The secret to making a positive impact (Part 1)

The Secret to Making a Positive Impact

Agile coaching is a tough profession to be in. If you’re an Agile coach or Scrum Master with a couple of years under your belt, you’ve surely dealt with resistance to change, lack of leadership support, and incompatible organizational cultures. It’s a tough job on a good day, but this year, it’s seemed even tougher.

There’s been a lot of bad news in the Agile industry lately – lots of layoffs, a tight job market, and a lot of debate on social media about whether Agile is dead or not. If you’re a passionate, dedicated Agile coach and you’re concerned about what all this means for your career, this series is for you.

I’ve talked to dozens of Agile coaches over the last year who are wrestling with the same questions.

• How can I make an impact?  

• How can I show my value so I won’t get laid off?

• What if I do get laid off? What will I do then if there are no agile jobs? 

If you’ve been wondering the same things, I want to let you in on a secret.

When you stop worrying about proving your value, you can stop worrying about getting laid off.  And you can stop worrying right now.

You’re already providing value and making an impact. The problem isn’t that others don’t see it – it’s that YOU don’t see it. 

I know this because I’ve seen it over and over again – including with myself.

My Story

About two years ago, I’d just delivered an agile team building workshop for an exciting, high-profile initiative at my company’s New York headquarters. It went extremely well. My pair coach and I got rave reviews from the participants. I should’ve felt great.

But more than anything, I wanted to quit. In fact, I wanted to give up on Agile coaching completely.

There were a lot of signs that the Agile transformation was going well–we had a whole team of coaches, success stories from dozens of teams, sponsorship from the top–but something didn’t seem right to me.

Everywhere I looked, people were stressed to the max. They felt intense pressure to perform: rapidly, flawlessly, and at scale. Agile, they thought, would help them do all of this even faster. 

There was no time for reflection or experimentation. No room for real collaboration. No tolerance for the messy process of iterative, emergent learning. No space for people to be human.

Sure, I could teach more people how to do Scrum. But it felt like we were missing the point. And I felt helpless to change that.

The really sad part was that I’d seen all of this before at another company. It made me wonder what I thought I was doing. How could anyone hope to make a difference?

So I made a really depressing playlist on Spotify called “Disillusioned Agile Coach” and listened to REM’s “Losing My Religion” and some other downers on repeat for a few months. And then I had an idea.

The Experiment

In grad school, I’d learned about positive psychology and the effect well-being has on success. It might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a ton of research that shows happiness doesn’t follow success – it’s the other way around! 

The neat conclusion I took from this is that I didn’t have to wait to feel success to enjoy my work and feel happy in general. I could instead design happiness into my work life and then see what happened. Even if I couldn’t influence my environment, maybe I could at least change my perspective.

I started reading more about models for well-being and putting what I’d learned into practice. Over time, I distilled this into 5 daily happiness habits I could easily incorporate into my routine.

And then something wild happened.

I got an email from an SVP at the company who wanted help with turning his leadership team into an Agile team. They’d just completed a team-level transformation for their 500-person department and wanted to know what it would take to be an Agile team themselves. Specifically, he asked about a framework I’d never used and how they could get help installing it.

If I’d gotten that email 12 months before, I would’ve convinced myself I had nothing useful to offer. I would’ve passed the request to someone else, or downplayed my experience. I would have failed to deliver value because I would have believed I didn’t have anything to give.

Instead, I tapped into the confidence and positive presence I’d been building and took the meeting. After hearing about what they wanted, I offered another solution they gladly accepted. And then I continued to coach that leader and his leadership team for six months, focusing on team culture, collaboration, and embracing change. 

I had the most fulfilling coaching experience of my career so far.

Nothing had changed about my skills, my job title, or my network in the year between my low and high points. What changed was the effort I put into cultivating a genuine positive presence.

Designing Your Experiment

If you’re feeling great and thriving, you’re going to do great work. When you do great work, you provide value to everyone around you. 

And when you’re providing value, you don’t need to worry about proving it all the time. It’s obvious.

When we feel better, we do better. 

You might be wondering if just running around and saying positive things to yourself can really be enough to change your situation.

No, it’s probably not.

It is effective, though, to use the findings from the last two decades of research in positive psychology and the emerging evidence from the field of neuroscience to find the activities that really work for improving your outlook and your circumstances.

Still skeptical? 

As we tell the teams we coach, why not try a little experiment and see what happens? 

In the next post, I’ll share some tips for how you can start experimenting with some of these evidence-based methods to create a virtuous cycle of flourishing in your work. 

In the meantime, will you let me know what you think by adding a comment below? You can also send me a note at michelle@streamsidecoaching.com.