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. It’s a bit like mentoring, but typically this is a sideways shift in a team or organisation, rather than mentoring from a more senior team member.
Feedback shows that shadow roles are having the following benefits for teams, facilitators, and shadows.
Pairs (shadow and facilitator) schedule a recurring fortnightly “shadow session” for 30 minutes which runs for one year. In these sessions, both people typically present a current challenge. It doesn’t have to be too urgent or too important, just something they can work on together as a pair inside and outside of the session.
The best pairs get quite invested in these challenges and extend their sessions or make them more frequent. When these pairs have to move the session, they always re-organise it within the same day or week, as the sessions are most beneficial when done consistently. Outside of shadow sessions, the facilitator can invite the shadow to other 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.
In the last End of Year Survey, completed by 92% of participants, 100% of them said they either “have already” or “would probably” recommend shadow roles to others.
Prior to the shadow role commencing, to get a pair on the same page, it’s helpful to walkthrough this document as part of a 15-minute Intro session with the following agenda.
If pairs get stuck here are some conversation starters that help to reveal things you can discuss during shadow sessions.
The sessions also become more comfortable and enjoyable when pairs get to know each other personally with questions like “what did you do this weekend?” and “any exciting plans tonight?”.
To reduce the risk in participating in a shadow role, at any time, the shadowing can be terminated by the facilitator or shadow. This usually happens when the facilitator changes role or takes on new responsibilities. In these situations another shadow role may be available.
At the end of the year, participants receive this End of Year Survey to gather feedback to improve Shadow Roles for next year and to better understand the achievements & benefits of the initiative so we can encourage others to benefit from the initiative too.
To save you time, feel free to use that same form, I’ll anaylse the feedback to update this page and you can contact me via ryan@shadowroles.com or My LinkedIn to get any feedback received from your organisation.
I created Shadow Roles in 2021, inspired by the Shadow Board concept with the help of a few colleagues willing to give it a try and the support of my manager and my mentor.
In the first year, I organised the initiative for 1 engineering team with 4 shadow roles, mostly Software Engineers shadowing a Product Owner or Scrum Master on their team, so we’ve made it work at a small scale. The next year, I expanded to 3 teams with 18 participants with a wider variety of roles. The following year, we expanded the initiative to the entire engineering department with 46 participants and we’re now experimenting with an expansion outside of the engineering department for the wider organisation of 450+ people. So it seems like it can work at a much larger scale too.
Having shared my excitement with a few friends in different industries, they’ve started creating their own Shadow Role Initiative like this one, so it seems like it can work elsewhere too. I’m now sharing this document to enable other teams and organisations to organise their own Shadow Role Initiative more easily.
If you’d like to talk about this more, please contact me via ryan@shadowroles.com or My LinkedIn.
© 2021-2024 Ryan Smith with CC-BY-4.0 license