Building (and losing) credibility as a quality coach

Working as a quality coach or a senior tester is an interesting role, the role may not come with in built authority and so you live and die by the influence you cultivate.

What is a quality coach?

Quality coaches, like Agile coaches, are specialists that join organisations to help them think and learn about testing. Unlike a traditional testing role in a team, they focus NOT ON DOING THE TESTING but instead FACILITATE TEAMS TO DO THEIR OWN TESTING. They can do this in a number of ways such as pairing with people to help them solve problems, or maybe they provide training to help teams understand the art of the possible.

Quality coaches come in many flavours and configurations with some part of a testing team and some working as the lone testing & quality specialist in the company. They usually are in individual contributor roles (like a staff or principal engineer role for example) and don’t have line management responsibilities for the people they are coaching.

The awesome Vernon Richards talks a lot about the role of a quality coach in his talks and blogs.

Not having authority means you need to have influence

When you manage people you have in built authority to be able to get them to do things. You can use career progression and performance reviews to set objectives that make people behave in ways that you need from them. Plus being a manager just automatically get’s people in a mindset of “I SHOULD DO WHAT YOU SAY”.

But for people who are coaches and peers, that authority doesn’t automatically exist. This can mean having to earn being listened to by the people around you by showing that you have good ideas and can be trusted to help people. Sure, we’ve probably been hired in as an expert but what does that really mean to teams and the people we’re supposed to be supporting?

In order to be able to coach people in testing we need to start building our influence (and cultivating it) within the organisation.

Building influence might be harder in some situations, especially as a tester. Your team members may have had bad experiences with testers, seeing them as unpragmatic or having a view of quality that sets the bar too high (causing them to think testers work against teams and not with them).

We’ve all seen the memes of testers fist pumping when they find a bug and prove developers wrong. Well developers see those too and they might build up a healthy skepticism about testers from this, thinking that testers are antagonistic and not there to support them.

This might mean having to undo some thinking within teams and rebuilding trust with people before we can even start coaching.

Why does credibility matter?

As a coach if we want people to come to us for help then they need to know THAT THE HELP WE GIVE IS GOOD. Teams might be time poor and having to focus on a lot of things all at once, so they need solutions that actually work for them. This means people need to trust that you’re the person that can give them that help, because if they think you’re not why would they come to you?

As mentioned above, we don’t have authority so we can’t always push things onto people. Instead we need to create a pull for the awesome knowledge, information and help that we can give to people. Credibility helps generate that pull and a lack of credibility might lead to disengagement and a reduction in that pull.

Simply put, people need to know that you know your stuff.

Building credibility

Especially useful when we join a new organisation or need to build trust with new people. Also useful generally for keeping that credibility up.

Showing that you know your stuff

Sometimes we need to get in there and do some testing and show that we can interrogate the code, use tools, write code and share information about quality in a good way.

Or maybe this means talking about testing in a way that resonates with engineers (close to the code testing anyone?). People will want support with the tech and tools that they’re using, so we need to show that we understand what they’re doing and can talk about these things.

Being pragmatic

This means point in time coaching and supporting what’s needed. If we start talking about things that people won’t need, can’t use or don’t care about now then the team won’t see us as useful; make an assessment of what will really help people now and coach on that.

This can also mean looking at whether teams are overloaded, look at whether they have the capacity for learning and coaching and making a call on whether you teach now or JUST JUMP IN AND BAIL THEM OUT BY DOING IT FOR THEM. If teams are massively overloaded they just can’t learn new things after all.

Building relationships

People trust people that they like. If people have a good relationship with you they’re more likely to overlook mistakes you make, they trust you more and will assume you know more than you might do. So cultivate your personal relationships with teams and team members to build that trust with them.

Showing not telling

Talking a big game is one thing, but if you’re only hypothetical it doesn’t help people really know what you mean. At some point we need to put the slide decks down and actually pair with people to give some practical tips and tricks.

Being hypothetical also takes you away from the realities of problems, so you might not be able to give advice that people can really use. By getting in there and showing people what you mean, people can take away a real sense of what you’re trying to teach them as it applies to their work.

Plus just being told things is frustrating, imagine TV shows where all the coolest stuff is just spoken about and never shown… annoying.

Broadcast stuff (self service)

When you’re building credibility, one awesome way to do that is just to put stuff out there. Just like if you were building a brand on social media, you can put stuff out there to show that you know things. Make Slack posts, share blogs, create infographics or even do lunch and learns that people can self select drop in to.

People will start to see that you’re someone who knows their stuff and may start engaging with you for help with their things.

When I do this, I don’t limit it to product teams or engineering. I involve the whole company because you never know who might become an ally on your quality journey.

Losing credibility

On the other side of things there are behaviours that might make you lose credibility as someone who can help people. If we lose credibility then we may lose influence with people and have to do some work to rebuild trust with them.

The worst thing about this is… different people might have different things that make them lose trust with you; so we need to manage this on a person by person basis!

Half baked ideas & constantly changing opinions

As coaches building credibility we need to be able to provide advice that works, is understandable and can be used by the team. That means that half formed ideas that don’t work can really hurt us because people will start picking holes (or asking questions that we cannot answer) which makes us look like we don’t know our stuff.

Likewise having to constantly change things can make people feel very unsettled and leave them feeling unsupported. It’s okay to iterate on things, but changing all the time because you hadn’t thought through an idea seems a bit unpredictable and untrustworthy (or like you haven’t listened to people).

This means actually taking time to come up with good answers for things rather than being scrappy and off the cuff.

Having a one size fits all mentality

People want help with their work and also want to feel like you’re listening to them. This means taking the time to TAILOR THE ADVICE YOU GIVE TO PEOPLE and also telling them why this will help them solve their specific challenges.

If we come in with boilerplate models and advice that we share without having taken the time to see if they will work for the teams we’re talking to, we’ll lose credibility. We may also lose credibility if we don’t take the time to sell people on the ideas we’re sharing, people need to have confidence in the solutions you’re providing after all.

Make sure that if you reuse assets that you brand them to the organisation you’re working in. That’ll help people to feel that the information you’re providing is bespoke and tailored to them.

Not enough of the how (or not enough of the what and why)

Advice we give needs to be holistic, providing the how (what should you be doing) but also helping to show why this will help. If we don’t provide enough detail in our coaching then we’re not empowering teams to take on that learning and use it; and if they don’t take learnings on then they may disengage from future teachings.

Find ways to ensure you communicate enough information about things: what the challenge is, how we can solve that challenge and why that might be the best way to solve that challenge for us now.

Not listening to team’s needs

Touched upon earlier, I mentioned that sometimes teams might not have the capacity of headspace to learn. Pushing your own agenda of coaching and forcing teachings on to people who aren’t ready for it right then might cause them to lose trust in you.

Work with teams and managers to look for the best times to coach, rather than assuming people are always ready for it.

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