Should Coaches Have An Agenda?

I was talking the other day with Peter Lam - a fellow agile coach - and, as conversations between coaches often do, the conversation turned to coaching. We were talking about the idea that the coach should not have an agenda when coaching - the coach is a facilitator for someone's personal growth. They are there to help the person with whatever it is that they want to work on. They aren't there with their own agenda. They shouldn't be there with their own agenda. Their own agenda gets in the way of the subject's personal growth. 

That's the idea anyway. But Peter said to me " that's all very well... but most of the time I do have an agenda. It says it right there on the label - Agile coach. I am there to get you using Agile techniques. That's what the organisation has hired me to do. I have a very clear agenda". So how does this sit with the idea of an agenda-less coach? Are Agile coaches, or any other "system" type coaches - devops, Human Centred Design, lean, change management, etc - doing their clients a disservice by coming in with an agenda?

To answer this, I think we need to draw a very clear distinction here between general development/growth type coaching and skills based coaching like Agile. Skills based coaching is the one most people are familiar with. It’s the one your personal trainer uses, your golf coach, your tennis coach, and your Agile coach. It's all about learning new skills and how to apply them well. 

Skills based coaching has an agenda built right in - get better at those skills. Your tennis coach isn't going to say "let's forget about tennis, just grow wherever you want to grow". No. They are there, taking your hard earned money to make you better at tennis. And that's perfectly OK. If better at tennis is what you want, then hire a tennis coach and you are going to get better at tennis. Same with Agile - want to get great at agility - hire an Agile coach. 

Skills based coaching is great for getting great at skills. Where it hits its limits is when, in order to get better, you need to fundamentally change the way you relate to the world - the relationship between agility and complexity that I wrote about recently is a great example. If you really want to grasp agility, beyond applying the techniques, you need to develop a different relationship with complexity. Skills based coaching can't give you that. That's where growth coaching comes in.

Growth type coaching is a bit different. This is growing and developing as a person. It doesn't really have a set direction. You are developing new mental models and new ways of looking at the world. There is no agenda to growth like that. Growth happens in unexpected directions and any agendas the coach or coachee bring into that may well get in the way. 

The big difficulty, of course, is that the clear distinction I drew at the beginning really doesn't exist. Most, if not all, coaching starts as skills based. Very few people wake up in the morning and think "I need to develop as a person, let me go find a coach". The people who think like that, probably don't need a coach. They are well into their journey already. Instead, most people want help with a particular thing - wanting to be better at relationships, wanting to be better at time management, or giving feedback or working with others or even agility. So they go and get a coach to work on those particular skills. 

What happens then is that they discover that the real barrier to doing whatever it is they want to do isn't lack of skills, it's a need for growth. So the coaching shifts from skills based to growth. If the coach can do growth coaching of course.

So what happens to the coach's agenda when that shift happens? Are they still the "Agile" coach, or the relationship coach, or even tennis coach when working on growth? Do they still have that same agenda? I would say no. The coach should put aside their agenda while operating in growth mode and pick it back up again when the conversation moves back to skills. 

This, I think, is a big challenge for coaches working in this space. The ability to put down your agenda when the conversation turns to growth, and pick it back up again when the conversation moves back to skills is not easy. It’s even harder not to have a hidden growth agenda - trying to make every conversation into a growth conversation when the coachee is expecting a skills based one. That's just as bad as having a skills based agenda in a growth conservation.

I tend to make this switch between skills and growth explicit as part of my coaching conversations - "we are moving into a growth type conversation here so I'll take off my Agile hat now..." or "we are moving back into agility here so talking as an Agile coach again, I would suggest...".

Other coaches move seamlessly between the two. Others have separate growth and skills sessions. Whatever works for you. But regardless of how you deal with it, you need to be able to put down your agenda when it will be in the way, and pick it up again when it will be useful.