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.

Why are Shadow Roles useful?

Feedback shows that shadow roles are having the following benefits for teams, facilitators, and shadows.

1. Cultural: Building empathy and friendships across roles.
   Addressing a culture of strained relationships, knowledge silos, or a feeling of "us" and "them".
2. Upskilling: Developing new skills, career mobility, and leadership talent.
   Addressing a feeling that there's a lack of progression and things to learn.
3. Innovation: Looking at challenges creatively from new perspectives.
   Addressing frustration at a lack of creativity and innovation in solving challenges.

How are Shadow Roles used?

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.

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What have been some of the highlights?

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.

• Continuous Integration Engineer (Facilitator): "I loved the fact that I don't think there was a single session where we didn't achieve something, and that it wasn't just contained to the scheduled times, we got to a place where we would exchange information or an idea and ask/answer questions on the fly."
• Software Engineer (Shadow): "I feel like I have built a great relationship with my facilitator from our time together, and there is much better communication and cohesion between the developer and infrastructure teams compared to a year ago."
• Scrum Master (Facilitator): "Understanding, to a greater detail, the impact our practices make on individuals."
• Software Engineer (Shadow): "Improving the GitHub actions workflow in our application to cut costs; this is an ongoing issue but it's useful to be able to make tangible change to cost by making certain processes more efficient (while not stopping the team from doing awesome things)."
• Data Engineer (Facilitator): "People shadowing you can challenge why you do things a certain way and give you new ideas."

Introduction Sessions

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.

1. Tell each other what you like to do outside work to get to know each other a little better.
2. Tell each other why you wanted to participate in this shadow role.
3. Find a day and time to repeat your fortnightly shadow session.

Shadow Session Themes

If pairs get stuck here are some conversation starters that help to reveal things you can discuss during shadow sessions.

1. What’s got your attention and what’s your biggest challenge right now?
2. What is the pathway to the role and where can you learn more?
3. What are the boring/repetitive parts and the exciting/forward-thinking parts of the role?

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?”.

Early Termination

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.

End of Year Survey

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.

History

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