Introduction
Coaching for performance is Agile Coaching with a focus on improving the performance of a product development organization. This approach emphasizes finding performance gaps and setting metrics for improving product development. In traditional performance monitoring, metrics are set by management and implemented via a reporting chain. In this setup, there is no ownership across the organization for the metrics, and there is no clear interconnection between the metrics and the customer value the company tries to deliver.
A Performance Coach establishes a system where the metrics and the value a company tries to deliver are tightly coupled. There is a process for continuously monitoring and improving them. Also, employees own the metrics and have an interest in providing the data for the metrics. There is an agreement that creates a transparent and value-driven context to evaluate the performance of the organization.
Coaching for performance allows the coach to apply various stances such as teaching, consulting, mentoring, and coaching or any other competency the coach can apply to influence their environment. The organization needs to choose an implementation to continuously monitor and evaluate the metrics and their results. I recommend using agile and lean approaches such as OBEYA for that.
Continuous improvement
Agile methods are about implementing feedback loops to continuously measure the organizations’ performance on value delivery. To quote the Scrum guide:
“Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques, so that improvements can be made.”
scrum guide
In other words, the Scrum framework teaches us we need to focus on two areas of continuous improvement:
- Bringing value to customers
- Improving the way we do that
Performance coach competencies
The two key competencies that are indispensable are Systems Thinking and Organizational Design.
Systems Thinking
The coach works with (the people in the) teams, focuses on improving the interactions within teams, and works with management. The coach understands that improving the parts of a system will most likely degrade the performance of the system as a whole. They apply Systems Thinking to choose the right metric (outcomes that produce the desired behavior) and perform slow thinking to analyze results.
Read more on Systems Thinking:
Organizational Design
The performance coach has a deep understanding of the impact on the performance of organizational design. For example: think about the number of dependencies between teams or the lack of end-to-end capabilities of teams. These aspects have a huge negative impact on the team’s ability to improve their performance. We need management to use insights like these to further improve their organizational design.
Read more on creating adaptive organizations with Org Topologies™
An example of improving development ecosystems.
A word on metrics
“Performance” is highly contextual, and so are metrics to measure performance. To choose a metric, we need to look at which organizational capabilities we want to improve. For example: reliability, traceability, speed, adaptability, etc.
We want to measure outcomes over outputs. Outcomes measure the impact of outputs. Outcomes are outputs in a context. For example: a marketing plan is an output, more people buying our product is the outcome of applying that marketing plan. Outcomes give information on the value we deliver, while outputs are needed to measure the process of delivering value.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend “less is more”. Trying to define the smallest set of metrics is extremely difficult, but adding fine-grained outcomes will reduce transparency. Having too many metrics will confuse people and make it more difficult to understand causal relationships. This will make it harder to assess performance improvements.
We need to measure where the value is created (inside the company) and where the value is consumed (at the customer when our product is consumed).
Read more useful tips on metrics here.
Closing
The Performance Coach leads by example and plays an active role in organizing around value creation and transparency in performance. They work with people in the teams to give them the context so they can self-organize to improve their performance. They work across teams to analyze and solve systemic problems of the development ecosystem. They work with management (of departments, business units, or value streams) to provide a vision and hold people accountable. They help create the right environment for collaboration where people create valuable products and have the autonomy and understanding to improve their development system.
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