Enterprise Coaching

Centralized vs. Decentralized Coaching

Contrasting having a few coaches set the tone for many others or having dedicated coaches embedded in teams.

Gene Gendel, Shane Hastie

May 20, 2018 • 14 min read

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Coaching

Transformation

Responding to Change

Enterprise Coaching

Decentralization

Summary

This whitepaper extensively talks about Agile coaching with the key focus on decentralized and centralized coaching. It states that there is a frequent misunderstanding with respect to the definition of agile coaching: coaching focus (e.g. enterprise vs. team) is confused with coaching alignment (centralized vs. decentralized) within an organization. We learn that centralized coaching is basically a distinct organization driving transformation across the entire organization while decentralized coaching is a less rigidly structured team of like-minded coaches that align themselves with a clearly defined product, service, or line of the business. Read the whitepaper now to draw the difference between centralized coaching and decentralized coaching, know the benefits of decentralized coaching, and generally gain a deeper insight into Agile coaching.

Takeaways

Centralized Agile coaching makes sense only when it takes place within an organization that is small enough to be effectively managed front-to-back (including its all organizational layers) and is genuinely supportive of its own coaches, by providing them with “organizational immunity” and operational safety - to enable them to perform their challenging duties.
Centralized coaching is often limited to being “responsible for introducing KPIs, documentation of script-style-one-size-fits-all best practices and cookie-cutting approaches”. This leads to system gaming by other departments and organizational silos that must “meet numbers goals”.
The main advantage of the decentralized coaching approach is that coaches are close to the real action: deeply engaged with products/services, and are intimately engaged with senior leadership. Decentralized coaching is deep & narrow (as opposed to being broad and shallow) and takes time to cause meaningful and sustainable organizational changes.
There is a frequent misunderstanding with respect to the definition of agile coaching: coaching focus (e.g. enterprise vs. team) is confused with coaching alignment (centralized vs. decentralized) within an organization