, but that is an action item that we took out of our meeting was to deliberately capture that and make sure we're all aware of what that is. So, you know, it's one of those things where, like you said, sometimes you, you, It's definitely something that I would say to another company. If I come in, you should have working agreements, team agreements. But when you get to your own little team, you think, oh, we all kind of know what that is. No, you kind of need to be deliberate about it. I agree. Yeah.

Vinnie (26:25.647)
And it needs to be reviewed. So that's something that we all, we all, we all don't do, I guess. Some of the other stuff I talked about is like capability metrics, right? And I always, I always say this. I'd, I'd rather be somebody's shot of whiskey than everybody's cup of tea.

Brian (26:45.71)
I love that.

Vinnie (26:49.071)
I am not the right coach for some people or some teams. And I am absolutely the right coach for some people in some teams. So the important thing is, you know, how we work together. If I bring the listeners back to when we talk about the coaches in the system, starting with where we are at the moment, who was that best person to go to this area or work with that person? We all have our different skills. We all have our skills, skillsets and strengths, um, and things that we're not good at. And while we're on the subject, I know everyone says, if you have a weakness, you need to do better. Nah, that's not me. You know, for me, if I'm good at something, I can be better at something. Um, and if I'm not great at something, that's fine. You know, I'm not going to, um, spend my time or feels, you know, worry about it, you know, that I'm not, not so good at it. The important thing is I am aware that I'm not very great at this and there are other people more suited to this. So that's how I've been, um, I've basically been in the last few years. It's like, yeah, cool. Don't worry about it, right?

Brian (28:08.91)
Yeah. No, I love that. I think that's great. And I completely agree. It's, it's, uh, you know, of course we're, we're, we're agile people. We, we are trying to continually improve. Uh, you know, that we, we tell that to our teams and I, uh, I think that's something we take to heart and just how we live our lives. But you're, you're absolutely right. I completely agree that, you know, there are things I am stronger in. And there are things I'm weaker in and there's no real reason for me to have to really strain to try to do something I'm weak in when there's a better option. If I know there's somebody else who's really good at that. Well, I'll give you a great example. There's a, you know, one of our, our, uh, our trainers here that we work with, we have mentor of mine that I've worked with that have on the podcast regularly. Uh, Lance Dacey, uh, Lance is really. great at he actually went back to school and got a master's in data science and he knows that much better than I do. I know a little, you know, like I know I kind of know generals. I'm not I don't know a lot of specifics, but if we had someone come to us and say no, we really need someone who's who's really big in data science. Sure, there's no reason why I should have to strain to press in and try to cover up for something that I'm not as strong in as Lance is. So I agree with you. Kind of the old adage, know thyself. Know what you're strong in, know what you're weak in, and don't be ashamed. It's just who you are.

Vinnie (29:59.727)
Yeah, exactly. Right. Cause you're never going to be a data science expert and I'm not going to be a robotics expert. Right. So sometimes when I do have these conversations with people like, Oh, you know, you're weak in this place. And I was like, well, I knew enough, but you know, so be it. And they're like, Oh, that's really weird attitude. And I was like, yeah, like I'm good at these things. It can be better at these things. I'm not so great at these things, you know, let the other person.

Brian (30:08.398)
Right.

Vinnie (30:26.511)
do that because that's their passion. That's what they're interested in.

Brian (30:30.606)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been great. I thank you so much for taking the time here. I know with time differences and stuff, you're in your evening and it's already weekend where you are. So thank you so much for taking your time and sharing your wisdom and knowledge with us here on the podcast.

Vinnie (30:53.263)
Thanks, Brian.

Brian (30:55.886)
Absolutely.