Coaching through Change with Empathy
An interview with David Frink. Edited by Michelle Pauk.
“I kept interacting with Product Owners and Scrum Masters and coaches who were just so frustrated with developers and how they were not engaged and weren't showing up,” David Frink told me when I asked him about his experience with resistance to change.
A former developer himself, David found it easy to relate to this challenge and help others try to see things from the developers’ perspective.
Take a common example. “If developers are complaining about too many meetings, why is that?” David asks. “Maybe you do have too many meetings, maybe your meetings are ineffective, or maybe your schedule is really beneficial to the product owner and the managers and it's terrible for developers.”
He explains, “There’s a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. If you’re a developer with a daily Scrum and then a refinement meeting 30 minutes later, and something else 30 minutes after, then no code is getting written that day. You need hours of uninterrupted time if you’re a developer.”
The key to overcoming resistance in a situation like this isn’t getting developers to stop complaining. It’s redesigning the meeting cadence to better support their needs.
Recurring conversations like these inspired David to develop a conference talk about overcoming resistance with developers in agile transformations a few years ago when he was working as a software development manager. The core message was empathy.
Empathy, David told me, is the starting place for finding a path forward from resistance. “When you see people as people rather than as problems, then you can actually do something.”
David also helps others consider how identity can affect our perceptions of change. “When you think about a traditional plan-driven or waterfall development process, the developers are asked to spend a lot of time on their own doing their own work. In a pre-agile environment, developers are given information, and then they have to go away for a couple of weeks to work on something and come back with a result.”
When Scrum or agile methods are introduced, this rhythm changes dramatically. “Now you tell them, guess what, every day, you're going get together with group people, and you're going share what you did and what you're going do or what's not working. And then every two weeks, you're going to show off what you've done, you're going to get feedback on it, and maybe we're going to have to go back and change it. That can sound and feel like what you would do to somebody in the old model who doesn't understand their job. You’d only subject someone to this constant scrutiny and interruption if they were bad at their job.”
Without considering how this new approach might feel like an insult to seasoned professionals, it’s easy to become confused and frustrated by resistance. Again, empathy is the key.
In David’s work today with leaders, he extends this empathetic approach to supporting the changes leaders have to make in their roles. “I have definitely seen a lot of coaches and Scrum Masters and others who have this inherent distrust for managers, technology leaders. And that really is sad to see.
“If I am a manager, then I'm undergoing this change process just like everybody else. I really do want to get it, but I might not yet have the skills or the language to do that in the Agile way. What happens if I try to help and get pushback from a coach or Scrum Master about taking away the team’s autonomy or disrupting the team’s psychological safety? It alienates me. I am trying to do the right thing with the skills that I have. It makes me feel bad about what I'm doing, and I become disengaged.
“As much as we want teams to be self-organizing, people who are in leadership roles are not just taking up space. They have so much value to offer and guidance and direction. So how do we embrace the fact that managers exist rather than pushing them away?”
What a wonderful question and invitation for us to consider!
To learn more about David, connect with him on LinkedIn or visit his website at dfrink.com.
