Not the coach for us

In 2022 I worked as an enterprise coach with a healthcare organization’s IT department of about 300 people. The organization wanted a more engaged workforce, less administrative burden on its clinicians, and digital services, like self-service appointments, that could hold their own against competitors. Agile was new to them.

1. leadersthe CIO and five VPs
2. setback"not the coach for us"
3. change agentsvolunteers own the change
4. pilotvisible backlogs
5. resultfour quarters of gains

Starting at the top

I was embedded with the executive action team: the CIO and his five vice presidents. My job was to help them work as an agile team themselves, so they could model the shift from command-and-control task management to servant leadership for everyone else. We spent several hours a week together in working sessions, alongside one-on-one coaching.

At the same time, I launched a transformation team of volunteer change agents from across the department and trained them in change management and Scrum, so the change would belong to the organization instead of to an outside coach. We ran the two teams as our own application of Scrum@Scale, with me as scrum master for the executive team and coach and scrum master for the transformation team.

The setback

A few months in, the CIO went to my manager and said I wasn’t the coach for them. I was taken aback. The obvious moves were to push back and prove him wrong, or to quietly step away, and neither would have helped the organization.

So I changed where I put my energy. I spent more of my time with the transformation team, all of whom worked in the CIO’s organization and one of whom reported to him directly, and I kept the CIO informed about what they were doing and learning. The change would now travel through his own people.

A small pilot on a big belief

One belief shaped many of the department’s habits: the CIO felt that without time tracking and resource allocation, accountability and ownership would disappear. I didn’t argue with him. I asked what time tracking had actually given his teams and what it had cost them, and I shared how other organizations had moved to visible backlogs, where everyone can see the work, its priority and its progress.

That conversation led him to sponsor a pilot with guardrails. One of his vice presidents already wanted to move away from time tracking, so a group of managers in that area tried visible backlogs while I coached them through the transition.

Six months later

Over the following six months, the transformation team became the engine of the change. The CIO came back to say how well the team was working and how much value the coaching had created, and the leader who had asked for a different coach was now praising the work.

The numbers backed him up. We surveyed team health and engagement every quarter, and over four quarters every measure trended up. Some of the change spread in ways nobody planned: Lean Coffee, which I had introduced for our own sessions, became the way managers preferred to run their meetings.

What I took from it

Resistance from a senior leader tells you something about the system. When I stopped pushing against it and built alliances around what was already working, the change found its own path through the organization. Healthcare also taught me patience: the work is meaningful, the bureaucracy is intense, and lasting change comes from the people who stay after the coach leaves.