I will be honest with you all. Being an Agile Coach, as rewarding as it is, has its moments where you just want to bang your head against the wall. Like with any job, you will eventually have days in which everything goes wrong.
Last Monday I had one of those days. Where I had planned a good session with one of my scrum teams, it got shot down due to the fact the team had spend the morning in discussion with various people instead of refining the user stories for our first sprint.
Of course, as a coach you try to facilitate the process and make the best of it. Being Agile means being able to adapt when plans get shot down and so I did. The result was a 3 hour session in which we did refinement and planning, with me walking a fine line trying to keep the team on track, while still giving them space to make their own decisions so that they can come with a work load that they can commit to. In the end we managed to get just that.
Of course you can be happy with a result, but at that moment I was drained and a bit frustrated. The hard part as a coach is not to project your frustration onto your team because it would only influence the team in a negative way. You need to let it go, but Agile Coaches are human beings, too.
That is why it was all the more pleasant to get a compliment of one of the senior members of the team for my part in facilitating the process and keeping everyone on target. It really made my day to have someone recognise the effort you put in on behalf of the team and confirm that even though it was taxing it paid off.
I get my energy from watching my teams grow and become better and definitely don’t seek recognition for its role, but an earnest compliment goes a long way in recharging your battery.