 Welcome everybody to the session eight guiding principles for agile coaches change agents from Spotify ads R&D coaching team. And we have today with us Jason Yip, who is a senior agile coach from Spotify. Cool. And yeah, feel free to add chat and Q&A while I'm talking. That'll help me get a sense of what people are thinking about. So hello again, as mentioned, my name is Jason Yip. I'm a senior agile coach at Spotify and today I'm going to talk about some guiding principles that we came up with as a agile coaching team at Spotify within the advertising R&D area. So a lot of these things came up from the coaching team in Spotify advertising R&D. And this is us here in this picture. We came up with these eight principles, which we thought were useful. They're derived from what has seemed to work for us and what hasn't over around five years since I've been there and I think most people were there. Some of them joined a little bit later, but these are derived from our experiences there. Okay, so another thing I have adjusted the language so that it's more general and added some more detail to compensate for lack of shared context. How we actually express them internally is a little bit different and that's just to reflect shared context like we already know what we're talking about there. But I've tweaked this a bit just so that they're more general and maybe useful for a broader audience. This slide here shows it's kind of a copy and modification of something that we actually use internally so it looks like this. But again, as mentioned, I've changed some of the language and some of the descriptions just so it's easier for you to understand. This is the full list of eight guiding principles and what I will do is expand on each of them in turn. I'll show this again at the end so if you want to take a screen cap or whatever of it, you can do so. I've also the slides I assume will be shared. Okay, so let's start with the first principle. The idea here is you are more impactful with both team level and senior leadership relationships. What does that mean? So team level relationship, this just means that you are engaging with individual teams and individuals in order to make sure that you have in a more accurate view of what's actually going on. So there is a phenomena I think which is very common where if you just talk to managers and interpret what they think is going on, that usually will have a disconnect from what is actually happening. This is not necessarily deliberate distortion from the managers. It's just that sometimes they're just the power dynamics because the manager is part of reporting lines. So when someone shares information, they're reluctant to do so to a manager. We have found when you do have direct relationships and direct interactions with teams and individuals, you will get a different signal. They all say different things and the aggregate diagnosis of what's happening ends up being different. The advantage of doing this is that you start to be able to provide a useful insight to managers because you provide this kind of third party view. And then you'll be able to say, hey, here's something going on with relationships and what's actually happening, which becomes useful to the managers themselves. As well as you're acting from a coaching perspective, you're acting from a correct assessment of what's going on. Now that's for the team level relationships. However, from the principle, the idea is that you want both this team level thing as well as senior leader relationships. Why do you want the senior leader relationships is because when you are dealing with cross-team systemic issues, you typically need senior level relationships to have influence and the influences necessary to change and address those things. What doesn't really work is if you say you talk to the teams and you identify the problem. And these are, let's say, if they're the broader problems, they're not problems that they can change on their own. And you don't have the influence to do anything about it because you have no senior level relationships and you're not really useful to that team. All they can do is complain to you and all you can do is complain with them. So that's the idea is that you want the team level relationships so that you know what's going on, but you want the senior level relationships so that you can do something about it. Okay, the next principle is you should not become operational. I kind of summarize this as like in terms of what the coach or change agent should be doing or thinking about things is you want to enable others and then you want to move on to the next problem. So you don't want to be trapped on any specific problem. Now this is not saying that you don't want to be hands on. I think it is sometimes useful, sometimes even the best way to set up a role model systems and habits yourself some more directly, because let's say a team or an individual doesn't know how to do something. Having them try to generate that and derive it from scratch is unrealistic and unreasonable, and it's easier just to role model it show them directly how to do it. The, let's say the boundary line is when you become operational and responsible for that system and habits. So, hey, I'm going to show you how to do a thing, but I'm not going to take responsibility for doing it ongoing. So your teaching versus becoming responsible. If you become responsible operational responsible for something you like the issue here is that you become you take away their ability to take responsibility so you interfere with their development. And the other thing is that you limit your impact so if there are usually a whole bunch of problems but because you become operational responsible for one problem, you lose the ability to spend time on other problems. Okay, the next principle is too much time spent on quick win limits your ability to have sustained impact. Quick wins I think are very useful because it helped build momentum and if you have momentum, it helps create influence, and if you influence you can initiate further improvements that are more difficult. However, with a sort of complicated complex system, not every improvement you're looking at is quick. Especially when you're dealing with the systemic underlying systemic issues I mentioned before. So if you spend all your time just dealing with quick win momentum building things. You're not spending enough time dealing with the underlying systemic issues, like the, it's always useful to remember why are you engaging in the quick wind it's not really for the result it is to be able to buy time and influence to be able to deal with the underlying things. So you should spend that time there. The next principle is around coach collaborations more effective than silos. It's kind of a phenomena. And this can vary depending on where you're at but I do find that many agile coaches in our industry are very used to working alone, just because of the dynamics. Maybe some places don't hire enough coaches or whatever. So then, because they're used to working alone, they become unused to working in a team. And I think with even with coaching teamwork is effective. And it's useful to remind yourself remember to do that that if you have other people that can help you should use that work as a team not just as an individual. And even if you don't have other coaches if you're like a solo coach in an area solo change engine, it's worth still trying to team up by finding other allies so it's kind of a weird thing to think that hey you're an agile coach, but even then it's easy to forget that teams are effective. So it's a useful reminder to have. I'm kind of there this is a somewhat of a repetition but just a reemphasis of this idea that results are for the short term and systems and habits are for the long term. And this diagram is similar but just to emphasize that point again, we're doing these kind of quick win things or activities that are dealing with results and that is to contain an issue so there's an active problem and you just need to get it under control. And that's what results are for. So you may be coaching to get a particular result in order to contain a problem so that you're buying space and time. But there's really no real future in just doing those results oriented things if you want long term systemic improvement you have to deal with underlying issues if you want to deal with underlying issues. You have to improve systems and habits that that's the only way to do it. And again as mentioned before that those things might take a little bit more time. And it's not to say you just do one or the other you have to do both so results to contain and systems and habits deal with long term issues. The next principle is around involving existing leaders formal and informal for brainstorming and implementation. Why would you want to do that. It is because existing leaders have influence and power. And why they are an existing leader again said both informal and informal because you could have people that are just influential but they don't necessarily have a title. It's because they have already worked out how to acquire influence and power it doesn't matter how they just have it. And as a change agent as a coach, it's useful to utilize that influence and power. It's much faster than trying to develop it yourself and it's essentially counterproductive to compete against that. So the reason why you want to involve them is you can now leverage that and avoid getting into a conflict with existing influence and power which depending on how long you've been there and how good you are like it's just not necessary in any case to compete. So, always worth when in any particular situation to assess what exists terms of influence and power and then use that to the advantage of moving things forward. Okay, the next principle is around coaching structure coaching strategy and coaching strategy and product business strategy so the idea is that the structure should follow the strategy even for coaching and the coaching strategy should follow the product business strategy. So, kind of have questions here to clarify this so this a general idea of structure should follow strategy applies to all teams I'd say in all organizations, which is why coaching organization design should be the same. A product strategy is really about what are the most important product priorities to address and this is the first thing you should understand coaching existing within that context is what are the most important ways of working problems to address and that should fall underneath the umbrella what are the most important ways of working problems within the context of what are the most important product problems, which makes sure that what you're looking at as relevant to the product context. And given once you understand what are the most important ways of working problems to address you should be looking at what are the best ways to organize to address those most important problems and that's when you look at structure. So you shouldn't be looking at coaching team structure how you want to be organized until you understand the previous things now this is an iterative process as is most things but as a general driving direction. This is what we would advocate for and this makes sure that you don't do things that are irrelevant to your particular business context. Okay, the next principle here is around sharing your work and that it should be intentional not just organic. I think it's very easy for people to think that you're just doing the work and it's enough. But if you want to have influence to initiate larger changes again back to this idea of some underlying systemic issues underlying systemic issues are important to have the larger scale change and those are can be more difficult. You require the influence to be able to initiate those larger systemic changes, which means that you need to be able to market your impact your results in order to acquire influence. So this idea that hey if I just improve things people will notice is unlikely to be true. Not again not because people would be deliberately trying to ignore you it's just that there are a lot of things happening. And you want to be reliable about creating that visibility, because you need influence to be able to create the larger changes. Okay, I'm just going to this is the summary of these principles again, but I've noticed I have a lot of questions so let's maybe switch and start looking at those. Thank you Jason. I'll be asking you the questions do you want to like share the screen or we can. We can keep this screen I can leave these guiding principles up just so people can reference them. Yeah. So the first question is from an anonymous attendee. Why only eight principles are there any more key principles that were left out or these eight principles were the key principles, and more could not be identified or are not there in consideration. So I think he's asking that, right, any more principles. There's probably more stuff that like in terms of what we came up with. This is what we just came up with. I am trying to remember whether we filtered this out I think it just sort of fell to this many. There was some idea though of there can't be too many because it's too many to remember. Like partly why we even express this is a marketing exercise to say hey how do the coaches operate what do they think through and you don't want too many because it's just beyond working memory. So a combination of working memory marketing, we did a limit to around eight. And I'm trying to remember if there were more I think I'm pretty sure we did talk about more things but I wouldn't necessarily say hey. What else should I try to remember because you're not going to. Like I'm relatively comfortable saying hey these are ones that I would emphasize and like hey if you get beyond all this stuff then yeah sure like we can talk about other things too. Okay. Thank you. The next question we have is by implementing these eight principles were there significant improvements in the outcomes delivered by the agile coaches. Is it quantifiable just to know from the improvement purpose. Oh that's interesting. It's hard like we didn't necessarily say hey, because we didn't really have that context of. Hey, we're not following any of these principles and I'm going to baseline and then I'm going to follow the principles and then what's the new things we didn't do anything like that so I can say hey, this is quantifiably better. This is something you could try but it's kind of a weird thing to set up because you effectively say I'm going to ignore all this and just be bad and then I'll see if it's better. There are some things like it's just more logical sense there's some aspect of it helps people understand how we operate and then you could say there are some things where it's almost quite it's at a qualitative level quite obvious. Okay, we're doing this thing. And people don't care because it's too shallow or it's a light thing you're not dealing with the underlying problem so it's some of those things are obvious but yeah there's nothing like we baseline with not following any of this then follow up so I couldn't say that that was measured in that way. The next question we have from Chitranthana. Are there any skills or natural reactions that coaches have to unlearn to coach better. Some of that is might be individual specific. So, I'm trying to think like I mentioned a few of these what one I think which is sometimes see, I mentioned a few actually. One where, depending on what your coaching background history is you may be used to just being working on your own. So you're very independent. Just used to having to work things out and not necessarily having to coordinate with the team. So at least within a coaching team I think that's a habit you would want to break. So to say okay no I have other people helping out and I want to engage them and involve not just in like oh I'm going to engage them so I get buy in but I'm going to engage them to try to work out what to do and all that kind of stuff. And I would say even when you don't have other coaches that's a habit you should try to be developing so involve other people other allies, both for exploiting or leveraging their influence, but also because you're more effective as a team. The other thing is I think I mentioned before of getting into something that you're getting to operational and this is a balance point like I think sometimes people are two hands off when they should probably step in because they need to demonstrate and they're leaving things too much up to people trying to work it out from scratch, but at the same time, not getting pulled into where you're essentially doing things for other people. And so it does depend on what your background is and what you've been doing in the past and you kind of have to judge that but those are the ones I see a lot. Yeah, we are actually running out of time with that. Thank you Jason. Thank you so much for your time and the session.