You see a lot of things that you would like to change. Highly confident in your ability to see problems and excited to help the team, you start sharing your observations and pieces of advice! You feel like you are doing everything right.
At first, they listen. They may even follow some of your early recommendations. But as time passes, and regardless of whether you are giving good or bad advice (trust me - it doesn't matter), people start listening to you less and less.
What is happening is you are consistently giving more advice than they are willing to receive. You are trying to get them to change much faster than they are willing to change.
You are losing confidence in yourself, and you are also a bit mad at them for not listening to you. You start to disengage. Soon your coaching will be over.
Therefore...
Shut up for some time before it is too late. Do it just enough that the team starts to miss you again. When they do, you are back on track.
Details
In the strategy game Masters of Orion, you explore space and develop colonies to conquer the Galaxy. The population on every colony can generate "Food" or "Production". Production generates pollution. Every planet is only able to absorb a certain amount of pollution per year. If you generate more pollution than gets naturally absorbed by the planet's biome, it starts accumulating. If you accumulate too much pollution, it starts impacting your ability to produce food, and if you do not address the issue, eventually all forms of life disappear!
Agile coaching is the same (minus the apocalyptic part - maybe). Every team has its own ability to absorb your agile coaching. When you are trying to get them to change faster than they are able to, it generates waste in the form of frustrations, unmet promises and disappointments that accumulate over time. If you do not keep this under control, you are seriously compromising change.
Reading this, you might wonder: Why not just consistently stay below the amount of coaching the team is able to absorb? I see two ways in which this would be a sub-optimal approach to coaching:
- It is difficult to know what that threshold is until you see it, so whether you want it (for the sake of finding how much they want your help) or not, you are meant to do some over-coaching at least once, and learn from it.
- Some of the improvements you gain from the teams are not obtained from a conservative coaching stance. You sometimes have to get close to the danger zone in order to help your team achieve greatness. You can see this as a "high risk - high reward" type of situation, and get used to it.
All in all, "ShutUp" can both be used as an emergency procedure for getting back on track when you have screwed up as a coach and been way too outspoken or demanding; or be used as a somewhat systematic means to compensate for the times where you intentionally push the team to their limits.
All this being said, if you find yourself having to "ShutUp" too often, there has to be something fundamentally wrong. There may be a mismatch between what you are offering the team and what they need, your coaching style might not suit them, or you may just be spending more time than necessary with them.