Internal coaches are spread way too thin. Teams need more help than coaches can give. And coaches often get stuck going through the basics again and again instead of having space to help teams tackle deeper, more specific challenges.
Maybe you’re the coach trying to support 12 teams at once. Maybe you’re the VP wondering why transformation is taking so long. Or maybe you’re on a team that sees your coach for an hour every other week—if you’re lucky.
Jerry Weinberg called this the Law of Raspberry Jam. You’ve got a spoonful of jam (your coaching capacity). You can pile it all on one piece of toast for an intense raspberry experience. Or you can spread it across a whole loaf for just a hint of flavor everywhere. But you can’t have both intense AND widespread. Not with one spoonful.
Internal coaches face this dilemma every day. Focus deeply on one or two teams and really move the needle? Or spread yourself across eight, ten, twelve teams and hope for incremental improvement everywhere?
What would change if you didn’t have to choose?
Time and Leverage to Actually Coach
A coach walks into a team retrospective. The team is struggling with their sprint commitments. The coach thinks, “Perfect opportunity to introduce story splitting patterns!” But wait—first they need to explain what makes a good user story. And actually, the team isn’t even clear on vertical slices. Three sessions later, they’re finally ready to apply story splitting to their actual work and move towards more sustainable sprint commitments.
Multiply that by eight teams. That’s not coaching—that’s small-batch, customized training. Exhausting for the coach. Frustrating for teams. Expensive for the organization.
Now imagine this instead: The coach walks in and says, “Remember the story splitting patterns from your team workshop? Let’s look at your current sprint and see which pattern fits best.” Boom. Straight to application. Straight to value.
We recently talked to an internal product coach serving more than a dozen teams. She shared how much easier her job is when teams are already on board with the value of starting with small slices of complex problems. She can dive right in to help do it in their unique context. No more one-off training before being able to have a real coaching impact.
Internal coaches like her have something external trainers like us can never have: deep context about your organization. They know your tech stack, your politics, your history, what worked last year and what crashed and burned. They know why Team A can’t just copy what Team B does, even though it looks the same from the outside.
That contextual knowledge is gold. But it’s wasted when coaches spend their time teaching Scrum events or explaining what makes a good user story.
This is one key way we support internal coaches—and the organizations smart enough to invest in them. When every Product Owner has been through our CSPO program, every ScrumMaster through CSM, and teams through our Agile fundamentals workshop, something shifts. We handle the concepts and skills. Your coaches handle the context and ongoing growth. Together, it actually works.
Coaches can finally coach. Teams can finally improve. And organizations can finally see the ROI on their coaching investment.
Coach-the-Coach: Because Even Coaches Need Coaches
Ask a beginner in any field if they need a coach, and they’ll say yes. Ask an elite performer, and they’ll tell you about their coaching team. But ask someone in the middle—someone who’s pretty good at what they do—and they’ll often say they’ve got it handled.
That middle, especially the third quartile of performance, is perhaps the highest-leverage area for coaching. Why? Anyone who has made it to better than average performance without coaching has a proven ability to grow but is likely to be bumping up against the limits of their own growth process. A coach can help harness that growth capability while breaking through those limits.
Internal coaching is rewarding work, but it can be draining. Your calendar is full. Every team needs something. When do you get time to reflect on your own growth? When do you get to work through your own challenging situations with someone who gets it?
We work with internal coaches in two key areas:
Adding leverage in tough situations: That team that resists every change? The product owner who always says “yes” to scope change? The director who keeps changing priorities? We help coaches think through options, build facilitation plans, and discover new tools. Sometimes you just need someone who’s seen 500 versions of your current challenge. That extra leverage in a touch situation led one coaching client to tell us, “I got more done in this hour than the whole week.”
Supporting the coach’s own growth: What patterns are you falling into? Where are you getting in your own way? What skills would unlock the next level of your impact? This isn’t about fixing what’s wrong—it’s about taking good coaches and helping them become exceptional.
The impact compounds. When coaches get better, teams get better faster. When teams get better faster, organizations transform. It’s a beautiful flywheel when it’s working.
Making It All Work Together
Create shared foundations through training. Free up coaches to do actual coaching. Support coaches so they can support others.
Know someone who needs to hear this? Maybe you’re the VP who’s been wondering why your coaches seem overwhelmed. Maybe you’re the coach who wishes your teams came in with fundamentals already covered. Maybe you’re the team member who wants more from your coaching sessions.
Whoever you are, we should talk about making coaching work better in your world. Schedule a free consultation with us to discuss how your internal coach capability can create more of the outcomes you want.
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