Coaching Coaches Who Coach Coaches

Hanging out on Linkedin is always a mistake. Twenty minutes of scrolling and reading and I lose all hope for the future of humanity. Is this what end-stage capitalism looks like? Does anyone actually make or do anything remotely useful anymore?

I’ve seen an ever-increasing number of people who call themselves coaches or consultants prowling the timeline or hitting my DMs with sales pitches. Who are these people, and what are they selling? Well, in truth, they’re selling nothing. They’ve turned themselves into a product and they are selling some of their time to people who must be truly desperate or truly gullible. Coaches for job seekers. Coaches for salespeople. Coaches for HR professionals. Coaches for dressing professionally. Coaches for acquiring that magical sauce called “executive presence.” Coaches for successfully using social media. Coaches for women who lack confidence. Coaches for coaches, even. And my favorite most recent DM "a coach for busy moms who want to lose 20 pounds." 

Some of their marketing techniques are a little sketchy. For example, a woman who seems to be building a nice business being an HR consultant and author posts multiple times a day, all variations on the same formula, and none of it particularly deep or insightful. Mostly it’s “be nice to people, give people a chance, don’t judge a book by its cover.” Or it’s a picture of her in makeup and suit, making a big presentation somewhere. And then another person, a woman with no picture and a rather vague profile, immediately reposts her content. Every time. Like that’s totally legit.

Another one of these folks is a guy who proposes to help “build your personal brand on Linkedin.” He seems to spend most of his time making pithy, positive, happy comments on the posts of other influencers. He doesn’t comment on my posts because I don’t have enough followers to be useful to him. He always agrees with great enthusiasm with whatever has been posted without ever actually adding any ideas or facts to the conversation.

I don’t understand why people give these folks money, sign up for their webinars, or schedule them to speak at their events. Declaring yourself an expert on social media doesn’t make it so. Publishing a book isn’t really that impressive an accomplishment either. I’ve read a lot of absolute rubbish books in the name of better business processes and self-help. Which reminds me of this other “coach” I found who actually “helps busy professionals get the most out of self-help books.” I shit you not. The most use I've ever gotten out of a self-help book is kindling for my woodstove. 

If I were going to hire someone to coach me, I would want to be sure that person had walked the path I’m on, had succeeded, had overcome obstacles, had relevant and actionable insights to share. But honestly, that's about as likely as my hiring a butler. 

Are all consultants shysters? I’ve been a consultant. I was the kind of consultant who came in and interviewed stakeholders, wrote the requirements, facilitated the scrum meetings, groomed the backlog, and tested the code. I tried to create things of value, actual things that other people actually used. Sometimes even customers.

Coaching is like consulting without actual deliverables. It’s play money. Like crypto. Or NFTs. But that’s a whole other topic. It smells like the death throes of an economy. People just exchanging money for nothing and calling it business.

These coaches are eager to connect with you and anybody else on Linkedin. But they’re not going to buy anything from you, or repost your articles, so don’t bother trying that. This is not a two-way street.

Facebook Turtles All The Way Down

I use an ad blocker on my laptop. It can’t filter Facebook’s “sponsored posts” in my newsfeed, but when I’m visiting FB via Chrome, I don’t have a big proliferation of ads. Using the FB app on my phone, however, is an entirely different experience. Every third “post” is an ad, and they’re quite intrusive. I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking ALL of them. For the past 3-4 days, I’ve been getting the exact same ad (same picture, same copy) because no matter how many times I block it, it just instantly rebrands itself under another name and pushes the ad at me again.

The product in question is an overpriced laundry basket with a turtle on the side with the compelling copy “Love it. Order Here.” Facebook has decided since I’m a female over the age of 34, I must really be excited about laundry baskets I guess.

I noticed that the links served up in these ads were all “Rebrandly,” so I spent some time on Google to learn more. Rebrandly advertises themselves as a URL shortening and link management service.  It sounds innocuous enough, but the questionable deluge of spam for junk products tells another story.

I Googled rebranding and found lots of friendly, helpful articles about legitimate rebranding techniques to use when you change your company name or want to launch a new brand under your existing company umbrella.

Next I searched on how to dodge ad-blockers. Again, totally legitimate advice on providing quality branded content, native advertising, and other techniques that any company that’s serious about their marketing ought to be doing.

Clearly there’s an ugly underbelly of social media advertising that just isn’t getting media attention. I figure there’s one of three dynamics going on here.

1. The retailer has paid a sketchy social media marketing firm to get them as many impressions as possible and doesn’t really care how it’s done.
2. The retailer has purposefully chosen this questionable marketing technique figuring that if they flood people with ads, sooner or later enough of them will click through and buy that it’s worth the money.
3. The advertiser isn’t a retail company at all. They’re just an affiliate site getting paid by clicks not conversions, so they’ll do anything to get clicks no matter how low the quality.

What depresses me is that FB clearly has no safeguards in place to prevent this type of spamming, utterly disregarding the quality of user experience so that they can maximize advertising profit. Even if you block these advertisers, you will see their ads again. On occasion I’ve even clicked to the advertiser's FB profile, reported it as a fake, and subsequently blocked it. The fact that FB gives you no mechanism for blocking a page unless you report it is problematic too. Their arguments that they have algorithms to prevent harmful targeting practices are obviously completely hollow. Without regulation, they will do NOTHING that would remove even one ad from your feed, and they’ll continue to make it as difficult as possible for users to influence their own experience.

So, as a business owner, when FB prompts me to pay to boost a post, I just laugh. As if boosting a handful of posts would allow me to compete with the spam turtles? As if I want to be just one more ad that frustrated users automatically block because they’re so fucking sick of the spam?

You've Never Been Beautiful

A couple of years ago, when I was still in communication with my increasingly toxic and dysfunctional mother, I posted a selfie on Facebook. 

Selfies get a bad rap. We’re labelled vain, attention seeking, or shallow for taking and posting them. But in a world where women over age 50 are considered well past their prime, invisible, and probably shopping for Depends and compression hose; documenting and celebrating my middle-aged face and body feels affirming, positive, maybe even a little revolutionary.

And because I have the right kinds of friends, there was the usual scattering of likes and “you’re so beautiful” comments. My mom jumped on to the thread with her predictably joy-killing vibe. “You’re kind of cute, but you’ve never been beautiful,” she commented.

My friends reacted with shock and horror. Some of them knew she was my mother. Some of them just thought she was a random rude person hanging out on my timeline. I laughed and deleted her comment and all of their offended responses.

The funny thing is, I look a lot like my mother. Just as my youngest child looks a lot like me. So when my mother says “you’re not beautiful” she’s saying “I’m not beautiful.” Her red hair, freckles, and cute little round nose come from her father’s side. When I say “her father” I mean the man who impregnated my grandmother, a man whose name I do not know, a man who vanished into the past when my grandmother refused to leave her husband to go with him. But my brunette grandmother with the aquiline nose and her dark-haired, patrician husband never would have produced a child together who looked like my mother, who carried in every flaming red hair on her head the evidence of her mother’s guilt.

My mother was a toddler when my grandmother’s husband volunteered for the Army and went to war. He didn’t need to. He was over-age and had a good career with the phone company. He had to get waivers in order to be allowed to join up. He went off to serve in northern Africa. I don’t know if he wrote her tender letters or any letters at all. But at the end of the war, he came home, a stranger in a dark uniform, resumed his career as an engineer, and spent the last nine years of his life looking for the bottom of the cocktail glass. I have a picture taken on a winter’s day; he still in uniform and my mother standing next to him in a snowy suburban yard, neither of them smiling. I have no pictures from my mother’s childhood of her smiling. I’m not sure she knew how.

I never met the grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-uncles of my maternal line. They died before I was born. My grandmother, always old to my eyes, never again to my knowledge had nor sought romance in her life. She lived long and alone, occupying herself with career and hobbies and travel and friends. And I was raised by a woman who hated her body that was shaped like mine, who cut her beautiful red hair into an unflattering bob or pulled it back into a plain ponytail, who wore matronly dresses or boxy suits or chambray shirts, and who was constantly dieting and failing to lose weight. She dressed me in shabby hand-me-downs, jerked my strawberry blonde hair into braids so tight they made my head hurt, and sent me to school in boxy brown loafers and ridiculous pinafores covered by an ugly brown corduroy coat. Never mind that everyone else was wearing bell bottoms and rainbow striped tee-shirts.

I wasn’t ugly. But I sure felt ugly. I look back at the pictures and see a sweet, perfect, heart-shaped face, pale and lightly freckled, surrounded by a halo of blonde hair. I see my young body, strong and lithe, graceful in every pose. But I felt none of those things that I see now. And when puberty hit, with all of its longings and weirdness, my insecurities made me grateful for any attention, even from a guy who was wrong in every way. Luckily, I outgrew that phase and outgrew him and found the confidence and strength in adulthood that I’d never imagined I’d possess.

When I look at my child, now grown to an adult, I see in their bright red hair and the shape of their face and the sprinkling of freckles on their pale arms my own youthful beauty, the beauty I never knew I had. And I see my mother’s face as it should have been, with smiles and laughter and confidence. I want them to know how amazing they are. Every morning, when I kiss them awake, I tell them they’re beautiful. Every day, when they haul the wood or carry the hay or dig up a flower bed, I remind them that they are strong. And I hope that when they look in the mirror and see my eyes looking back at them, they see the love in those blue eyes. And beauty.

Purple Flowers

We all have that one project that we look back on with nostalgia. Maybe it was the interesting work, or the good people, or even just the place we were. It’s the sort of memories that keeps consultants going through the bad times.

It was a very short project – only six weeks. And it was in Los Angeles. I’d never actually been to Los Angeles before. Flying in for that first week I had a window seat, which is my preference. I watched the desert pass under the plane. I love the desert landscape, the way that ancient volcanos and lava flows and the slow erosion of the land is all clearly visible without the screen of greenery that obscures the geology in more verdant landscapes. Then suddenly there were the folds of mountains, sprinkled with snow and the green fuzz of vegetation. A little further and Los Angeles revealed itself, a sprawling city under a haze of bright purple blossoms. No one told me that the city would be smothered in flowers.

The project was for a public entity that needed to replace or upgrade their telephony management system and knew that they needed to document their current state processes before they could make a good software choice.

True confessions – I didn’t know jack about telephone technology before I started the project. But I do know how to talk to all kinds of people and find stuff out.

Luckily, the client, knowing that the compressed time frame would be a challenge, had already not only requested the necessary building and network access for me, but had scheduled meetings for me with the key stakeholders I’d need to interview. It’s the only project I’ve ever worked on where the client was so proactive and prepared. Also, they gave me a corner office with a conference table since they knew I’d have to meet with so many folks. Wow.

But the most memorable part of the project wasn’t the stakeholders or the office or even the fascinating exploration of telephony technology (I got them to take me down into the basement and show me all the copper). It was Los Angeles.

It wasn’t a cheap part of town, if there is one. I stayed in a $300 a night hotel. For the last three weeks I managed to switch to a rather nasty AirBnB to save money. I definitely preferred the hotel, which had free wine in the lobby and a lovely restaurant with a panoramic view of the western hills. Oh well, the things we do to stay on budget.

I chose not to rent a car, because obviously. So the first week, I got on Craigslist and found a graduating college senior who was selling a bicycle for $50. I bought it. It was a rusty mess but it took me all over town. I rode it to the office and back, out to Santa Monica, and around town in search of cheap food. And everywhere I walked or pedaled, the jacaranda blossoms fell on my head and on the sidewalk, turning from a cloud of purple overhead to a slippery pile of purple underfoot.

I made the rookie mistake of biking all the way down Sunset Blvd. to the beach. Halfway along you lose both sidewalk and shoulder and the cars go speeding around those blind turns and you begin to wish you’d updated your will. After walking for a spell in the sand and dining on a burger at the pier, I rode back up Wilshire, which was less scenic but a lot less terrifying. As I pedaled along, slow and tired, I passed a barbershop where some older black men sat out front playing checkers. I waved and they called out pleasantries as I went by.

Friends told me to check out the “cemetery of the stars” so with a little help from Google maps I located it and visited it during a lunch hour. It felt odd to be a tourist at the tiny, intimate, extremely well-tended cemetery. I walked slowly reading headstones. Farrah Fawcett, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe (her marker covered with lipstick kisses), and Rodney Dangerfield. His marker read simply “There Goes the Neighborhood” and I tossed back my head and laughed.

The best was the weekend that my youngest flew out to join me. Renee had never flown by themselves and it was a bit of an ordeal for them. Luckily since they were a minor, I was able to go to the gate to meet them. I rented a tiny car so that we could get around more easily. We drove out past Marina Del Rey, and Renee raised an eyebrow at me, having just finished reading All the President’s Men. The two things Renee wanted to do were tour the Getty and go hiking in the hills. It made for a wonderful but exhausting weekend. Do you have any idea how big the Getty is? And how hard all those miles of white marble floors are? Not to mention how overwhelming it is to consume that much art in one day? You can’t process it all. It’s like trying to watch a movie in fast-forward.

The next day, hiking up in the hills, was a welcome respite. The city, full of little bungalows and carefully manicured gardens full of exotic plants, lacks life. There are few birds, few squirrels, no sweet smell of untended nature. But get up above the city, and the hills are full of wildlife and flowers of exquisite, unexpected beauty, and the golden warm smell that means California to me. We wandered for hours, not quite sure where we were going, but reluctant to turn back. To compensate for having to return to the sterile streets of the city, I took Renee to my favorite little Italian spot for some really kick-ass risotto. And then it was time to see them to their plane and wave goodbye for another week.

And the project? It was a success. I worked long hours and barely finished, but in the end I had a solid ecosystem map, a complete set of process flows, an issues list, and a very pretty little presentation to show. It was a satisfying conclusion, but there’s something about such a short project that leaves you feeling disoriented. Just as soon as you’ve found your way around, figured out who the players are, and really gotten your teeth into the problems, you’re flying home and wondering what they’re going to do with all your hard work. Not that I wanted to keep flying to the west coast every week. That part was exhausting, and I’ve got nothing good to say about the LA airport. I left the keys to the bike with the receptionist and told her to do whatever she wanted with it. It wasn’t worth trying to sell again.

The Agility Monster

Being on the first team of a big international company to go Agile was exciting.

They were building a brand-new application that was going to, among other things, allow them to finally retire a very outdated legacy system that was causing a lot of operational and technical problems. The team was strong and talented. The director was young and progressive and had the cutest British accent. One of the members of our consulting team was an Agile coach. And there were several other senior-level analysts and product managers on board.

Establishing Agile practices at the team level wasn’t too bad. We had a team room, met every day, turned the projector on, and talked through our tasks and issues just like an Agile team should. We were co-located and cooperative and enthusiastic. Or at least, not hostile. The developers, like code-slingers everywhere, had a “well here’s another new thing” attitude, but so long as they were able to build good code and do interesting work, they were satisfied.

The mid-level management folks were less happy. Some of the more astute realized that Agile meant the lines were being re-drawn and they didn’t see themselves in the new organizational geometry. Some of them bailed. Some of them adjusted and found new roles within the evolving landscape.

Months went by. Our team worked hard to stay one step ahead of the developers. It was a bit like being a detective, finding the systems and processes and teams that would be impacted in the future by the work we were doing. As our director said, we were in charge of “kicking over the rocks and seeing what was living underneath.” Slowly the application grew and went in front of user groups for demonstrations and feedback and refinement. It was an Agile success story.

So….

Like I said, it was a really big company. And more and more teams started switching to Agile. It became official. It become canon. It became a juggernaut.

The heart of Agile is small, self-directed, responsive teams. The heart of big corporations is standardization, measurement, and control. Rock, meet hard place. Now, there are folks who will tell you that scaling Agile is totally do-able. There are books and classes and certifications and conferences, oh my.

What everyone is really doing is trying to fit Agile into American corporate culture. It doesn’t work. What you end up with is chunky waterfall with a fancy new lexicon to describe the same old shit.  Nobody really wants to go back to the excesses of waterfall. The long planning cycles, the analysis paralysis, the heavy change management processes, the piles of documentation. So, why don’t we Agile better? How did something so simple, so radical, and so intuitive get so fucked up?

I’m not the person with the answers, but I can share a few examples that might shed some light on how it goes sideways.

Standardization – Imagine an organization with many Agile teams working in different business areas on different applications in different states or continents. Now, tell all of those teams that they must use the exact same structure and standards for their product backlogs, that they must build complicated and time-consuming dashboards and reports for management to track the details of their sprint activity, and that they must participate in multiple meetings every week outside of their regular team activities. This breaks the concept of “self-organizing” teams. You don’t trust your Agile teams to organize and manage themselves and their work to accomplish a goal.

Budgeting – Instead of funding Agile teams, you organize your entire budgeting process around projects. Say for the next year you have 30 possible projects. You’ll probably fund about 5-6 of them, but you require the IT organization to submit sizing and budget estimates for all of them so that you can evaluate them. This means that your Agile teams will have to drop their planned sprint work for several sprints while they analyze, document, and size the proposed projects. Later, when you evaluate the performance of your Agile teams, you notice that their velocity has slipped significantly, so you institute more controls and standardization to track and measure their performance. If you want your Agile teams to be productive, you need to change your corporate governance processes to align with Agile principles. Agile that is confined to IT will never truly succeed.

Starving IT – You think of software developers and IT as a cost center to be minimized as much as possible. You pay on the lowest end of the scale and utilize offshoring and contractors as much as possible. Slinging code isn’t a skill set you consider core to your company. Sure, turnover is pretty high, but you have standards and processes in place to ensure the less experienced folks don’t get too far off the rails. For Agile teams to be productive and maintain consistent velocity, they need to be able to gain expertise in the business and technical domain they work in, as well as to develop strong working relationships and trust within the team. This is impossible to do if the team is constantly churning and your most experienced people are leaving for better pay elsewhere.

Too Much Complexity – You’re a big company, and over the years you’ve added many off-the-shelf and bespoke software applications, with layers of services to connect them all. Because you engaged in rampant customization, any change to your ecosystem causes reverberations across multiple domains and applications. Any project you undertake impacts so many domains that 10+ Agile teams are involved in weeks if not months of development and testing. And regression testing? Well that’s a whole other story. If product teams spend a significant amount of their time supporting projects from other domains that have significant impact on them but do not provide noticeable benefit to their user groups, they won’t have the time to actually address their own backlogs. They spend all their time dog-paddling, and eventually, frustrated because they can’t build anything of quality and impact, they leave.

So, is there a lesson in all of this? I don’t know. Maybe that you can’t start transformation at the bottom. Maybe that American business culture is its own worst enemy. Or maybe that I just got too cynical to keep on pretending that with the right training and the right coach, miracles can happen. Folks tell me that Agile works pretty well at small tech companies with collaborative, forward-thinking leadership. I don’t know. Those aren't the ones who call in consultants to fix their shit.