The author of the article writes:

> You’re not the player, you’re the coach. Sometimes that means strategy and big-picture thinking. Sometimes it means shielding your team from dumb shit. Sometimes it means buying someone coffee and saying, “You’re not crazy. This is hard.”

Guess what good agile coaches or scrum masters are expected to do :-)

Very little of that. Agile coaches don’t deal with under performers, promo packets, retention issues, etc.

Agile coaches are also not able to shield the team from dumb shit. They don’t have the power to make priority calls on what the team is doing.

I'd argue it's not my job to "shield the team". It's my job to enable the team to question "dumb shit" and put them in a position where they can discuss these matters constructively with management (or whomever).

Also - I "deal" with underperformers because my team needs to deal with them. It all comes back to "what benefits the team".

I see that there are a lot of different varieties of agile coaches out there.

Off topic, but:

It's interesting how everyone thinks they're "managers" in "agile" teams.

Scrum Masters, Product Owners. I've even had Designers and QAs trying to make decisions on behalf of the team.

> It's interesting how everyone thinks they're "managers" in "agile" teams.

In scrum in particular, teams are supposed to be "self-organizing and self-managing". Perhaps that's why :-)

Well, yes, but "self-managing team" implies the team manages itself, not that one person picks up the slack. As the sibling poster said, this is a sign of a dysfunctional team.

> QAs trying to make decisions on behalf of the team

Oof, hits close.

Suggestion from a QA to implement some feature that is hugely difficult to implement? Business agrees so developers now need to make it happen.

Yep.

The crazy one for me was QA not going through business and just marking new feature ideas as "bugs", and then informing business that "there are still lots of bugs to be fixed".

Cross-functional teams can be very toxic when there is no decision maker, and someone suddenly decides they don't want to really collaborate.

That sounds like a dysfunctional team to me, to be honest.

It is indeed.

Leadership and Management are two pair of shoes, I get that.

I don't consider Agile bureaucrat positions leadership either.

At best they're clerical support and training. In practice they can become officious ticket minders.

Obviously, I strongly disagree.

Hope you will experience better Agile Coaches through your career.