Team Members Coach Each Other

In a cohesive agile team, you see feedback everywhere. Team members experiment together and separately, learning different areas of the product and learning how to make the product work. You’ll hear things like this:

• “Did you know if you refactor like this, you can see that?” “Oh, no, I didn’t. Show me more.”

• “Hey, does anyone know why this test returned those results?” “Oh, we haven’t fixed that part yet. Let’s look at it together.”

• Fist-bump. “Thanks for showing me how to do that.”

Team members learn from one another and ask each other for feedback—not necessarily in the formal form. If you don’t hear these kinds of conversations (or see in virtual conversations) you may have the ​Trap: Not Enough Feedback​.

That learning is where team members might coach each other. No one has an obligation to coach another, but the team members might offer coaching.

Coaching is offering options with support. Not everyone wants coaching from everyone else, so coaches must have permission before they start to coach. Otherwise, the coach inflicts help on the other person. That doesn’t help anyone. (See ​Trap: Inflicting Help​.)

Especially when coaching around new skills, I find it helpful to ask the other person to generate options. I don’t want to be the know-it-all or default to teaching when coaching is so much more than that. When the other person can’t generate more options, I might prompt with one option and then see if the other person can generate more. I use the Rule of Three as defined in Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management [RD05] to help people generate options before we evaluate possibilities.

In an agile project, the team members take responsibility for completing work together. They coach each other to help move the work across the board. When team members realize they don’t know something about how to work or how to solve a problem, they may ask for more training or coaching. As a leader, you might be able to help. You might not.