Stop Trying To Fixing Teams. Start Coaching for Meaning

This week's episode is for those of us that see ourselves as coaches in whatever role it is that we play. Whether you are a leader with a coaching mindset or a career, product or agile coach. I want to propose a really, but I think maybe, dare I say radical shift in how some of you coach, lead and transform your organisations. Today's episode is called Stop Fixing Teams, Start Coaching for Meaning because coaching a single team or a collection of individuals is like trying to fix a leaking tap on the Titanic. Welcome to the Product Agility podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Imagine standing inside an organization mid translation. Maybe you're just thinking about your organization right now. Rd. Maps have replaced detailed project plans. You've got products now, Hooray, what more could you ask for? Teams are sprinting, do Bunny ears and sprinting daily. Stand ups are happening. Three questions are being answered, boards are buzzing with post it notes, burned down charts, and you've invested in some fancy new tools. Now ask yourself, is anything really changing or have we just rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic? Now if you've ever read about the Titanic, you might recall a man named Jack Phillips, the ships senior radio operator. Jack, along with his assistant, passed multiple iceberg warnings to the bridge. Was he listened to? Not really. When disaster struck, did he abandoned ship? No, he stayed. He stayed desperately signalling for help coordinating rescue efforts and was responsible for saving many lives. Jack Phillips commitment to others ensured that hundreds were rescued and today in his hometown his legacy is honoured and celebrated with every child in every local school learning and celebrating his heroism. How do I know that? Not because I googled it, but because he came from my hometown. Like you may be thinking, right? Has Ben lost his mind? What the hell is he talking about? No, I I have a warning for you. Jack Phillips understood the meaning of his role in the crisis. When things around him were changing catastrophically. He didn't have a retro with his assistant to work on his team charter or figure out what he was mad, sad, or glad about. He tapped into his purpose. He tapped in and did the most meaningful thing he could think of. If your transformation lacks real meaning, purpose, and direction, you're simply sailing full steam ahead into your own Titanic failure. I think the great coaches in US, we're not the ones that women face of a crisis, just try and fix the team. We tap into that core purpose, that core meaning of why we're there, and we look to have the biggest impact we can do like Jack Phillips did. The real transformation isn't just about adopting new processes or coaching the system in Bunny years once again or ticking agile theatre boxes. It is about coaching for meaning. It's about really understanding and having people tap into why the hell they're showing up. It's about anchoring each little change you make to a clear, shared purpose that creates genuine business value and human impact. Why it matters, right? The world loves a trend, and agile was no different. In the pursuit of fitting in and with the early social proofing I mentioned in my piece When Agile Coaching is Dead, Like people love the case studies, they flocked to what agile appeared to be from the outside looking in, rather than appreciating that it was probably best left to a niche section of a software development community. So if your trends are, you know, a reflection of collective consciousness, like what we value, what we crave, and how we want to be seen. And I thank Lottie Pursue for that on her excellent BOG blog, BOG. She's an art director and then she's done some research on trends. And I think it's such a great way of seeing trends, right? There are things that we value, things that we crave. We want to be seen, we want to be part of a group. And Agile was no different. And I think leaders, myself included, wanted to be seen, to be modern, to be moving fast, or at least having the intention to moving fast. And honestly, honestly, everybody just wanted to get much more for much less. And I don't think that's changed. This is why we saw so much emphasis on velocity and leadership behaviours. Bunnies again, and for say many organizations, no real transformative impact. Because if agile alone could turn organizations around, they think we'll have done so by now. And the truth is agile ceremonies often lacked any meaning and were just hollow acts of box ticking theatre interventions that pasted agile on products and and labels. And what already existed with a clear and meaningful and challenging purpose drifted into bureaucracy because they lacked that meaning. And the proliferation of team level coaching, I mean, Christ, so much team level coaching, so many coaches, so many scrum masters ended up just being a vain attempt to Polish already ineffective systems like transformation that sticks. You know, the kind that as everyone, that everyone was trying to sell and achieve, that made a real bottom line. Business impact demands that we help people reconnect, not to what matters most now or in the past, but there's something new and different that every single organizer, every single person in the organization can find a way to believe in it. Maybe not on day one, maybe not on day 100, but at some point for transformation to have a real impact and to be successful over and above the human impact and the business impact, like everyone needs to believe in what you're doing to their customers, their teams, and their own sense of purpose. This is where they need to align their mindsets. So I've got 3 ideas to share with you today. That make a huge impact on the effectiveness of leaders, teams and organisations that I support, but also in my own level of joy in my own work. First one is coach and guide leaders to articulate organizational purpose. And if you are the leader, this is this is to I'm talking to you here as well. This is something you can coach and support yourself in. It's something that I do with my business and my life generally speaking most weeks, is that we need to support each other and we need to support our leaders, even if those leaders aren't our peers, right? Not to be agile, but to be meaningful. When someone approaches me asking for my support and if any form of significant change nowadays, my starting point is to help them figure out and communicate a clear, compelling purpose consistently, right? One which resonates to them, they have to believe in it and they need to change their language. I need to change my language. You need to change your language so that you are really pushing this compelling purpose. This meaning people know why they have to change. People know the repercussions for not changing so that that resonates throughout the whole organization. And this isn't just top down, this is bottom up. We need people on the ground also saying that. So this is more than just a stupid workshop. This is finding ways to make this purpose resonate through all of your communications and all of your interactions. So consider what would make this company meaningful to our customers, not just efficient for us. If you think about this question, for many, this will be answered with fluff initially. I'm not picking holes here. I'm not. They don't think unfairly like picking people out. But I've just got really tired of fluffy statements. My corporate career when I worked in lots of a large banks was full of this fluff. I was the producer of said fluff many a time. So if your answer to that question was, oh, they're going to get stuff quicker, if we can get this particular feat out, it's going to change everything. I think it's useless. These are surface level statements that anyone find hard to disagree with. What I really want to hear is their aspiration. I want to hear a winning one. What I want to hear is what obstacles their products organization needs to overcome to achieve that winning aspiration and what their part is in doing it. What capabilities are missing? Do we need to grow in our leaders, in ourselves, in our teams, collectively, systemically to make that a reality? And if we can get to that point, we can get beyond agile leadership, whatever that meant, the theatre around it, and create a meaningful narrative that teams may actually believe rather than a partially polished canvas from a workshop. Now, I know this is contrived and there'll be no surprises when I say that we need to prioritize genuine business impact over methodology, right? But I'm just saying we've just forget the frameworks, forget, forget the frameworks, focus on something meaningful. But I hear you say that sounds great. And we've heard this a million times, Ben, what does that mean practically what you're saying that's different? And you're right to challenge me, absolutely right to challenge me on that. So much snake oil has been sold over the years and not just agile, but most of the consultancies have sold some. Never a snake oil. Many, many people sell snake oil. I'm not saying about agile here, but there were many culprits of this in the agile world and myself at times absolutely probably did sell some snake oil. One of my old videos on YouTube is someone calls the topic snake oil. I totally agree, absolutely agree, right. But the reason we got away with it, the reason people still get away with it is because people didn't push to get meaningful answers to questions such as these. So first of all, just just forget the outcome for now, right? Our outcomes are for naughty. If you don't know what the impact is, right, then there's no point talking about outcomes like what's the business problem we're trying to be solved at the moment? And when we're being sold something, when we are answering the questions, that's just when I posed earlier, we wanna go to the heart of this. We wanna be answering questions which focus on how are we gonna win and what's the business problem we're trying to solve at the moment? Why is this even a problem? Like what's so wrong with how things are now? That a change is needed? How do we think behaviours will be different and how we measure them once the problem is solved? If the activities the teams are undertaking aren't addressing these points, coaching that individual team in isolation is really unlikely to make any kind of impact because it's all out of their sphere of control. There is no magic framework that will answer this question for you. There are some great tools we can learn that will help to challenge and shift our mindsets and really find the face of a status quo to help leaders, teams and coaches work together to answer questions such as these and challenge a lot of the presumed activities we think we have to do. You know, and personally, you know, I consistently found that the leading product discovery method from Lean UX is a surefire winner. And the thirdly, I think we need to create the context to allow teams to care and connect deeply to their work. OK. And this is about tapping into human motivation, which is something we all have, but at the same time, it's unique for each of us. And for me, This is why we just need to just forget frameworks. I consistently recognize that things move forward and teams and organizations are successful not because of a framework, because they care, because there's meaning. And if you can get people tapping in to that meaning and organizational level, like that's what makes a difference. Sure, you can play around with some frameworks and once you've got that put that meaning, you're lost. So how can we bring that meaning to our organizational context? Many of the organizational operating models and designs that people find themselves in are designed to balance control and stakeholder expectations. That's the rub. They are designed by people whose job is to oversee an organization and make it easy to manage but not necessarily effective, and the result are pieces that are, again, seemingly easy to manage and report upon. Believe a gaping chasm between the people creating the product and the ultimate arbiters of success or failure are customers in the market. If we want people to show up more than just a paycheck, we need to create a new context. If you want them to show up because their work means something impactful to them, we need to design and encourage behaviours that create the environments where it's normal for teams to talk about their purpose, their meaning. We want to make it normal for teams to expect and embrace having their performance measured by their ability to achieve this purpose. And if that meaningful context isn't there, no amount of individual team level coaching will save the day. Even if you have one coach for 10 teams, it won't save the day. The observation I make in organizations that leads me to believe that we're really on the right track is when teams are actively challenging and rejecting meaningless work and celebrating failure as learning and an open door to do something much more impactful than they would have done otherwise. And I saw this a few months ago with one of my clients when we had teams who historically, I think felt like they were just told what to do to an extent. I think they enjoyed their work, but they did feel like they weren't the manifested of their own destiny. And to have a team member stand up or not stand up, speak up, let's say I think you did stand up. But he spoke up and said, I don't see how our work is has any meaning. I don't see how our work is contributing to what we need to do right now and what we've agreed to focus on. So we're going to go back to the drawing boards. And here's how we propose we're going to figure out something that's more meaningful. And I think this was just wonderful because it wasn't just the fact that they'd found that the work they were doing wasn't meaningful. It was the speed at which they were able to dust themselves off and continue moving forward, not just for the same vigor and energy, but renewed and increased vigor and energy. And that's the hallmark of a truly meaningful purpose. So if you're looking for some practical steps for coaches or. Yeah, and practical steps for yourself. And if you're still listening to this, you're either agreeing with me or thinking I'm full of shit and Ivor is fine with me, right? But you're still here. So thank you. So let's get practical. I have some advice of what you can begin to do or plan to do starting today. First of all, get to know what's meaningful to yourself and your leaders. Team level coaching doesn't yield real systemic business impact and meaning because there's a disconnect, but in the necessary feedback on the activities the teams undertake versus the expectations of the leaders. In this same way, coaching individual leaders, or individual leaders coaching themselves in some way often highlights the same disconnect between their activities and the expectations of their boss or the board. Now, whilst I was cooking Sunday lunch with my father-in-law, he shared a nugget of wisdom with me. He said no. I went out of my way to understand the three things my CEO thought about. First, when he started his working day. Once I knew what these were, I knew what I had to care about and how to make an impact. Yeah, he was really successful in his industry. It's very, very senior and he would understand these three things that his CEO cared about. Now it not to say that he could control all of those, but he knew that if the ones that he could control he would do something about and the ones that he couldn't control he would influence. So let's get over the jargon and the bullshit and let's turn on our curiosity and get your leaders answers to those questions. And if you are the leader and you can't answer them and get yourself out of the building for a walk and figure them out. And if you want company on your walk, please feel free to send me a message. I'm always up for increasing my step count. If you discover that the three things you care about cannot be linked to the change you're planning. If you are planning a change and I think you have a prioritization problem, next tip is to find ways to connect daily work to strategic purpose. And I'm not suggesting that everyone now goes off and makes a convoluted hierarchy in Jira. I'm, I'm conversations on hierarchical backlogs and grouping, etcetera. Great. I, I, I think they're over laboured. I think we just need to solve their strategic purpose and the simplicity thing first and then whatever structure we need will fall out. So what I am recommending is that we make it simple, easy and straightforward for every activity and every output across the organization to be clearly tied to the organization's organization's purpose or their transformation purpose. I found that not making a mess of OK Rs is a great way to do this. And for me, not making a mess of OK Rs means having as few as possible, having each impact a customer, even if it's an internal customer. Is making OK Rs the result of discovery, not the other way around? It's replacing boring, meaningless agile theatre with short, concise conversations on the critical things that are affecting the OK Rs. And if we can do this, we can begin to tap deeper into what gets people out of bed and connect each team to something bigger so that they can begin to understand, meet the meaningful impact they can have, and begin to demand that. Because that's what we want. Because for me, this beats spending more time doing individual team retrospectives expecting to see a massive turn around. I feel like teams have been treated like children. What these adults really needed was something meaningful to do, so they felt like they were making a difference. If today's episode has meant something to you, here's what I request you do. One, take a moment to reflect. Like, where in your organization are you fixing leaky taps instead of trying to find a way to build a new ship? And the second request is that you share this episode with someone that needs to hear it. Because together by coaching for meaning, we can create organisations that don't just work better, but matter more. Now there is 1/3 slightly cheeky request. Very soon I will have my own sub stack, the link to which will be in the show notes for all of my episodes. So if you've enjoyed this and you want to get a slightly different take on the episode, do head over to my sub stack. Make sure that you subscribe so that I can build that subscriber list because it's just a great way to reconnect with your in a slightly more interactive way. So as always, thank you very much for listening to the Product Utility Podcast. I've been Ben Maynard, hopefully not too grumpy, but still somewhat positive. So until next time, keep leading with meaning, not just methods.