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I consistently adapt my coaching style because every individual and team is unique, with varying levels of experience, maturity, and specific needs. One situation that really stands out involved two very different teams within the same large financial institution. I was initially brought in to help both of them improve their delivery effectiveness.
The first team, let's call them the "Innovators," was a relatively new team tasked with building a cutting-edge AI-driven analytics platform. They were technically very strong, eager to embrace new ways of working, and had a decent understanding of Agile principles from prior experience. However, they struggled with internal conflict resolution and effective decision-making, often getting stuck in debates without reaching consensus. When I started observing them, I noticed a strong leader who tended to dominate discussions and a few quieter members who held back their opinions, leading to a lack of diverse perspectives in their solutions.
For the Innovators, my primary stance was that of a pure coach and facilitator. They didn't need me to teach them the basics of Scrum or Kanban; they needed help unlocking their own collective intelligence and improving their team dynamics. I focused on facilitating their retrospectives and daily stand-ups, but with a specific agenda: I introduced techniques like "Fist to Five" for quick consensus checks, "Round Robin" for ensuring everyone's voice was heard, and specific frameworks for structured conflict resolution. Instead of offering solutions, I'd ask probing questions like, "What behaviors are preventing us from reaching a decision?" or "How might we create a safer space for dissenting opinions?" I coached the dominant leader on active listening and asking open-ended questions, and I mentored the quieter members on how to articulate their thoughts more effectively. We even did a team exercise on understanding different communication styles. The outcome was remarkable: within a few months, their decision-making speed improved significantly, and their solutions became more robust because they were leveraging the full range of opinions within the team. They learned to self-organize their discussions and resolve conflicts constructively, leading to a noticeable increase in psychological safety and overall team happiness.
The second team, the "Reliability Engineers," was a highly experienced but deeply traditional team responsible for critical infrastructure maintenance. They were accustomed to a rigid, hierarchical structure and very little transparency. They viewed Agile as "fluffy" and irrelevant to their highly controlled environment. Their initial resistance was high, and they saw my presence as an unnecessary intrusion. They definitely didn't need coaching in the pure sense; they needed to be shown the ropes, and often, quite directly.
For the Reliability Engineers, I adopted a much more direct teaching and mentoring style, almost acting as a temporary "Scrum Master plus." I couldn't just ask them questions and expect them to self-organize on day one. I had to explicitly teach them fundamental concepts: what a user story is (even for infrastructure tasks), how to break down work, the purpose of a daily stand-up, and the value of a retrospective. I ran highly structured workshops on basic Kanban principles, explaining how visualizing work-in-progress could reduce their stress by exposing bottlenecks. I mentored their team lead directly on how to facilitate meetings, manage a backlog, and protect the team from external interruptions. I wasn't just observing; I was actively participating in setting up their initial Kanban board, helping them define their work states, and even writing some initial acceptance criteria for their stories as examples. I paired with them frequently, demonstrating the practices in real-time. The outcome, while slower to materialize than with the Innovators, was ultimately successful. Over about nine months, they transitioned from seeing Agile as an imposition to recognizing its value. They started running their own effective daily stand-ups, managing their work more transparently, and even initiating process improvements in their retrospectives. Their lead time for infrastructure requests reduced by 20%, and they started to embrace a culture of continuous learning, which was a huge shift for them. The key was understanding that their context required a more hands-on, educative approach before they were ready for self-discovery through pure coaching.
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