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Agile Coaching

Are You Asking a Question?

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Are You Asking a Question?

In a recent post on John Cutler’s, Beautiful Mess blog, he wrote about Those Pesky Question-Askers.

It made me reflect on how I’ve handled questions of all sorts in my—

  • Own personal leadership journey,

  • While teaching my classes,

  • And while coaching my clients.

Even if I—

  • Don’t like or appreciate the question

  • Don’t want to answer it

  • Have answered it before and find it repetitive

  • Find it offensive or personally challenging

I rediscovered that how I answer questions sets the cultural landscape for my context. It impacts— 

  • Transparency

  • Safety

  • Ideation and creativity

  • Deep Democracy

  • Engagement

And as I reflect more, I’m now committing to being much more self-aware of how I engage question-askers.

Thank you, John!

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Half Full Retrospectives

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Half Full Retrospectives

If you’ve followed my writing, you know that I’m enamored with the wisdom often shared by John Cutler. Well, it’s happened again…

I found the following post on LinkedIn where John shared his thoughts around reframing retrospectives to be more positive. And that resonated deeply with my thoughts of late around the place for

  • Positive Psychology

  • Positivity

  • Strengths-based approaches

  • Appreciative Inquiry

In agile contexts.

I thought it was an interesting exercise to color-code them according to the following:

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Agile Coach (and tips) Spotlight

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Agile Coach (and tips) Spotlight

I steadily follow agile coaching-centric content on a wide variety of channels. I’ve been doing it for years. But I don’t share it often enough and this post (hopefully leading to an ongoing series) is intended to rectify that.

I’ve come across the following voices and/or content recently that I thought I would share with you as a way of deepening your agile coaching competency in your learning journey.

Enjoy!

John McFadyen

First up is John McFadyen. He’s someone who has emerged on the coaching scene with a perspective and voice that I truly appreciate.

One example is this LinkedIn post that focuses on discipline and practice. If you’ve been listening to me over the past few years, you know that I’m laser-focused on us practicing our craft. As is John.

Here’s a link to John’s Growing Agile Coaches newsletter. Trust me, you’ll want to join it.

Chris Stone

Another gem of a voice, pun intended, is Chris Stone. Chris has contributed a wonderful learning resource to our community. It’s based on the Agile Coaching Competency Framework and is a Miro board that contains oodles of learning resources for all aspects/competencies within the framework. And, it’s growing.

He also does business as The Virtual Agile Coach.

Erin Randall

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I get excited about every topic that Erin Randall focuses on in her writing. I find her to be a deep thinker in the agile coaching space who reminds me of the power of professional coaching.

She shares her thoughts at Ad Meliora Coaching. For example, here’s a post focusing on Meet, Reveal, and Align and Act that I particularly enjoyed. Or another entitled Five Powerful Questions for Every Coaching Conversation. And finally, here’s a wonderful post on the Voice of the System.

Erin’s is a voice you’ll want to start listening to…often.

Systemic Modelling: Installing Coaching as a Catalyst for Organisational Learning

https://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/311/1/Systemic-Modelling-coaching-for-organisational-learning/Page1.html

Stay agile my agile coaching friends,

Bob.

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Key Differences for Internal vs. External Agile Coaches

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Key Differences for Internal vs. External Agile Coaches

When writing the EBAC book, my (our) perspective was largely from the position of the “universal” agile coach. One where the approaches, tactics, skills, and strategies were essentially the same no matter your place in the organization.

But there are many aspects of agile coaching where the subtleties of your place significantly influence your approaches. None is probably more varied and nuanced then whether you’re coaching as an internal (employee, full-time, FTE, role-based) coach versus an external (contractor, consultant, full or part-time, outside the organizational hierarchy) coach.

I think the differences are so compelling that I wanted to share the following table with you to sensitize you to some of the differences in perspective and approach.

While there may be differences, I want you to minimize the internal gyrations you go through to do your job. In essence, I still want you to be you as a coach. But, depending on your organizational positioning, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of these subtle and not-so-subtle differences.

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3 KEYS to Beginning any Agile Change

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3 KEYS to Beginning any Agile Change

I could have also titled this short post—The 3 Bs to Beginning any Agile Change…

Be Positive – Acknowledge & Celebrate Your Past Successes

  • Celebrate your history and journey

  • Celebrate the people who contributed to that journey

Be Real – Acknowledge and Learn from Your Past Failures

  • Mine thru the defensiveness and denial

  • Find the failures, face them, and embrace them

Be Caring – Acknowledge and Begin the Healing from Your Past Traumas

  • Every organization has induced some level of deep trauma, find it, expose it

  • It could be individual-based (ghost spirits); name them

I’d recommend doing this as part of an open space (or similar) event where you kick things off with your team.

Then, using these insights, craft your overarching Why for moving to agile ways of working and then leverage that to focus your strategy.

Food for thought. Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

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Managers as Coaches

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Managers as Coaches

My friend and colleague, Anthony Mersino recently wrote an article that explores a new shift for managers into becoming coaches. The first part of the article mentions me quite a bit, but that’s not what caught my eye. And I also borrowed his photo.

But I digress.

What stuck with me is the notion that managers (traditional organizational leaders/managers), need to be converted somehow to be better coaches to their teams. Especially in agile contexts. And, I couldn’t disagree more.

Why?

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Am I the Right Agile Coach?

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Am I the Right Agile Coach?

How do we determine if we are the “right” agile coach for a—

  • Client, Individual, Group;

  • Team, System;

  • or Leader?

Is there a singular answer? I don’t think so, but here is a shortlist of considerations—

1. Solid introduction—Have an introductory coaching session and see what unfolds. It makes sense during this session to explain the role/notion of coaching. What you do and how you do it as a coach. And what you don’t do. Then, both you and the client determine if it makes sense to continue.

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Show a Little Understanding

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Show a Little Understanding

My friend and colleague Mike Hall wrote an insightful article entitled—Starting an Agile Transformation with Understanding, not that long ago. It contains the following quote quite early in the article. It touched me deeply with its truth and I thought I’d share it—

Agile Coaches operating as true change agents will spend the first few months building relationships and understanding how your business works. They will lead with empathy and seek to understand. They will dig for the historical perspective of why things are the way they are, in a non-judgmental way. They will observe, ask questions, interview, and establish a “mental context” prior to making any change recommendations. Don’t short change this crucial time period – it is absolutely required for the upcoming Agile recommendations to be meaningful!

The three things that stood out to me from the quote and in reading the article were: Relationship, Empathy, and Understanding.

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Leaders, should your Agile Coaches be doing your job?

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Leaders, should your Agile Coaches be doing your job?

I was coaching another agile coach the other day and they presented the following story to me looking for my coaching wisdom & guidance…

I know, I know, but I shared as much wisdom as I could ;-)

The sponsor/stakeholder/client (a senior executive in the technology organization) asked them to coach one of their direct reports. That person is a senior manager in the organization, well respected, and long-tenured.

The senior leader gave the coach a list of challenges they had with the individual that they wanted them (the coach) to work on fixing in (the senior manager).

When the coach attempted to “coach” that individual, they met resistance. In fact, the person didn’t see the need for coaching. They recounted that in their last performance review their manager (senior leader) had given them a stellar review, wonderful feedback, and a nice promotion and salary increase. So, they really didn’t feel the need for much in the way of coaching and personal improvement.

The coach went back to the stakeholder and respectfully and delicately communicated the resistance and tried to bow out of coaching the manager. They told the senior leader that, if they felt that individual needed some help, that they would have to communicate that to them themselves, thus opening the door for the leader performing the coaching.

The senior leader didn’t accept that position. In fact, they pushed back hard. They said that (1) the manager had a performance problem and (2) that they were delegating to the coach to “fix it”. As part of their ongoing responsibility as a “coach”. To be honest, they resented having to repeat themselves…

And this is where I came in. The coach was looking for me to do something (ask powerful questions, provide advice, suggest options, mentor them, anything…) to help them to decide what to do next.

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