What I've been doing, almost exclusively, for the past 2 years is to help various IT teams here in Iceland make the leap to becoming agile IT teams, and their departments to become agile departments. The way in which I have been doing that is to work with each team for at least 5 weeks, in a program we've developed at Sprettur Marimo called Agile Jumpstart.

Anyway, just last week we hosted the biggest series of events in our company's short history where we sandwiched our AGILIS 2009 conference with, first a CSM class with Alistair Cockburn and then a CPO class with Jeff Patton. The whole week was as a smashing success, as my partner Petur Orri likes to say, and we are all very thankful and proud that so many people came to get excited about Agile and Lean.

Finally, the preamble is over and I can get to my point. I was talking to Jeff Patton about the way we structure our Agile Jumpstart package and that we use Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership II (SL II from here on) model to vary our coaching style through these 5 weeks. He found it interesting and told me he'd 'steal' that idea (I hope you do, Jeff!), so I thought I'd share it with you as well.

The SL II model is really quite simple. It aims to guide leaders (teachers, coaches, ...) to pick the right style to lead with based on the learning needs of the people being lead, so to speak. To read more details about it check my link above or Google. The way I employ SL II in our Agile Jumpstarts is to start by informing the team I'm working with, that this is a way I've found to be effective when working with teams, and if they have no strong objections I'll do that with them as well. This is very important - I have forgotten to do this and it's not good.

Consequently, using this model I start out with a Directing style. This is at the beginning when I'm helping the team get started with Scrum. It means I train them, and direct them through a series of facilitated sessions to bootstrap their process as well as directing them through much of their first sprint.

Next, I go to a Coaching style, and work closely with the Scrum Master and Product Owner while they get used to leading and facilitating the process. Here I'll be less directive and the Scrum Master takes on most of the facilitation that I did to begin with. I give the Whole team high support and provide them with the safety they need to do the process work themselves, but I try to facilitate a lot less.

Third, is the Supporting style where I don't facilitate at all, I'm just observing and supporting the team. I answer questions of course (and ask some of my own), but at this point I'm getting ready to leave the team to itself, so the less I do (or need to do) the better I feel about leaving.

Fourth, is the Delegating style, and many cases this just means I move on to another engagement at another company. In other instances, where I'm coaching many teams at one company I can be reached and consulted with, but effectively I'm off the case!

The past year or so we have been using this model we've been really happy with it and it seems to make a lot of sense to people that we coach. Obviously, it's not always as cut and dried as this linear description of mine seems to suggest, but having the model is very helpful and I'd recommend people take a look at it if they are in any sort of leadership position in their lives.