A shadow role involves two people, a shadow and a facilitator, meeting every fortnight for 30 minutes. The shadow becomes a kind of understudy of the facilitator’s role. Typically, this is a sideways shift for a slightly different role, rather than mentoring from a more senior team member in the same role.
Why are Shadow Roles useful?
Feedback shows that shadow roles have the following benefits for shadows, facilitators, and their teams.
- Networking: Building empathy and friendships across roles.
- Learning: Developing new skills, career mobility, and mentoring abilities.
- Innovating: Looking at challenges from new perspectives.
How do Shadow Roles work?
The facilitator schedules a recurring fortnightly “shadow session” for 30 minutes, which runs for 6 months (e.g. January-June & July-December). In these sessions, both people present a challenge they can work on together as a pair inside and outside of the session.
The best pairs extend their sessions or make them more frequent. When they need to move the session, they always reorganise it within the same day or week. The same pairs also say it’s important to be open to impromptu calls and messages from the shadow/facilitator. Outside of shadow sessions, the facilitator can invite the shadow to relevant meetings, and the shadow can take on some of the role’s tasks and responsibilities, particularly when the facilitator is away or needs an extra pair of hands.
How do you terminate a Shadow Role?
Speak to an Organiser. At any time, the shadowing can be terminated by the facilitator or the shadow, but it’s important to give it a chance to succeed. Typically, a termination happens when a facilitator isn’t able to make enough of their time available to the shadow, which usually occurs when the facilitator changes roles or takes on new responsibilities. If another facilitator or shadow is available, the facilitator and/or shadow may be able to continue with different people.
What should we discuss in our first Shadow Session?
In your first session, you can follow this agenda.
- Walk through this Shadow Role Guide together.
- Tell each other what you like to do outside work to get to know each other a little better.
- Tell each other WHY you wanted to participate in this shadow role.
- Find a day and time to repeat your shadow session for 30 minutes, every fortnight for 6 months.
- Write down your goal(s)/motivation(s) for the shadow role (1-3 lines max).
What should we discuss in regular Shadow Sessions?
In your regular Shadow Sessions, you can use these conversation starters if you get stuck to help reveal things you can discuss.
- What’s got your attention and what’s your biggest challenge right now? (consider the GROW model)
- What’s something we could work on together right now?
- What has your week involved and what will you be doing in the week to come?
- What’s the pathway to the role? Where can you learn more, what’s important to know, and how can you become good at the role?
- What are the boring/repetitive parts and what are the exciting/forward-thinking parts of the role?
There’s more to life than work, these sessions become more comfortable and enjoyable when pairs get to know each other personally with questions like “what did you do this weekend?”, “any plans tonight?”, etc.
What have other people done in their Shadow Role?
Since the Shadow Role initiative began life in a software team, the examples below are currently limited to software and are just a few of the recently recorded highlights of the initiative.
- Software Developer shadowing a Data Analyst. Rather than the Software team spending weeks developing new dashboards for their application, these two members worked together to build upon existing tooling in the Data team to build the dashboards in several shadow sessions. Out-of-the-box, the dashboards worked at a large scale with advanced features due to the data warehousing and dashboarding tools in use by the Data team.
- Software Developer shadowing a Scrum Master. During the course of the shadow role, the Software Developer took on the responsibilities of the Scrum Master, leading retrospectives and other meetings. As a result, the team became more autonomous and the Scrum Master enjoyed that the shadow was able to “challenge why [they did] things a certain way and [gave them] new ideas”.
- QA Analyst shadowing a Software Developer. The software developer’s expertise enabled the QA Analyst to automate more test cases, particularly in “hard-to-test” areas, which increased the team’s test coverage, their confidence in the tests, and the reliability of their software.
Authored by Ryan Smith © 2021 with CC-BY-4.0 license