Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

Introduction

These few pages of introduction were probably harder to write than most of the book. Bemoaning this fact to an agile coach colleague of mine, someone who was my coach apprentice a few years ago, I watched a slow smile creep across her face as she looked up at me and fed my words back to me. She said, with simplicity and clarity, “Take it to the team.”

“Take it to the team,” I repeated. How many times had I said that to her during her agile coach apprenticeship? Too many to count, as I helped her recover from command-and-control-ism and move into a world where she would routinely take problems to the team instead of solving them single-handedly.

So, when confronted with the problematic introduction text, “take it to the team” sounded ...