For the last 2 years I was acting as the coach of a team in this way. I've now moved to a remote location and can't really coach effectively any more, so I'm mostly just lending horsepower to the cause at the moment. In case you are interested, I'll give a little bit of background: I've got 20-25 years as a developer (kind of lost count) and had spent 5 years teaching English immediately prior to doing this coaching role. I also have experience as an XP coach on several teams, but on those teams I had much more focus on process improvement, than on skills improvement.

When I started at this position, money was very, very tight. While we had managed to get and retain some good people due to a variety of factors including luck, there was no realistic way for us to be able to afford to go after and hire the top people in the industry. So our strategy was to train the people we had and help them develop whatever potential they had. I think it was quite a risk for the management team to hire me because they had to believe enough in the staff that the cost of my salary would be compensated by the improved performance of the team. Not many management teams trust their staff to this degree (it is one of the best things about working on this team).

There are a few observations which I will make. First, it's a really, really difficult job :-). Even though I have probably more relevant experience doing this kind of thing than most people in the industry, it stretched me pretty far. Had I not been very motivated from the start to do it, there are probably many times I would have just given up. I will speak of some of the difficulties a bit later on.

By and large, I would say that we were successful. One measurable result is that we had very little attrition during that period. I think the fear many companies have is that if you spend money training people that they will just leave for a better paying job. It is a reasonable fear and you do have to be careful to track the development of people and to try to offer salary improvements as their skills grow. I think it is fair to say that we were not always successful in this aspect (due to very real constraints on our budget at the time), but that people valued the personal growth aspect of the job enough to decide to stay anyway.

In many cases, I think as a coach your role is not so much to tell people how to do their job better, but simply show them where they are not performing well. The thing about programmers is that they are both intelligent and also problem solvers. Even if the person is not functioning at the top of their game, I think this generally holds true, at least compared to the general population. I found what worked best was to try to formulate the problem in terms that the person could understand and then encourage them to find their own solution. Of course you have to give tips and guidance from time to time, but most programmers can improve themselves quite a lot simply if you show them what is lacking.

Of course this is not always easy. I'm just going to have to be blunt. Not everybody wants to improve. It is a testament to the team that I barely ever had to deal with this, but I think it is a real possibility in general. What I did have to deal with is the problem that sometimes people don't want to improve right now. Sometimes their life is full and they just don't have the capacity. This is really, really difficult because you have to wait until they are ready, never really knowing if they will ever be ready. This is pretty stressful for the coach.

The other main problem that is difficult is when the person you are coaching simply doesn't believe that what they are currently doing is sub-optimal. In fact, they may think exactly the opposite -- that what they are doing is amazing and that everybody else is crap for not doing it. To some extent, this happens to everybody. The kicker is that it happens to me (the coach) too. So you often find yourself in some pretty intractable situations where you are pretty sure that you are right, but then so is the other person. You are paid to coach them, but if you get it wrong... you could potentially do a lot of damage.

So the main thing here is that you need to be pretty flexible in allowing people to examine their ideas. Even if you know you are right and the other person is wrong, once you have broached the subject you have to let them find their own way. It can be extremely painful as you watch the person make the same mistakes over and over again until -- finally they get it. At some point you have to trust that the person will get it, while doing your best to do damage control for the mistakes they make while they are learning.

If you have read this far, you may have noticed me use the word "trust" a lot. I think this is the most important part of doing a role like this. If you think the people on your team are crap and can't be trusted to improve, then I think the job will be impossible. If you can believe that no matter what situation you are in today, the person/team will blossom then the job is (barely) possible ;-)

How you get that belief in the first place and how you maintain the belief and trust over a long period of time will largely dictate the level to which you can succeed as a coach, I think. If you ever get a chance to do this role, I highly recommend it, but you need to be prepared to do a lot of sole searching.