Agile Coaching Stances

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Origins

The four-stances model is most associated with Lyssa Adkins' Coaching Agile Teams¹, which articulated the distinction between teaching, mentoring, coaching, and facilitating as a foundational framework for the Agile coach. Adkins drew on the professional coaching tradition (ICF/CTI), facilitation practice, and her own experience working with teams to formalize a question that practitioners had wrestled with informally for years: "what hat am I wearing right now?"

The model has been refined and extended elsewhere — Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley's Agile Coaching² covers similar ground, and the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel makes the stances explicit dimensions of coach competence — but the core insight is Adkins'. The skilled coach is not the one who picks the right stance once; it is the one who moves between stances fluidly as the situation calls for each.

The Four Stances

1. Teaching

Teaching is the transfer of knowledge or skill the team does not yet have. The team needs to know what Scrum is, how Kanban boards work, what Definition of Done means, how to write user stories. The coach provides the content.

Teaching is appropriate when:

• The team genuinely lacks the knowledge or vocabulary.
• Information would take hours to derive but minutes to transfer.
• The team is new to Agile, the role, or the framework.

It becomes a problem when:

• The coach teaches what the team already knows or could quickly discover.
• The coach defaults to teaching because they are most comfortable in that stance.
• The team becomes dependent on the coach's expertise rather than building its own.

2. Mentoring

Mentoring is sharing experience and judgement. Where teaching transfers knowledge that's true in general, mentoring shares "here is how I've seen this play out, here is what I'd watch for." The coach draws on their own practitioner experience.

Mentoring is appropriate when:

• The team is facing a situation similar to ones the coach has navigated before.
• Patterns and pitfalls would be expensive to discover through trial and error.
• The team is asking for advice from someone who has done the work.

It becomes a problem when:

• The coach's experience is held up as more relevant than the team's context.
• Mentoring slides into telling rather than offering.
• The team loses confidence in its own judgement because the mentor's is always available.

3. Coaching

Coaching, in the strictest sense, is the practice of helping someone arrive at their own insight through questions. The coach does not provide answers. They draw the team's own understanding out. This is the stance most influenced by the professional coaching tradition (ICF, Co-Active Coaching), and the one most often misunderstood as "asking some open questions in between answering."

Coaching is appropriate when:

• The team has the knowledge but is not seeing it clearly.
• The growth edge is in the team's thinking, not its information.
• The right answer is contextual and only the team can know what fits.
• The team needs to own the decision for it to stick.

It becomes a problem when:

• The coach asks questions when the answer is genuinely just unknown to the team and they're being deprived of information.
• "Coaching" becomes performative — questions used to lead the team to the answer the coach already has in mind.
• The team has urgent, real work to ship and the conversation needs to move.

4. Facilitating

Facilitating is the practice of guiding a group's collaborative work without taking ownership of its content. The facilitator is responsible for structure, time, participation, and the path through the conversation; the group is responsible for what they decide.

Facilitating is appropriate when:

• The team is working together on something only they can decide.
• The group needs a structure that protects participation and produces a result.
• The coach's role is to make the conversation possible, not to contribute to it.

It becomes a problem when:

• The facilitator slides into participation, particularly when their content view is strong.
• The facilitation becomes mechanical — running the format without serving the group.
• The team needs teaching or mentoring and the coach hides behind facilitation neutrality.

Choosing the Right Stance

The skilled move is choosing — consciously — rather than defaulting. A useful question in the moment: what does the team need from me right now to move forward?

• If the team lacks knowledge, teach.
• If the team lacks experience patterns, mentor.
• If the team has the knowledge but not the clarity, coach.
• If the team has the answer between them but no path to surface it, facilitate.

The same conversation often needs different stances in different moments. A retrospective may open with facilitating (running the format), shift into coaching (drawing out a deeper observation), drop into teaching (the team genuinely doesn't know what 5 Whys is), and close with facilitating (capturing commitments). A coach watching for the transitions and making them deliberately produces dramatically better sessions than one stuck in a single stance.

Common Defaults and How to Notice Them

Most coaches have a default stance — the one they reach for when uncertain. Recognizing your own is the first step.

• The default teacher: explains everything, often before the team has tried to figure it out. The team is well-informed and dependent. Coach yourself to ask first, teach second.
• The default mentor: shares war stories, often more than the situation calls for. Coach yourself to ask "is this story useful to them, or am I telling it for me?"
• The default coach: asks questions when the team needs information. Reaches for "what do you think?" reflexively. Coach yourself to recognize when a direct answer is more respectful.
• The default facilitator: never offers content, even when the team is stuck. Hides behind neutrality. Coach yourself to step out of the role when the team would be better served by your view.

Mixed Stances Done Badly

The most damaging pattern is the mixed stance done without the team knowing which mode is in play. "I'm just asking questions" while actually leading to a predetermined answer is the most common failure — it teaches the team that the coach's questions are not real, which undermines all future coaching.

The fix is transparency. If you're about to teach, say so. If you're going to share an opinion, label it. If you're facilitating and want to step out of the role briefly to contribute, name the transition: "I'm going to step out of facilitating for a moment to share a thought, then step back in." The team can follow you only if you tell them which mode you're in.

Coaching Tips

Name Your Default

Before you can shift fluidly, know which stance you reach for under pressure. Ask a peer or supervisor to watch you and name what they see.

Ask Before You Tell

If you're tempted to teach, first check: does the team already know this? A 10-second question can save 10 minutes of unnecessary explanation.

Make Transitions Visible

"Stepping out of facilitating to share a thought" gives the team the same map you have. Silent stance changes confuse the team.

Catch Performative Coaching

If you already know the answer and you're asking the team to discover it, that's leading dressed as coaching. Either let them genuinely arrive at a different answer, or just tell them.

Use Mentoring Sparingly

War stories work in small doses. Used too freely, they teach the team that your past is more relevant than their present.

Practice the Hardest Stance

Whichever stance is least comfortable for you is where the most growth lives. Engineers-turned-coaches usually need more coaching practice; facilitators usually need more mentoring practice.

Summary

The four coaching stances are not a hierarchy. Teaching is not less developed than coaching, and facilitating is not the most advanced form. Each stance is right for some moments and wrong for others, and the coach's craft is reading the moment well enough to choose deliberately.

The single most useful habit is checking, often, "what does this team actually need from me right now?" The team that needs information should not be coached at; the team that needs to find its own answer should not be told; the team that needs structure should be facilitated, not lectured. The stance follows the need, not the coach's preference.

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