Centralized vs. Decentralized Coaching
Explore the dynamics of centralized vs decentralized coaching in agile transformations.
May 20, 2018
•
14 min read
-
Advanced
Leadership Change
Leadership Development
Organizational Change
Organizational Improvement
Organizational Strategy
Show More
Summary
This analysis delves into the distinctions and effectiveness of centralized versus decentralized coaching in organizational settings. It highlights the risks of centralized coaching turning into silos and the benefits of decentralized coaching being more engaged with real action. The content also clarifies common misconceptions about coaching focus and position, offering insights into the advantages of a decentralized approach for meaningful change. Engage with the material to better understand how coaching alignment impacts agile transformations.
Takeaways
- Centralized coaching risks becoming disconnected from real action, focusing too much on standardization.
- Decentralized coaching fosters deeper engagement and meaningful organizational change.
- Decentralized coaching requires genuine support from multiple organizational layers.
- Effective coaching strategies should align with organizational goals for sustainable impact.
- Understanding the difference between coaching focus and position is crucial for effective agile transformations.
- 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