You are coaching a team, a team of teams, or a specific person. They are new to agile.
Your coaching contract (formal or not) is not to implement any specific framework. You have not been empowered to decide. Rather, you are an "advisor".
You wish you could use your influence and aura alone to convince everyone to do it your way, but resistance is too high and it is not happening. The team decides to go with a traditional, waterfall-ish approach.
You are stuck, and frustrated.
Give up having a big impact and changing the team drastically for now and get ready because winter is coming.
Prepare yourself for when spring comes back.
Disclaimer: If you are a consultant working on a short-term contract basis, this pattern is not for you because your contract won't be renewed if you Hibernate... While this might be exactly what you are after, if this is what is going to happen, I'd rather suggest you have fun and take risks instead.
Also, if you can go and coach another team within the same organization, you may just wanna do that!
As a coach, you get to work with teams you will find wonderful, individuals you will find brilliant and open-minded and who will listen to everything you say no matter how new, difficult, or risky the path you are taking them down. While it is understandably very gratifying for a coach to work in such an environment, being only able to handle this kind of environments is not enough.
Sometimes, you have to work with those slower teams or organizations that may frustrate you because they are not "ready" for the big changes you carry with you. This pattern is particularly important for internal coaches because they are usually in it for the long run.
When this happens, it is important that you:
You can achieve all those 3 things by Hibernating.
When hibernating, I do several things:
First, I reset my expectations and my mindset. I take some time to bury my previous expectations (of having a short-term, big impact). By doing that, I protect myself from being disappointed - by myself and by others. Not being disappointed by others is critical. If you cannot help it, well ... at least do not show it!!! Because people will need to trust that you are not mad at them or think they are idiots to come back to you later, down the road.
Second, I clarify what people expect of me (now that they have chosen to vastly ignore my recommendations) and do things their way. This is critical because you do not want people to blame you later, and you need that alignment. Typically, I would meet with whoever is "in charge" and get him to tell me what he expects of me. I will write his instructions down. You may drop him (and his boss) an email after the meeting. The email may go something like: "After talking about my role and what is expected of me from now on with regards to Project Z, we have agreed that intensive coaching of the team was not needed anymore. I am still expected to advise John about Product Management strategy (I am setting up a weekly 1 on 1 with him) as well as help Brian prepare retrospective meetings every 3 weeks."
Third, I plan for Spring ...
There is this game on Steam called "Don't Starve". It is basically a sandbox type of game where you start with nothing and gather various stuffs that you can then combine to create other stuffs that help you survive. The game has daytime, nighttime and seasons. Nighttime poses its own challenges, so does every season. But the hardest time is winter. When winter comes, the days are shorter, the food doesn't grow, and you need additional clothes to survive the cold. While you do have a couple of hours (game time) of spare time during winter, you cannot get too far from fire. Therefore, even if you are in the middle of building that amazing marble wall for your basement or huge farm, for the most part you have to give up making any progress towards that long-term project until winter is over. However, during those couple of hours, you can still clean up your storage or collect basic ingredients nearby, for building better stuffs later! When Winter is over, you will be able to resume your long-term project, and you will even have accelerated thanks to that clean-up and collecting you will have done.
This is what a coach must do sometimes: give up on the long-term project for now, but get ready to resume and even accelerate when better times come!
When it comes to agile coaching, this may mean a variety of things.
There sure are some other things you could do depending on your context... just keep in mind that this is winter. Give up on finishing that beautiful marble wall for now, make sure you don't starve, and use your spare time for cleaning up and collecting ingredients for later!
Related page: ShutUp , FocusOnOneTeam