Systemic Agile Coaching

1. Course Overview: Hi everyone. My name is Will Jeffrey and welcome to my course. I had been a certified agile coach and professional Agile trainer for multi-discipline teams. I've been teaching them for more than 15 years how to work smarter together. My workshops, Dr. ground-up collaboration for much better and more integrated results. I'm happy to help you improve and do what you love. Agile has exploded in popularity and more and more people are interested in learning how to become an Agile coach. This course has been designed for anyone with a desire to harness the power of coaching. This course focuses on how to coach individuals in an Agile context. By the end of this course, you will be able to explain what is expected from an Agile coach. Differentiate among mentoring, facilitating, consulting, teaching and coaching. You will also learn the mindset behind systemic coaching. So you will know how to listen and keep the conversation flowing without actually steering it. How to open up a new coaching conversation and guided to closure. How to formulate questions so that the coachee provides the content while you provide the structure, and learn how to hold effective one on one meetings. Using the coaching model, setting smart goals, and defining OKRs. Out of this course will give you the tools and structures you need to become an effective Agile coach. 2. Starting the Journey: Agile coaching is at heart not such a complicated thing. It is the art of observing, listening, forming an understanding and validating it. Then working with the coachee to come up with and enact solutions. By coaching and observing others coach, you build up your own collection of patterns and tools. Were a junior coach will have to rely on written material in the support of others. An experienced coach can quickly form and validate hypotheses and pick the right tools from the toolbox. But starting out as a new Agile coach is not so easy. Where do you go? How do you get started? With this course? I wanted to create an introductory reference for new Agile coaches, as well as experienced from masters. It contains much of the theory that I teach my new clients and students and hopefully a lot of insights for new coaches. Throughout the course. I will use the term agile coach, but don't take that too literally. It's an umbrella term that covers everyone interested in coaching Agile teams and small organizations. I don't expect that every student wants to become an Agile coach. Rather, I have designed this course to be useful to a large number of people, including Scrum Masters, development managers, and system thinkers. So whenever you see Agile coach, please substitute it with whatever title you feel is appropriate for you. That said, some parts of this class are written for people who see a lot of different teams, either inside one organization or across many companies. Scrum Masters, development managers, and internal Agile coaches typically work with the same teams year after year. Agile coaches, on the other hand, are expected to train and coach teams from scratch until they become self-sufficient and Scrum, which usually takes two to three months before moving on to other teams. Overtime, a consulting Agile coach will find herself working with many different teams in many different contexts and with many different goals. I have therefore included some material relevant to working with new teams. There are sections in this class dedicated to team building models or what you can do to help your teams perform better. Becoming an agile coach is a journey that has no end. 3. Why Do We Need Agile Coaches?: Before discussing the what, let's understand the why. Why do we need Agile coaches? Why are companies hiring Agile coaches? Is this role really necessary? Maybe these are the most intriguing questions in the entire Agile community. Answering these questions is an essential exercise to understand the real problem we are trying to solve with this role. Agile coaching is about change, period. It concerns how we can improve organizational behaviors at different levels, produce better results. Agile coaching is an approach towards fostering organizational improvement. This means that companies are willing to achieve a different state regarding better ways of work, better business results, or simply to solve an organizational problem. It's possible to group the typical challenges during a change journey into five categories as follows. Primary problems, any elementary situation to be solved. For example, maybe the organization wants to increase customer satisfaction, or perhaps they need to reduce the time to market or maintain competitiveness in a dynamic market. On awareness and attention. Very common. People don't know what they don't know. And because of this, need help to have a clear understanding of the problems, gaps, and opportunities to improve. In Agile, awareness is an indispensable condition for promoting continuous improvement. Low sense of ownership, a lack of engagement and participation is one of the most typical challenges for many companies. For this reason, many organizations need help to create elements to foster collaboration and boost a sense of ownership among their employees. That is the reason why self-organization and collaborative decision-making are frequent topics and most of the Agile practices gap of competencies. Maybe people will need a different set of skills to achieve the desired state. Most of the time, change means adopting different behaviors and new ways of working. People need to learn different responsibilities and activities during an Agile transformation. For this reason, they will need assistance and support to develop new skills. Organizational barriers. Business agility is a great desire for most organizations. Consequently, companies must optimize their processes and organizational designs in order to nurture more flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to unpredictable changes is the reason why companies need help to identify and overcome barriers during their journey of improvement. As you can see, there are different types of issues during an Agile transformation initiative. It is not about US framework X or Y. Scrum kanban XP, safe and less, are just a set of interconnected options to help people to improve their organizational capability, solve problems, and generate value. As agile coaches, we should master how to mix these options to help out the organizations. 4. PART 1: What is Agile Coaching: Agile coaching is the art of helping people see reality using an Agile and Lean perspective and change their paradigms, habits, and roles accordingly. Agile coaching has two very different sides, agility and coaching. And you will need to know a bit of both. Being good or skilled in only one of these two domains is not sufficient. Agile is an umbrella term for all kinds of methods and practices that are based on the values and principles defined in the Agile Manifesto. It reads, we are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work, we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration, over contract negotiation, responding to change over following a plan. That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. At present, the most widely used agile methods are Scrum, Kanban, and XP. When I refer to agile and usually mean any at all of the Agile methods. But I will sometimes specifically address one of the Agile methods. In my experience, most Agile coaches typically have a background as Scrum masters, project managers, general managers, process specialists, or quality managers. Working with different teams. They have noticed that they can help the teams work better by introducing or strengthening the teams agile thinking. At some point it may start calling themselves agile coaches, or they keep their scrum master title from failures and successes. They have slowly learned how to approach and work with different teams. They have started out as new Agile coaches with reasonably good agile knowledge. But I do not know enough about coaching. If you belong to this group. This course is for you. Agile thinking and agile practices are easier to learn than coaching skills. There are agile books, scrum training, workshops, conferences, communities, and a lot more available. However, for many people, the main problem is in fact, the unlearning of old thinking patterns. Coaching is also a skill that you can pick up and improve on, although perhaps not as easily as agile knowledge. This is because coaching is a way of acting almost a personal habit. And habits are notoriously difficult to change. In order to become a good coach, you must learn to observe and listen to keep your own biases and control to not jump to premature conclusions and to communicate well. This naturally affects how you are aware of yourself, how you react to other people and how others perceive you. Many people are unwilling to even start this journey. For example, people who enjoy the feeling of power that comes from bossing people around do not necessarily want to give it up. Agile coaching is not magical handwaving. It is a soft but very, very structured skill. I don't want to encourage the perception that an Agile coach can just walk into an organization, talk to people, run some workshops, slap stickies on flip charts and turn everyone's super agile. Instead. I see Agile coaching is structured and long-term work that stretches over months, sometimes years. The difference between a newly started agile coach and an expert coach is simply that the expert knows more structures by heart and remembers more tools and has more experienced to help her choose the right tool or structure for the job where an experienced coach can pick and choose from memory. New coaches may need to consult lists, books, or mentors and are perhaps more likely to occasionally, they choose the wrong tool for the job. I would encourage you to think of coaching as an additional set of tools in your leadership Toolbox. Coaching is something you can try out and adopt gradually. Tool by tool and technique by technique. And it is very likely that you will find the skills and tools in this course useful in many different situations. For example, the skill of listening will be very convenient when interacting with customers and colleagues, as well as your mother-in-law. 5. What Does an Agile Coach Do?: Understanding the function of an Agile coach is much more feasible once we acknowledge the set of y's described previously. We can summarize the essence of the work of an Agile coach using a model called the Agile coaching DNA. This DNA works as a compass to guide the decisions about which practices and approaches we can use to help clients achieve better results. Based on this DNA, it is possible to see Agile coaches working on five elements. Catalyze improvement, promote awareness, booster ownership, develop competencies, and facilitate barrier removal. Those elements work as high level goals for Agile coaches. Let's talk a little bit about those elements. Catalyze improvements. Agile coaches must act as catalyzers for the continuous improvement culture. Providing support and facilitation to the change journey is the primary element during the Agile coaching process. As agile coaches, we need to continuously help organizations, teams, and individuals in the journey from the current state to the future state. At the real gist of coaching. Promote awareness. In order to catalyze the improvements is necessary to help people to be aware of the problems, gaps, needs, options of solutions, et cetera. Most of the time, agile coaches give support to people to explore their mindsets, behaviors, and consequences to promote changes and improvements. We can use different ways to promote this sort of awareness. For example, we can use open questions to help people to visualize and understand some particular thinking or behavior. Another good example is about Agile itself. We can use data-driven culture and all sorts of metrics. Flow, lead time, cycle, time, throughput, velocity, cost of delay, business value, et cetera, as enablers for awareness in organizations. Based on this shared awareness, we can help people to identify the opportunities for improvements. Boost ownership. Awareness can lead people toward engagement. If we are aware of our problems and their implications, we are more likely to feel responsible for the solution. Ownership means that the person has sufficient commitment on the path towards some goal and others words, the person has committed to knowing why and how to build the road to reach his or purpose. This situation builds self-esteem and self-motivation. Ownership implies in more autonomy or in a low level of dependency to create and sustain solutions. For this reason, when an Agile coach provides answers or dictates exactly how to solve some problem. It compromises the coachee's ability and learning how to learn. Also give answers. Maybe we'll create a dangerous dependency on the Agile coach. In this case, the coachee will always need help from the Agile coach to create and maintain the improvements. Boost ownership is the reason why most of the Agile coaches should be temporary agents in the organizations. As a takeaway to boost ownership, Agile coaches should avoid dictating the solutions and must practice a non-judgmental approach to help people build their path towards some goal. Develop competencies. As you saw in the previous elements, helping people learn new skills, hard and soft competencies is one of the key ingredients of Agile coaching. To develop people skills, we can create a combination of two approaches, coaching and mentoring. However, there's a huge difference between both. When we are acting as a mentor would provide the correct answers to solve some problem. When we work as a coach, we are always trying to promote awareness and ownership in the people so that they can build their solution. It is important to make this difference pretty clear for the audience. Also is vital that the Agile coach recognizes which kind of situation to which coaching and mentoring to be applied. As agile coaches. We also need to help the organization and creating strategies to promote a learning culture. We can use different practices to reach this goal. It is about how we can create an organizational environment to foster collaborative and emergent learning inside the Teams. Facilitate barrier removal. During an Agile transformation slash change initiative, there are lots of obstacles to adopting new behaviors and practices. Most of the time, agile coaches must act as change facilitators. A change facilitator is someone who helps the organization to identify the opportunities to improve and foster collaborative strategies to maximize the success of the change efforts. We always have driving forces, positive forces, and restraining forces, resistance to achieve any goal during a change initiative. For this reason, we need to reduce the resistance and take advantage of the positive forces. These elements represent the most common high-level objectives for Agile coaches. We can achieve these intentions by using different techniques and approaches. Let me give you a few examples of Agile coaching activities. It's important to note the relationship of each activity to the common objectives described in the Agile coaching DNA. Here are some activities and objectives. Facilitate sessions for envisioning the changes involving people from different levels of the organization. Agile coaching DNA objectives, catalyze improvements, promote awareness, and boost ownership. Conduct assessments to identify what changes slash improvements are necessary. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness and catalyze improvements. Facilitate sessions to map the company's current value stream and identify pain points and bottlenecks. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness and catalyze improvements. Assist the organization to create strategies for data visualization slash accessibility. Agile coaching, DNA objective, promote awareness. One-on-one sessions with team members from masters and product owners. Agile coaching DNA objectives, catalyze improvements, promote awareness, booster ownership, develop competencies and facilitate barrier removal. Providing training regarding Agile practices. Agile coaching DNA objective. Develop competencies. Facilitate critical retrospectives to identify organizational improvements. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness and catalyze improvements. Help the teams to create effective information radiators. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness, boost ownership, and facilitate barrier removal. Help managers and leaders to embed practices of agile management in their routines. Agile coaching DNA objectives, develop competencies and facilitate barrier removal. Help the team to implement good practices that improve quality and increased productivity. Agile coaching DNA objectives, develop competencies and facilitate barrier removal. Help the organization to establish Agile practices for effective portfolio management. Governance. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness and facilitate barrier removal. Create an assist the strategy to increase multi-actor collaboration, reducing risks, and enhancing organizational performance. Agile coaching DNA objectives, promote awareness, boost ownership, and facilitate barrier removal. Agile coaching is an extensive activity to nurture improvements in organizations and help people to evolve mindsets and behaviors. It is not a simple task, and it can vary according to context. Consequently, there are multiple forms and techniques to do so. The most critical idea here is having Agile coaching as an activity to catalyze concrete and relevant improvements in the organizations by promoting awareness, boosting ownership, developing competencies, and facilitating barrier removal. This is what an Agile coach actually does. 6. Other Coaching Domains: In this section, I would like to position agile coaching by comparing it to two other well-known coaching domains, systemic coaching and sports coaching. If you haven't heard about systemic coaching before, you can think of it as the classical therapy or counseling approach. Imagine a patient sitting in a comfortable lounges and a calm, neutrally dressed counselor and a hard back chair with a notepad in her hand asking, and how can I help you today? A systemic coach works with the system. The information, interpretations, goals and actions all come from the cocci and the systemic coach merely facilitates discovery through discussion. She asked neutral, open-ended questions related to keywords that pop up in the discussion. For example, tell me more about your time there or how did the others react to this piece of news? Now we have clarified what systemic coach is. Let's compare the three kinds of coaching. Agile coaching borrows a lot from systemic coaching. However, where the systemic coaches non-directive, the Agile coach usually has an agenda of making the team more agile. While an Agile coach supports the team and provides benchmarks, a systemic approach accepts any result. An Agile coach may discuss roles with Manager. A systemic coach accepts the team as it is. They both help team members find ways to improve. While in an Agile coach helps the team understand the approach in a given situation outside the selected method, a systemic coach helps the team explore scenarios and choose which one to pursue. An Agile coach uses Lean and Agile thinking to understand cause and effect. A systemic coach has a circular understanding of cause and effect. An Agile coach moderately expresses emotions. A systemic coach aspires to be neutral. Both systemic coaches and agile coaches usually have a sponsor and had been hired to achieve a goal. The difference is that systemic coaches try not to impose their own thoughts and ideas in the discussions. For an Agile coach, part of the goal is to act as a role model infusing the organization with Agile thinking and practices. And agile coach also works in quite similar ways to a sports coach. Whereas professional athletes know a lot about their sports and their main tool, the human body. Many professional software developers are lacking in theoretical knowledge as well as practical experience. While an Agile coach supports the team and it provides benchmarks, a sport coach sets goals and targets for the team. An Agile coach may discuss roles with Manager, a sport coach to find the team. And agile coach helps team members find ways to improve. A sport coach lays off number forming team members. While in an Agile coach helps the team understand the approach in a given situation outside the selected method, a sport coach tells the team what to do in a given situation. An Agile coach uses Lean and Agile thinking to understand cause and effects. A sport coach has a somewhat linear understanding of cause and effect. While an Agile coach moderately expresses emotions, a sport coach has very transparent emotions. The barriers of entry into software development of a very low and many software developers never receive sufficient formal education in their craft. At the same time, the pressure to release new features means that best practices are forgotten and people collect the wrong kinds of experience. Exacerbating the issue. Everyone wants to portray themselves as experts in order to keep their jobs. The more senior developers who could perhaps act as mentors and role models are all overworked, participating in dozens of critical projects and work groups simultaneously. This means that Agile coaches need to tread carefully when nurturing both basic software practices as well as agile projects slash product management and team building practices. Every coach should always have a clear goal. Unfortunately, Agile coaches are often called him to do something vague or implicit. Such as we've been told to deploy Scrum or my team isn't meeting their sprint goals? Or could you just look at this team and say What's wrong? Part of your job is therefore to observe or quickly assessed the organization, make a diagnosis or draw up some hypotheses and agree on the goal with your sponsor. Without an understanding of what the organization wants and needs is difficult to achieve results. To do this, you will need to allocate access time with the organization. In some cases, this might mean a concerted, structured assessment carried out in a very short time. Other times it may be more informal and unstructured for the extreme point of hanging around in the coffee room trying to meet and interview as many different people as possible. 7. The Agile Coaching Stances: Interestingly enough, and agile coach needs to be able to do many different things that are not coaching. One of the basic skills of Agile coaching is to understand when to coach and when not to coach, and to know what else you might do instead. For example, you may notice that a team doesn't understand why they should split work into small independent tasks. If you were only allowed to coach, you would need to ask the right questions and sequence patiently guiding them forward step-by-step until they connect the dots and understand the implications and come up with the right methods. This would require almost inhuman leaps of logic and induction from the team, as well as almost inhuman coaching skills from you. It would be more effective to just step out of the coaching role and spent a little moment as a teacher. Coaching and teaching are two different modes of operation that I call coaching stances. There are five stanzas in total, and I will explore them in the following sections. You should always be aware of which coaching stance you are taking in any given moment. You will change stanzas regularly as the situation dictates and you will need to take a different approach in each stats. 8. Coaching: For the most part, you should operate as a coach and stay in the bass dance of coaching. As Steve Jobs said, if you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution. Coaches operate under the assumption that the person they are helping has the knowledge and ability to solve their own problems and focuses on clarifying the problem, unlocking this knowledge, promoting self organization and growth. An Agile coach frequently pulls from experience and knowledge, not just an Agile context, but from previous roles and personal learning to validate or challenge their coachees narrative. The objective is to foster a new narrative which is more compatible with the mindset slash framework they are trying to accomplish and provides support and guidance needed to fully embody this new narrative. This stance is usually demonstrated in one-on-one sessions, team meetings or interaction moments with individuals. This is where you listen and observe how the team works, challenge and question their assumptions and status quo, and facilitate and lead the activities. The coaching stance is very close to systemic coaching, as we described previously. It is the most neutral in that the coach tries to be unbiased and not push her own ideas on the team. In order to avoid biasing the team that you are coaching, you should try to step back into the coaching stance as soon as the situation allows. 9. Teaching: The teaching stance that we mentioned in the beginning of this section is one that you will find yourself using quite a lot. In contrast to systemic coaches and to some extent also sports coaches. Agile coaches need to be able to educate and teach people. Sometimes the Agile coach notices a knowledge gap or establishes that reinforcing known principles and practices as needed. In those scenarios, the Agile coach assumes that teacher stance. In this context, switching means the ability to detect when a group you are coaching is lacking knowledge on some topic. Explain the concepts in a clear way, answer questions related to those concepts and verify that the group has indeed acquired the new knowledge. And effective trainer has command of several different techniques to present and reinforced knowledge, both in a formal classroom like setting or improvised events. It does not necessarily mean planning and carrying out engaging, informative multi-day courses. Although many Agile coaches also work as agile trainers and vice versa, the skill set required for giving multi-day courses is quite different. As mentioned, you should find your way back from the teaching stance to the coaching stance as soon as possible. Asking questions like, how do you think this new knowledge will affect your future actions? More with the knowledge I've just provided you, what will in your perspective be the best thing to do now can help you return to coaching. It also signals to the coachee that you are giving the responsibility back to her. And she needs to make wise decisions with the new knowledge in mind. 10. Mentoring: As part of the mentoring process, information is transferred between two people, where one assumes the role of the mentor, the person imparting the knowledge, and the other of the mentee, the person receiving it. The mentoring stance is usually applied by the Agile coach when deeper understanding of a common topic is needed or underlying principles need to be clarified. The mentoring stance is useful when the mentee has knowledge to some extent, but lacks experience and the topic, the transfer of experience often happens through discussions, stories, anecdotes and advice. It can also happen through hands-on demonstrations or through collaboration and pair work. In which case one could talk about apprenticeship. Mentoring is often confused with coaching, possibly because a good mentor must also be a good listener and a good coach. The mentoring stance requires the application of career or life coaching as part of the process. However, the context revolves around mindset and Agile principles approaches. Similarly, coaches must sometimes act as mentors. And agile coach would most commonly mentor a junior Agile coach or a scrum master. Your mentee is likely to find it convenient to have a mentor and she will encourage you to stay in that stance. Again, remember to return to the coaching role as soon as possible. For that, you can state something like that was the story I wanted to tell you. What kind of thoughts did it give you more? Now that we have done this together? Let me see you do it on your own. 11. Advising: Being an agile coach also includes the capability of giving advice to a client when necessary. This includes giving options, creating insights, and evaluating their experiences. If you have opinions on a topic, we'll also need to justify and motivate. You should be very careful when giving advice. As coaching and advising are conflicting activities. As a coach, you are supposed to be neutral and unbiased. But as an advisor, you are expected to provide opinions and suggestions. You cannot do both at once. This is one of the reasons why you are most likely better off adopting one of the other stanzas rather than an advising. Another reason is that people who asked for advice or not always looking for an honest answer. It happens that people just want to vent their frustration or would like to know whether they can use you for support when driving their own agenda. The third reason is that when you give advice or recommendations, you must also take responsibility for that advice. Sometimes you should not have any say in the matter, or you may have conflicting interests. Sometimes a simple question requires a complex answer, several complex answers, and sometimes the client takes your answer and implements it without understanding the implications. We commonly find ourselves answering, it depends. And then perhaps explaining the relevant theory training, helping them find their own answer, coaching, or providing examples that are hopefully illuminating mentoring. Only occasionally do we actually get straight out answers advising. And it almost never happens that we carry out the work for them. Consulting. Even when giving advice, you should always leave the responsibility to the coachee. One trick to make that happen is to form your suggestions as hypotheses. Could it be a possibility for you to more provides several options. Another approach that could be worth exploring is this sends a signal to the GOCE that it is her call to come up with a solution since she is the one that knows the context best. It also indicates that you are now stepping back to the coaching stance. When you push your solution onto someone else, there is a risk that the other person will not be fully committed to achieve the wandered result. 12. Role Modeling: As agile coaches, we constantly need to demonstrate integrity. Some of the key pillars in your career as an Agile coach, our transparency, honesty, commitment to help people grow and maximizing the benefits for your client's. Role modeling is primarily about living the Agile and Lean values. An Agile coach cannot simply say one thing and then do something else. For example, stating that meetings always start on time and then arriving late yourself, or asking the scrum master to be prepared, but showing up unprepared for your own engagements. Role modeling is different from contracting or consulting. A contractor or a consultant is hired to do a job on behalf of the client. The difference is that role modelling is a form of on the job training for the organization's own scrum masters. The role model also only assumes responsibility on a limited level and for a limited time. For example, ensuring that a retrospective as well facilitated or that the team is paying attention to the resulting actions. As a role model, you could, for example, facilitate a couple of sprints, gradually handing over to the organization's own Scrum Masters, which falls nicely within the scope of almost a coaching engagement. This is in sharp contrast to sports coaches who typically do not go out on the field to score goals during a match and to systemic coaches who can't change themselves on behalf of their clients. If you're coaching engagement explicitly includes contracting or consulting. I would talk about embedded coaching. An embedded Agile coach is expected to work full time as a team member or scrum master for a period of months or years. And simultaneously roll out Agile practices or promote Agile thinking in the team and surrounding organization. While this may seem like a great idea too for the price of one, so to speak. I've tried to avoid this mode of engagement as it has several pitfalls for both the coach and the client organization. As the coaches now inside the organization, some of her credibility and leverage will be lost within months, and managers will start bossing her around. Much of the coaching effort is spent on running the mechanics of the chosen Agile method. And the coaching progress is slower than it could be. The organization also easily becomes dependent on the coach, so that progress stagnates after the coach eventually leaves the building. Imbedded coaching is also problematic for the coach herself. Working with two different goals seldom leads to satisfactory results, especially if the goals are conflicting. There's only so much time. Should I run a retrospective or write more software. Furthermore, personal professional development can come to a standstill compared to a dedicated Agile coach. An embedded coach has twice the number of professions to learn about, but even less time. The experience she collects will be limited to this particular client. And she will lose out on the wide generalized knowledge that comes from working with many diverse clients. As an embedded coach, it is important to make it explicit when you're stepping from one role to another. Do not move constantly back and forth or linger in between because that will only confuse people around you. You will also need to find somebody to train as your replacement. 13. Additional Advice: As an Agile coach, you should always be careful not to involve yourself in content and productive decisions when advising and role modeling. It may be tempting to propose new and nifty features or nudge the user interface to. So remember that you have been engaged to improve the organization and not the product. When you position yourself inside the system, you are making it difficult to stay objective and unbiased. And unless you happen to be a recognized domain expert, it is very likely that the organization you are coaching understands their customers better than you do. 14. When Coaching Is a Bad Idea: Coaching requires a certain objectivity and it is difficult to coach people you deeply care for. Avoid coaching your family, friends, or close business partners unless they really asked for it. Even then you might want to make clear that it's a one-off thing. Get out of your home or office, go to a coffee shop, or take a walk while you discuss. And when the coaching session ends, remember to step out of the coaching mode and be yourself. Sometimes you will meet individuals who mistake coaching for therapy or are messed up beyond the help of a coach. Coaching is not therapy. In these cases, I recommend that you gently backoff and stay in coaching territory. This is primarily because amateur therapists can do serious damage, but also giving therapy is probably not what you were engaged for. Now of course, there are agile coaches who are also trained and licensed therapists. There might be situations where somebody engages such a trained and licensed therapist in order to give therapy to individuals or teams. If this is the situation, I'm quite sure that you know it and can handle it. In all other cases. I recommend that you step back and let professionals with the right skills handle the issue. 15. PART 2: How to Coach Individuals: As Ronald Heifetz said, attention is the currency of leadership. Leadership could be defined as getting people to pay attention to tough problems that they would often rather avoid facing. When you are trying to lead without authority. You don't have control over the holding environment. You can control your provocation. How much you stimulate people to change or to face tough questions. Because you can't modulate the response. You can't control how the organizational system response in the same way that you have leveraged when you are in the position of authority. In her previous part of this course, we discussed how Agile coaching compares two in contrast with systemic coaching. In the next sections, we'll look more into the fundamentals of using systemic coaching approaches in your job as an Agile coach, I will focus on how to coach individuals as a systemic coach. Coaching teams is much easier once you know how to coach individuals. You do not need to be an expert personal coach though. Even a little knowledge of personal coaching can help you along way when coaching teams, I will cover techniques for listening and formulating questions and talk about how to structure discussions. 16. Grow a Coaching Relationship: In this section, we're going to define the code of conduct for a systemic coach. Let us first have a look at what a coaching relationship is. A coaching relationship is primarily a powerless environment. This means the cocci and the coach are to be equal partners in the conversations. You coach? I do. I not from above and not from below. The coachee should not have to be concerned about consequences for his job or career. From what thoughts and ideas he is sharing with a coach. If he has, he will be holding back, which will decrease the effect of the coaching. Secondly, coaching relationship is a room with confidentiality. The coachee should feel safe at all points in time, both during and after the conversation. This means that you do not share details from the conversation with others, at least not without permission from the coachee. In popular terms, one could say that the vagus rule applies here. What happens in the conversation stays in the conversation. We will return to the topic of confidentiality when we talk about establishing a coaching conversation a bit later. Finally, it is overwhelmed. It is over, meaning you do not restart a coaching conversation once you have completed it, There's a time and place for the conversation. Within that you discuss challenges, you explore possibilities. You define action plans, and you agree on how and when to follow up. Outside of the conversation is not going on. You do not refer or add onto the conversation when meeting the coachee at the coffee machine, in the canteen or anywhere else. A coaching relationship can only exist within these three restrictions. Always keep them in mind and when necessary, make them explicit to the persons you are coaching. 17. Systemic Coaching Mindset: A coaching conversation is something that has cocreated between the coach and the coach. It is like a dance to which both parties contribute. In order to perform well, you must first agree about the purpose, the style, the rhythm, and so on. If in a real dancing situation, one tries to do a jitter bug while the other attempts a waltz. That makes up will become apparent within the first few steps. In a coaching situation, however, misunderstandings of similar magnitude can go undetected for a long time. Coaching is an approach to help people grow. A positive mindset is also required. People grow through appreciation by being acknowledged and respected for who they are, but also by being challenged by new and more ambitious goals. Appreciation is not about praising people for any random reason, but taking an approach like appreciative inquiry as a starting point. Appreciative inquiry is a research backed approach where people in an organization collectively imagined and describe a compelling future. Because this future state is desirable, people don't have to be forced or incentivized into working their way there. Focusing on problems and how to solve them is wearing in the long run and might even make the problems bigger. Catalyst for this is to live out the principle of helium tropism, which states that positive imagination leads to positive actions and results. By having positive ideas about the future. We are already laying the foundation for this positive future. Positive thoughts create similar connections in our brains as if we already were acting according to these ideas. This frees up energy to see new possibilities and do constructive work towards it. Like a sunflower, we are orienting ourselves towards the Sun and take advantage of the possibilities we are being given. One of the most well-known uses of the principle of helium tropism was President Obama's victory speech in Chicago Grant Park, November fourth, 2008, is primary messages were all things are possible. Changes are coming. And yes, we can. With this in mind, let us dig into what tools and techniques you can use for successful coaching. 18. Curiosity and Keywords: At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to underline that a coach should be curious and interested in people. This is a self-selected trait. If you are not interested in people, you will find it very boring to work as an Agile coach. So don't be afraid of asking questions. The only thing worse than being clueless about something is trying to hide that you are clueless. And frankly, who is the subject matter expert here? You more the coachee. That said if you keep asking random questions or repeat the same prepared questions, it sends a signal that you are not taking the conversation seriously. Make notes, review them, and learn. People know that names and in-house acronyms are difficult to remember. So those are more excusable. And sometimes new tools or an organizational restructuring may cause what you have learned to become obsolete. Even so the professional approach is to remember as much as possible or at least give the impression that you care. Keywords are words that unlock further ideas and concepts. They depend almost totally on the cocci and the conversation and are not always easy to identify. I recommend that you keep notes jotting down what do you think could be significant if some word pops up or as mentioned, repeatedly, ask about it or underline the words so that you can return to them later. When there is low in the conversation. Scan back and look for interesting and relevant topics to return to. You mentioned the palm meeting earlier. What does that mean? Asking about something may uncover more keywords, jot them down to, and use the new keywords in combination with your agile expertise to design more questions. There is a root cause analysis technique called Five Whys, hinting at the fact that digging down five layers is usually enough. Sometimes there could be three layers and sometimes six. But on average, the causal branch you are exploring will bottom out after five times of asking. And why does that happen? As a practicing Agile coach, you will stumble across patterns that repeat inside and across companies. Don't make the mistake of assuming that these similar patterns have similar solutions. Keywords most often point to symptoms. But the underlying network of causes and effects can be very complicated. And not all of the causes are necessarily visible. For example, many new Scrum teams, and sadly, many established teams too, are struggling to meet their sprint goals. Clearly something does not work as it should. But what perhaps the product owner is pushing. Perhaps the managers don't understand capacity planning. Perhaps they are dependent on another team delivering an unreliable, low quality component. Perhaps all of the above or something else. Don't make assumptions. Go and see. Remember, be curious, and keep track of keywords. 19. Listening and Responding: We all think while we listen, we study the person whom we are in a conversation with, reflect on the words, tie back into our own experiences, find sudden insights for interesting parables and connections. Often our thoughts take us far away into our own spheres of interest. And when we come back to reality, we realized that we have missed something, but probably nothing important, right? Other times we find something really important to say and mull over the message, rehashing it in our own minds while we wait for our turn to speak and forget to listen. This is how our brains are built and there's nothing wrong with that. As coaches, however, these habits make it difficult for us to do our job. They take focus away from the cocci. And while we sometimes get good ideas, just as often we might jump to premature conclusions. As coaches, we need to listen better. In this section, I will cover some thinking models and effective techniques for listening. 20. Shift Response Vs Support Response: The waiting to speak syndrome occurs when the listener is not actually focusing on what the speaker is saying, but rather is waiting for a break in the flow in order to infuse her own thoughts into the discussion. When somebody does this to you, it feels like the other person is not actually listening to what you said. In response, people often resort to repeating their words in a louder voice, rehashing their arguments in different words, or speaking on top of the other person. This syndrome is called shift response. When we think more about how to shift the topic into whatever suits our purposes, that about what the other person is saying. The opposite support response is when we are following along with the discussion in order to keep it flowing. In general, there is nothing wrong with either kind of response and a good discussion needs a suitable combination of both. When we are coaching, however, we need to be careful not to drive the discussion. We need to be aware of which response we are using. Support responses generally the gentler and safer option. We already mentioned keywords as a way to stay focused and his bit further, I will discuss an effective method for creating questions that bring the conversation forward without disrupting the topic. 21. Communication Enablers: Every serious traveler has experienced situations in which they need to communicate with someone, but don't know the language. It can be something as simple as buying a meal or getting a taxi, or something as complex as trying to explain what you do for a living, presumably some form of Scrum Mastering, Agile coaching. How did you explain agility if you only have five words in common? How about coaching? Without a common language communication becomes slow and error-prone and is limited to simple and concrete things. If you can not point to it or show a picture of it, it does not exist. Having sufficient command of a common language is one of the basic communication enablers. As the name suggests, the enablers help the flow of communication. If you are missing one or more enablers, communication. And thereby also coaching becomes difficult. If many or all enablers are missing, communication becomes impossible. A common culture is another enabler, similar to a common language. People from different cultures look at the world differently and this can cause misunderstandings during discussions. Cultural differences can also cause prejudices which tend to prevent people from entering a conversation with open minds. Listener biases and emotions likewise, make it difficult to communicate. As an Agile coach, you will often meet people who are just doing things wrong and refused to understand it. In fact, they may even try to convince you that your own methods will never work here. It may help to recognize that you are both biased in your own ways. Similarly, if a person is upset or sad, she may find it difficult to focus on the discussion. It could be a coral at home, some personal issues, perhaps bad news, sometimes just too little sleep or a headache. For communication to be effective. You will also need enough time at a distraction free environment. For example, one of my friends gets caught by moving images and finds it difficult to hold a discussion. If a television is on in the background, even an information radiator or a street window can be distracting. He solves this by picking seats that face away from the TV or window. Furthermore, the communication channels should be as wide as possible. Morse code or radio transmissions are at one extreme. These transmissions are very slow, unidirectional and require additional encoding and decoding. Video-conferencing tools are somewhere in the middle, although they have become much better over the last decade or so. Live face-to-face discussion is at the other extreme. In a live conversation, verbal communication is enhanced by postures, gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Information flows in both directions between the participants. 22. Active Listening: Virginia Satyr in 1964, was the first to recognize that listening consists of several stages. She divides reception into intake, meaning, significance, and response. As coaches, we'd like to use the simpler but still adequate active listening model, which contains the three phases of comprehending, retaining, and responding. In active listening. The first phase is comprehending. This includes hearing and understanding the words, sentences, and the context. As mentioned above, understanding the language and the cultural context is very important and even critical for comprehension. The second phase is retaining. The problem here is that speech is real-time wideband communication. The words come at you fast and it is not always possible to stop and consider a sentence from different perspectives or even ask the speaker to repeat. Other problems include the fact that short-term memory is lossy. Previous settings will be drowned out by new ones. Further, it sometimes happens that you underestimate the significance of something. When you first hear it. Later you get more information and realized that the speaker made some important point previously, but you can no longer remember exactly what it was. Is also easy to lose attention, especially in one-way presentations or in other situations where you are not expected to contribute. The third phase is responding, which includes both verbal and nonverbal responses. Body language has simple thing like raising a finger can be a powerful way of reacting without actually breaking the flow of the speaker. Verbal responses come on different levels. We can repeat what we just heard word by word. We can paraphrase the message where we can add our own reflections to it. We might also bring the topic forward by replying and support or in contradiction, or perhaps shift the topic to something else. The good news is that listening and responding is a skill at which you can become better. Let's focus on a model that may help you understand how listening works. 23. The Three Levels of Listening: There are different ways of listening, some of which are more suitable and some less suitable for coaching. Kimsey house, et al. 2011 describes three levels of listening at approximately mapped to First-person the internal listening focusing on me. Second-person that focus listening, focusing on you. And third-person view, the global listening focusing on us. Let's describe these listening levels and reflect on how they can be useful for an Agile coach. Level one, internal listening, subjective, and Level one listening. The narrator's story is reflected through the listener's own experiences and memories. Keywords remind you of episodes or topics that are of interest to you, but not necessarily to the speaker. It can trigger a premature reply and unexpected shift response that cuts the flow and steers the discussion off topic. For example, when hearing about somebody's misfortunes on the way to work, the listener may be prompted to tell about her own commute. Or when hearing somebody complained about a problem, the listener may feel obliged to solve it. Or when the speaker mentions a theory or method, the listener maybe lead to give a lecture on the topic complete with interesting examples. Sometimes people just feel the need to vent and do not want much more than T and sympathy, compassion and support. Other times they might be hoping for concrete advice related to some issue and might not be interested in hearing tangential stories. The speaker may be halfway through a story when she is interrupted and not allowed to finish. And all of these cases, the shift response may be quite rude to the original speaker. People may get the perception that the responder is selfish, trying to hijack the discussion or one-upping in an attempt to impress. Of course Level one listening can also inject new and interesting information into a discussion. When mentoring, it can be useful to share personal experiences. A drink and a funny anecdote told at a party may trigger more drinks and even funny or anecdotes. In coaching conversations. However, level one is mostly out of place and should be used with care. Level to focus listening passive. In level 2 listening, the listener is fully focused on sucking in information and committing it to memory. The story is heard without filters and the listener is almost sitting in the narrator's chair. This can be a very effective way of learning about the other person. I use the vibe model to remember what to observe when listening. Voice, the intonation, energy level, size and grunts. Information, verbal choice of words, what is said, what is left unsaid and nonverbal? Shrugging, pointing, body language, hand gestures, changes in posture, facial expressions, et cetera. Emotions. Is the person coming across as happy, sad, distressed, calm, energetic, passive, neutral, etc. The main drawback of level 2 listening is that you sometimes forget to participate enough in the discussion. And this can make the speaker nervous or destroy. This is because people subconsciously search for feedback while speaking. If the feedback is missing or contradictory, the speaker gets confused and doesn't know how to continue. Most people just butter to a stop thinking that the listener is trying to be mean or sarcastic. As a coach, this is not the message you want to send. Level free global listening. Listening with empathy. Everything is included in the listening. The speaker's tone of voice, body language, changes in energy level, et cetera. The listener is not only listening to the voice and words of the speaker, but also actively follows the nonverbal cues. Global listening requires patients and curiosity and the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the speaker. Humans use body language and facial expressions as well as prosody. That tone of voice, syllable stress, and rhythm when we communicate, nonverbal cues give additional information that can be very useful in a coaching conversation. Often the queue support the verbal message, but sometimes they can seem irrelevant or even conflicting. Conflict and words and body language could, for example, indicate that the other person is stressed or distracted. Other times you can pick up non-verbal information that changes or even inverts the meaning of the words. Sarcasm, for example, relies on tuning the verbal message. Just write. While people can express sarcasm just by choosing the appropriate or inappropriate words is much easier if they can use non-verbal channels as well. Non-verbal communication is often more honest than verbal communication. That is, have somebody might say one thing yet make it apparent from their stance and the tone they used that they would rather say something else. There are also micro-expressions, visible emotions like disgust, anger, and fear that flicker over the face for a fraction of a second. While they are difficult to catch, they are also almost impossible to suppress. People who know what to look for might gain a lot of information, such as whether the other person is being truthful or not. That's said in the context of Agile coaching, we are more interested in setting up a safe and constructive environment than constantly assessing the honesty of the coachee. Body language is too large and FASEA topic to fit in here. So I will not go into detail. My message to you is to watch for gestures, postures, emotions, inflections, pauses, et cetera, that indicate whether the coachee is alert and interested in the conversation. Combine this information with the spoken words to gain a more complete understanding of what is going on. In addition to the three levels of listening, there are also several ways of not listening. One might ignore the other person completely or half listen while doing other things. Obviously, these are not good approaches for an Agile coach. If you find yourself distracted to the point of listening with a half-year only or briefly ignoring the other person, the best thing you can do is apologize and either break the discussion or continue with renewed focus. There is nothing particularly good or bad in any of the three levels. In fact, in a normal social conversation, all three levels are needed in suitable amounts in coaching conversations. However, level one and to some extent also Level 2 can disturb the balance of the discussion and undermine the trust between cocci and coach. This is why an Agile coach should continuously be aware of which level she is listening at and try to move towards levels 23. 24. Handle a Coaching Conversation: A coaching conversation is not just small talk about how things are going or not going. Coaching conversations are for committed individuals or teams that want to make a significant change, will get wiser about an important matter. To help you succeed as a coach, you're going to apply a structure to the coaching conversation. This helps you in the coachee or team to focus on the important topics and find specific actions to carry out as results of the conversation. Is important to remember that a coaching conversation is something that you designed together with the persons you are working with. At the moment when the conversation is wanted. Coach, you never take the GOCE or team to places they do not want to go. This would be strictly out of line. You should never guide the content of the discussion nor force somebody into a discussion. What do you do instead is helped them to go where they wanna go while helping them reflect on what is important. As the coach, your task is to make sure that the environment is right. Try to ensure that all of them are in place. We mentioned before the important communication enablers. Allocating enough time and setting up a distraction free environment is easy. But if there are large cultural differences or you lack a common language, you may have to reconsider whether the conversation is worth having it all. I have found that many people do not know what coaching looks like. Sometimes they just need to vent or want some advice and get upset when you start by asking questions. In such situations, I have found it useful to ask for permission to coach, for example, by saying, Is it okay if I ask you some questions to help you achieve the results you want to achieve. 25. Structure of a Coaching Conversation: As shown here, coaching conversation is conducted on two levels. First one is the conversation level. The conversation level is where the actual conversation happens. Here you are using the levels of listening, showing curiosity and forming questions based on keywords as we discussed previously. The coachee or team are also on this level as they answer your questions. The second level is the metal level. The middle level is where you are observing, reflecting, and designing the conversation. Here you are deciding which powerful questions to ask, which hypotheses to formulate and in which direction to take the conversation next. As a coach, imagine yourself as having a third eye observing the conversation from the metal level and your awareness about the flow of the conversation. The answers you get will help you make the right decisions. As the coach, you are constantly acting on both levels. The coachee or team is primarily on the conversation level, but will from time to time be invited to the metal level by you. As mentioned, you will from time to time invite the coachee or team to join you at the mental level. The purpose for this is to have a conversation about the conversation, to collaborate on designing the conversation, reflect on the learning so far, and make decisions about where to go next. There are normally at least three opportunities for meeting at the mental level. One, when you are establishing a contract for the conversation to when you were having a timeout during the conversation? Free, when you are concluding the conversation. At the very start of the conversation, you should spend a little time on making contact with the ones you are coaching. Establishing contact helps people relax and feel confident in speaking freely. This is small talk and chit chat, talking about the weather, the traffic, How's your family, et cetera? Keep in mind that you should start steering towards starting the actual coaching conversation before too long. 26. Establishing the Contract: When you are establishing the contract, you invite the other part to talk about the conversation you're about to have. The contract consists of an agreement that you will have a coaching conversation. The ground rules for the conversation and the goal for the color. First of all, it should be clear for both parties that you are not just having a little chat. You're about to enter a serious conversation which might include both sensitive information and personal decisions. This expectation is sometimes implicit in the invitation, but it doesn't hurt to make it explicit. If you are in a discussion already and realized that it might turn into a coaching conversation. You might ask. Is it okay if I ask you some questions to help you solve this problem? You can also set up a later meeting in a similar way. Should we sit down tomorrow and have a coaching conversation about this topic? You will also need to establish the ground rules of the coaching conversation. This normally includes a statement of confidentiality from your side, as well as the promise of an emergency exit for the coachee or individual team members. For confidentiality typically use the simple and strict Vegas rule that we described earlier. However, if the team you are coaching is large and the atmosphere and the organization is sufficiently constructive, forgiving in supporting. You could also consider the Chatham House Rule. It states that all participants are free to use any information, but are not allowed to reveal homemade any comment. In recurring meetings, the rules quickly become implicit and you don't need to repeat them. But when you are coaching someone for the first time, you will have to explicitly set down the rules. I have a kind of boilerplate that I used that goes something like this. What does the topic you want to elaborate and get insights on? How can I best serve you during this conversation. Other questions you especially want me to ask or questions you absolutely do not want me to ask. When this conversation is over, where do you expect to be in? What do you hope to have learned? Now the actual coaching conversation can begin. Start by picking out keywords from the goals you just agreed on and formulate a question or several questions from that. 27. Making Regular Timeouts: During the conversation, you should from time to time, make a timeout to check up on the conversation. Look at the clock and the timebox, summarize the learning so far and decide where to go next. Checkups helped to co-design the conversation on the fly with the purpose of bringing the most possible value into it. Think of it as a sort of in sprint, inspect and adapt cycle on the metal level. You can use checkups when you feel the conversation is at a crossroads in which you have to decide which path to take next. The humble and unbiased do not take for granted that your personal decision will be the best path. Instead, ask the ones you are coaching what they think and follow their choice. Remember, it is not about you, it is all about them. You can also use check-ups to renegotiate the goal. If you and the other person realized that another topic seems to be more important, you can make as many checkups as you feel necessary. Asking questions like let me summarize the discussion so far we have been discussing and figuring out that do you wonder expand more on this? Would you rather move on and look at other options? What would that be? Let's look at where we are in this conversation. As I see it. We can either go in the direction of or in the direction of. You might see a third direction. Where do you wanna go from here? Let's step out of the conversation and check how we are doing. In the beginning of this conversation we agreed to speak about. But it seems to me that we are now discussing, what do you think? Should we return to the original topic or is the new topic more important to you? When the checkup is over, you can continue the conversation taking into account the decisions you have just made together. As an aside, I have found it useful to have a clock unobtrusively available. The simplest way is to put your wristwatch flat on the table beside your notepad. Smartwatches can be set to vibrate at certain points in time. Some smart phones can be configured to always show the time and there's a plethora of Timer apps. If all else fails, simply explained that you want to see how much time is left before you pull out your phone or watch. 28. Outcome, Plan and Feedback: By the end of the conversation, is time to come to a conclusion focusing on the specific steps the coachee or team is going to do in order to initiate the desired change. Have him, her or them summarize the conclusion, instead of you doing it, that fosters the sense of responsibility. Remember, it is not your solution, it's their solution. As a follow-up to the conversation is great practice to ask about what the next step will be, when this will be done, and how you will know that this has been achieved. Last question, the ones you coach will usually answer something like, I'll send you an email letting you know how it went and service to the other part, you could then reply. And if I do not receive this male, will it be helpful for you if I asked you about how it went? This attitude sharpens the awareness about the coaching conversation as something that serves a purpose rather than just being a chat about life, the universe, and everything. Finally, being a coach that wants to improve your skills. You should also ask for feedback about the coaching conversation. You can ask questions like, how is this conversation for you? What did I do that was especially useful for you. And which questions did I ask that were useless or disturbing for your understanding of the matter? Receive the feedback with gratitude and ask clarifying questions if you wish, but do not go into arguing about whether the feedback was right or wrong. You are asking for opinions and everyone is entitled to their own. The important matter is how the coachee or team experienced your coaching. There's most likely a point behind the feedback, regardless of whether you liked it or not. Just like you open the conversation. You can also be good to close down the conversation with chit chat and small talk as you collect your pens and papers and pack your bag. If you're meeting the coachee or the team again, you might also want to agree on the time and perhaps a topic or even an agenda for your next meeting. 29. Giving Constructive Feedback (Role Play): Well, thank you, Susie for taking the time to meet with me today. It really means a lot to me to be open and honest with you. Our work relationship is important to me, so I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me. I had something I wanted to talk to you about. Lately, I've been feeling like you haven't really been fully listening to me. Are really valuing or respecting any of my ideas are input. For example, the other day in our meeting, when I was, I was right in the middle of giving some giving an opinion on something. I felt like you interrupted me mid-sentence and never really came back to me. It made me feel like my feedback or my input was not valued. It also made me feel embarrassed in front of the other people in the meeting. So I just wanted to make you aware that that's how I felt, that that's hard to hear, but I appreciate you letting me know. I'm hearing that you're you're feeling embarrassed and not valued because I've interrupted you are cut you off. In meetings. I did feel a little embarrassed the other day. I didn't feel good. Yeah. I'm sorry. I have to admit this is something that I've received feedback on in the past. And so it's something that I really know that I need to work on. I really am committed to working on this and I'm going to really make an effort to be more self-aware and it would be helpful to me too, if, you know, you gave me some follow-up you back or I can check in with you later to make sure that I am giving you what you need. 30. Asking the Right Question: Asking the right questions is a challenging task, especially when you do not want to impose your own opinion on to the person or team you are talking to. Great coaching questions are open-ended, non judging and help foster new ideas and visions about possibilities. These kind of questions are called powerful questions. There are several approaches to creating powerful questions. They depend on which coaching school you are coming from. One approach is to practice a deck of questions until you know them by heart, which helps you choose the right one in a given situation. Another approach is to learn a strategy for designing the right questions as needed. One such strategy that I have found works particularly well with both individuals and teams is based on a model developed by Canadian Psychologist carl Tom. The Carl Tom approach has its roots in systemic theory. It encapsulates circularity in the understanding that each of us has a different perspective of the facts in a given situation and is entitled to that view. No one has monopoly on the truth. Indeed, different people can have very different perspectives and hence different understandings of what is happening and why. The model shows two-dimensions. Time is shown on the horizontal axis as the past and the future. On the vertical axis, we can find simple, what is obvious, evident, linear and complex, what is not evident? Multipath, circular. While time should be easy to understand. The concept of simplicity versus complexity may require a bit of explanation. In a simple and linear world, there is little room for doubt. Cause and effect relations are easy to see and everybody can correctly predict the result of any given action. In the complex world, however, you generally can't draw a straight line from cause to effect. There can be multiple interacting causes, not all of them visible. There may also be circular cause and effect chains of different lengths. For example, vicious loops and virtuous cycles. In a complex circular world, people may have quite different interpretations of why something happened the way it did, and sometimes even different opinions on what exactly happened. Powerful questions are anchored in all four quadrants of Carl Toms model. The powerful questions can be aimed either at what has already happened past oriented, or what could happen future-oriented. The powerful questions can also be designed on the presumption that there is one and only one truth. Linear questions will so that they acknowledged the diversity in our understanding of the truth. Circular questions. When we ask questions that are past oriented and linear, we ask questions like a detective in an interrogation, for example. What happened then? What kind of velocity did you have before that? When did it happen? How did it work out? Was that the PO or the customer? As a detective, we're looking for facts that help us understand the issue. Remember that facts are undisputable. Something either happened or it did not happen. All kinds of data, statistics, recordings, diaries, blog posts, e-mails, et cetera, are welcome. But even when people are in the same place, at the same time, they often end up with different observations. Memories have a tendency to evaporate over time. People fill in with assumptions when they don't have all the facts. This means that people can have very different interpretations of various events. Hidden assumptions are a major source of conflict and unearthing them can help immensely. When we ask questions that are past oriented and circular, we ask questions like an anthropologist doing research. We're looking for intentions and expanding our understanding of the intentions. For example, we could ask, what do you think was their motivation to do so? From which point of view could her action makes sense? But it'd be that they knew something that the rest of you did not. What could it be? Do you think she saw this as a problem at all? Future-oriented circular questions lower right, are intended to explore opportunities and different scenarios and expand possibilities. Here we ask questions like a future researcher, such as, what could you do to make things better? Is there something you could do to prevent this from happening in the future? Can you see a possible solution to this problem? It can also be useful to apply appreciative inquiry and helium tropism to explore a positive and compelling future rather than focus on the problems and issues. One trick is to ask a miracle question, something that suggests that a miracle has happened overnight. If you get them to work tomorrow and the problem has unexpectedly disappeared, How would you notice that? One day when you have solved this matter and look back on this period in time, which decisions did you make that made a difference? Questions in this future-oriented circular category might seem a bit strange at first, but give it a try. The advantage of questions like this is that they disconnect the person or team in front of you. From the constraints situation, air currently in. They free up energy to see new perspectives and decide on new courses of action based on those perspectives. They helped the person or team to see which part of the miracle or the desired future are already present today and how they can be used as stepping stones towards the goal. Finally, we can ask simple or linear future-oriented questions. These are the kind of questions that are captain would ask. They are more direct and practical, defining the next steps for the desired change. What does the first thing you're going to do now? Who do you need to talk to in order to move this forward? How can he or she helped you? How will I know that you have done this? Like at the end of retrospective, this is where specific tasks are defined and prepared for action. As the coach, your role is to ensure that the tasks are clear and simple, but also that the code sheet takes responsibility. When coaching someone. We are mostly looking at the future and that change we are going to make. However, from time to time, we must look back into the past to understand what has happened and why we are in the current situation. It is like driving a car. We're mostly looking at the windshield of the traffic in front of us. But from time to time, we also need to look in the rearview mirrors to know what is behind us. There is no specific route you must follow when using Carl Tom's discussion model. I've found that most of my coaching conversations tend to start in the detective dimension. Moving on to the perspective of an anthropologist. Then investigate is the future researcher. And finally ending up as the captain. This is the order in which I introduced the quadrants. In this section. You can imagine drawing the letter U over the figure starting from the upper left. The path is not necessarily linear though. On your way, you can jump back and forth as intuition tells you. You have already learned about conversation flow, active listening, and identifying keywords. You are now adding powerful questions to your toolbox of coaching skills. Asking powerful questions is a valuable coaching skill and one that can be improved with practice. When first exposed to powerful questions, your coachee or team members might think, what the heck is this guy up to? Especially questions from the anthropologist's perspective are usually grounded in the belief that behind any action there are good intentions. Not everybody believes in this postulate and we must admit that I also regularly have to remind myself about it. Nevertheless, taking this approach will let you help people reflect as well as help solving conflicts. Based on the prime directive of retrospectives by Norman Kirk. You may also find it useful to remember that in any given situation, people try to do the best they can with the information and tools they have. While powerful questions are useful, they are not a silver bullet. For example, as sometimes run across individuals or teams that feel powerless, suppressed, oppressed who are victimized. They may be stuck complaining about the past and refuse to move onto imagining a future. Yes. I tried something like that four years ago and it didn't work. There are strategies for dealing with such people, such as arranging a quick win in some area just to show that change can indeed happen, or enlisting managers to help. Although often the managers are part of the problem. 31. PART 3: Hold Effective 1-on-1s: As a coach, you want to help your coachee developed. In this section, I'm going to explain how to ever occurring structured coaching sessions with coachee's one on one sessions are regular meetings you have with a cocci or with each individual in a team. They can be conducted weekly or fortnightly and go from 30 to 60 minutes. The grow model is one of the more common coaching frameworks used by executive coaches and managers adopting a coaching approach, combining one on ones in the grow model will lead to setting a goal and then thinking deeply about how to achieve that goal by asking lots of open-ended questions on a regular basis. The grow model, relative simplicity and logic makes it easy to understand and adopt, yet organized in a way to encourage results. Use this model to help teams and individual employees improve performance, solve problems, make better decisions, learn new skills, and reach career goals. The grow model stands for Goal, reality, options. Wayforward. Please note that some models have a separate obstacles phase, but I like rolling the obstacles discussion into the reality phase and keeping the abbreviation simple. 32. GROW: Determining a Meaningful Goal: Coaching using the grow model begins with establishing a clear goal. Via their performance goal, a development goal, a decision to make, a problem to solve, or simply a goal for a particular coaching session, it is critical that this goal is represented in a way that will make it clear when it has been achieved. And a one-on-one meeting, the discussion starts by establishing a goal for the coachee. This gold can't be, your goal, has to be something that comes from an resonates with the person being coached. It is okay to help the coachee's brainstorm suggesting what areas in their professional life do they want to strengthen? For example, I wanted to be more comfortable and I have to present to the team, I wanted to be more confident about the quality of the code I write. What skills do they want to learn slash improved to help build their career? For example, I want to get certification x. I want to be able to contribute to architectural discussions. What habits slash behavior would they like to change? For example, I would like to listen more. I want to get to work before 10:00 AM. The goal is central to the grow model. With a well-structured and achievable goal. The rest of the gross steps are much more manageable to ensure clear and consistent goals, especially when working with a team, consider using the smart goal format. Let's see how to do it in the next sections. 33. What is a SMART Goal: A smart goal is a goal where the smart criteria have been met. Smart goals stand for, ask for a specific. Have you ever struggled to get started on a task because you don't really understand what it is, where the task seems too big and fuzzy. Well, you're not alone. Many people struggle with getting started on their goals simply because they haven't made their goals specific enough. But it's well worth the effort. The more specific goals are, the easier they are to achieve. When we're clear on what we want, It makes it easy to make decisions and take action because we know exactly what we're trying to do. M for measurable. How will you know you've achieved your goal unless you can measure it. If you can't prove you've completed the goal, then it's not measurable, which means it's not a smart goal. Measurability is a very important part of making your goals specific. A4 achievable. We can't control faith or other people. For a goal to be smart and must be achievable by us and within our control. Otherwise, it's not a goal, it's a wish. Or for realistic. It's important to feel good about your goals. When we set ourselves a goal that's out of our reach, we often end up feeling overwhelmed. We self judge, and sometimes we give up altogether. Truly smart goals feel great. This means it's important to factor in existing commitments and lifestyle when setting goals. Smart goals and actions need to be challenging enough to inspire you. And they need to be realistic enough that you believe you can achieve it. It's all about setting yourself up for success. T, for time-based. Why? Smart goals and actions are always time-bound. In other words, they have a date by when do you plan to complete them without a date? There's less incentive to work toward our goals. Where are we aiming at? We're also busy. How are we going to fit more activity into our lives? How do we know how to prioritize our activities unless we have a deadline to know this goal slash action is important to us. Also, an action plan to achieve a goal will be very different in terms of effort, solutions and help required if the deadline is a month from now, as compared to a deadline of one year from now. Setting a date allows people to work backwards and figure out an appropriate action plan. A date also gives us the opportunity to visualize completion. It allows you to imagine that time in the future when you have completed it. And that helps you commit to the goal. 34. How to Set SMART Goals: Goals should be specific. The more specific a goal is, the easier it is to measure, decide whether it is achievable. And short is relevant to other goals slash vision, and to determine a realistic time-frame. So rather than setting a vague goal like get fit, think about what getting fit means to you at this time. What made you want to get fit? Maybe you tried going on a run with a friend and couldn't keep up. So a more specific goal might be run for three kilometers without stopping. Or you may have taken your blood pressure and realized it is a bit too high. Your overall goal maybe something like reduce my systolic pressure that below 120 and diastolic pressure to below 80. Even though this goal is specific regarding results, it doesn't tell you what you need to do each day to achieve it, you may create some sub-goals that if you accomplish them, will help you complete the top-level goal. Lose 10 kilograms, establish a habit of running 30 minutes a day. Okrs help structure goals, objectives, and key results. Okr is a framework used for setting goals. Or objectives are defined and tracked along with their outcomes. Okay, Our consists of a clearly defined goal and two to five key results. These are tracked using specific measures. Okay, our aims to achieve objectives with well-defined, measurable and concrete actions. Results can be measured using different scales, such as a 0 to 100 scale percentage or a currency value. For example, dollar value. The goal reduce blood pressure will be an objective which could have reducing weight and establishing an exercise routine as key results. If we achieve the key results, we hypothesized that the objective will be met. If not, then we can try a different set of key results. Goals should be measurable. He must not only be able to tell whether you have achieved the goal, but also gauge how far away you are from reaching it. A vague goal, which is hard to measure, is easy to neglect. Having a measurable goal allows you to not only have a satisfying sense of accomplishment when you have undeniably achieve what you have set out to do. But it can also gives you a sense of satisfaction when you have haven't reached your goal, but can see that you have made progress, which can help you continue to work towards achieving your goal. Goals should be achievable. That's it is that in ward, the Victoria strategists only seeks battle after the victory has been one x1, x2 Art of War. It is crucial to settle on goals that are realistic and achievable. If you work at unattainable goals, you will eventually give up in frustration or may even cause yourself harm. Life as a race only with yourself. Take the time to build a rhythm, building on small successes, rather than being crushed under an enormous failure. Don't stress about getting your first goal right. This is not the only goal you will set in your life. Hopefully, you will regularly set and reach your goals slowly and steadily building momentum as you move slightly out of your comfort zone each time. As you get better at setting and reaching your goals, what you will correctly consider as achievable will expand. Goals should be relevant. We can only ever hold one or two long-term top-level goals at a time. We may also have established a life vision or have an idea of where we are trying to steer ourselves. You may have a vision of being a successful entrepreneur or an amazing parent. When you set your goals, you have to make sure they don't contradict your top-level goals or vision. Other goals you are working towards. If you are trying to lose weight and maybe competing in an eating competition may not yield the best overall results. Relevant goals also have context and a clear why. This goal, if I achieve it, will help me do x, which would help with y. If your goals align it and you've clearly understand why you are doing that, then it much more likely that you will stick at them. Even when things don't go smoothly. Goals should be time-bound. It is easy to neglect a goal that is not framed with an end date. A goal like I will lose 10 kilograms, can always be postponed till it becomes meaningless. As opposed to I will lose 10 kilograms by the end of winter. If the end of winter is 12 weeks away and you have already lost four kilograms, then you know, you need to lose half a kilogram of week on average to hit your goal. Always be safe. If you get close to the end of winter and you can't get the last four kilograms off. Don't starve yourself. It is okay to adjust your goals. Pat yourself on the back for getting as far as you haven't then adjust the goal. Give yourself another three months to lose that last four kilograms in a healthy and sustainable way. 35. GROW: Examining the Current Reality: The goal now established it is time to work for the practicalities of how to achieve it. Firstly, we look at the current situation, the reality. The current reality is where the client is now. What are the issues, challenges, how far they are away from their goal? Our view of the world is always distorted. What we think of as true as merely a construct based on our internal model of the world. This view of reality may still be useful or not useful. The reality phase aims to try and help the person being coached to establish a helpful and healthy view of reality. This reality is then used as a basis for the rest of the grow model. You can help the person being coached by asking open questions like, Tell me about what is happening now. What barriers or obstacles will you face? What has prevented you from achieving this goal in the past? Here's a pro tip. Never judge the person you are coaching or their situation. They need to feel safe to come to the realization they need. Your job is to facilitate their journey, not to judge them. These questions are great conversation starters that the core issue slash blockers slash shift in perception required usually live deeper. Using a technique like the five whys can be very helpful. In the context of a one-on-one meeting. The Five Whys is merely asking why five times for an open question. And sure the person being coached understands what is happening. And that the y's are not there to annoy them, but to try and find the root cause. If you're working as a coach in the same organization as the person being coached, you probably have some valuable insight into what problems that person needs to overcome and what value and strength they can leverage. A successful reality phase should establish a clear picture of what the current situation slash environment is like. What obstacles and challenges might prevent them from achieving their goal. 36. GROW: Exploring the Possible Options: We have a clear idea of what we want to achieve and why the goal. And we have a good idea of the current situation including obstacles slash challenges, the reality. So now we need to explore what options we have to help achieve the goal. Options can include physical and mental tools to help. For example, if trying to improve one's fitness than exploring nearby gyms and learning about willpower models wouldn't be helpful. Options could also include possible support structures and opportunities. For example, if we wanted to be more confident presenting ideas to the team, joining a Toastmasters group and volunteering to talk at an industry conference would help build support and structure for achieving the goal. Tools that can help uncover and develop options include open-ended questioning like, what do you think are some available options? What the advantages slash disadvantages of option X? If you didn't have any restrictions or constraints, what would you do? While answering these questions? Develop a mind map on the whiteboard. Don't be afraid to go shallow and brought initially and then dive deeper later. Also make it clear that there are no such things as silly options. Put some outrageous options on the whiteboard. This helps to come up with creative and out of the box ideas. Here's another tip. Don't ask multiple questions at the same time. Ask one open-ended question at a time and ensure the person being coached has time to consider the question and answer it fully. The less talking you do, the better. A productive options phase should provide a list of viable options with the ones that are easy to implement and deliver the most value at the top of the list. The person being coached should also have a clear idea of what they need to do to take advantage of these options. And their progress can be tracked at future one on one meetings. For example, if they want to join a gym, then that can be broken down into steps like develop a list of criteria for Jim cost, accessibility, locker storage and Swimming Pool. Find five closest gyms and visit and joined best Jim. 37. GROW: Planning the Way Forward: We have a plan. We know what we need to do to achieve the goal. We now need to shift into action. Thinking through what needs to be done, how you will do it, and how you will feel when it is done, can help move one interaction. Discuss questions like, when are you going to start? What are you going to do and when? Who can help you? How can you improve your chances of doing it? Here is a tip. Do not ask leading questions which indicate the answer you want. It is easy to get impatient and push the person being coached into saying what you want to hear. But this is not helpful. The person being coached is going through their own journey and need to arrive at answers that resonate with them. Try and encourage the person being coached to start small. You want to build a habit of working towards the goal a little each day. It is better to be consistent and chip away at the goal a little each day. Especially if the goal is trying to work on a habit. Starting small and building on small wins builds momentum. What do you may find is starting slow results in more significant momentum later on, then going all in from the start. A successful way forward phase of the grow model will leave the person being coached with a sense of confidence and excitement. They know precisely what they need to do and when to achieve their goal. They are chomping at the bit to start. 38. Example of One on One (Role Play): Okay. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I really needed somebody to bounce some ideas off of. I've just been feeling lately like I'm kind of bored in my job and I feel really underutilized with with the skills that I have, I feel like I can bring a lot more to the table. So it sounds like your goal here is that you want to feel more challenged? Yeah. And maybe like, your strengths and skills are more fully utilized? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So what's happening currently might be getting in the way of that. Well, I feel like a lot of the responsibilities that I have in my job right now. I've mastered a long time ago and I don't have a whole lot of room in my schedule to do much more than that. Yet, I would like to try to find some room in my schedule to do some more challenging things. So it sounds like looking at some support or resources from your manager or within the company to see who, like be able to be cross-trained or take some of them more administrative or right? Right. Lower skill, right. Tasks off your desk, right? Yeah. So have you thought about how you might go about accomplishing that? I do need to find ways to take on bigger responsibilities. Maybe stretch myself a little bit, take on some projects that are more challenging, more interesting to me. And that helped me grow and feel like I'm contributing at a higher level. So I need to really be proactive about that. And I think so it sounds like a conversation with your manager around shifting some of the tasks and also more proactively looking for opportunities, right? For you. A way to say it, to do some more challenging work. Those sound like good options are good places to start? Yeah. Okay. So what could be your next step? I'm currently having regular one on ones with my manager, so I just need to make sure that I am bringing that up on a regular basis and we kind of come up with a plan and we stay on track and we have deadlines and goals for those for each of those steps. And so that's kinda my plan. Well, that sounds like a good place to start. Yeah. And if you want me to follow up and check in on you, I'm happy to do so or if you want to come talk to me and let me know how things are going and I'm here to support you. 39. Don’t Rush the Process: When running one on one meetings, it is best not to let them drag on too long 30 minutes to an hour maximum. Running an entire grow process would not be realistic in such a short time frame. However, the growth process can benefit from periods of reflection between sessions. The subconscious needs time to digest and consider. So setting some homework between one-on-one meetings would be advantageous. In your initial meeting, you can take the person being coached through the grow model and explain to them how it can help them go through setting smart goals and ask them to reflect on possible goals that resonate with them would help in and out of work. You can set homework like generating mindmaps, creating various option assessment artifacts were researching before relevant phases. Don't make homework a hassle. Start with simple tools that require minimal effort. And as they get more engaged, you can slowly increase the sophistication and needed work. This is a coaching session. So the less talking you do, the better. Don't force uncomfortable silences. You can ask open questions and make suggestions. But if you find yourself yapping stopped. 40. WRAPPING UP: During this course, I have explained that becoming an agile coach is a journey that has no end. By coaching and observing others coach, you build up your own collection of patterns and tools. Were a junior coach will have to rely on written material in the support of others. And experienced coach can quickly form and validate hypotheses and pick the right tools from the toolbox. I defined agile coaching as the art of helping people see reality using an Agile and Lean perspective and change their paradigms, habits, and roles accordingly. I observed that coaching is something you can try out and adopt gradually. Fooled by tool and technique, by technique and the skills and tools taught in this course, we'll show useful in many different situations. Then I explained that there are five stanzas for Agile coaches. You should always be aware of which coaching stance you are taking in any given moment. You will change stances regularly as the situation dictates and you will need to take a different approach in each stance. Coaching. Coaches operate under the assumption that the person they are helping has the knowledge and ability to solve their own problems. Teaching. Sometimes the Agile coach needs to reinforce known principles and practices is needed and assumes that teacher stance, mentoring, mentoring stands is usually applied by the Agile coach when deeper understanding of a common topic is needed or underlying principles need to be clarified. Role modelling. What this role entails is deep understanding of the mindset, practices in theory, as well as experience working with a number of frameworks under the Agile umbrella term. Advising. The advisor stance is usually assumed when individuals would like to get information on a specific topic, scenario, problem, or question. Then I have explained that a coaching relationship can only exist within these three restrictions. A coaching relationship is primarily a powerless environment. Secondly, coaching relationship is a room with confidentiality. Finally, you do not restart a coaching conversation once you have completed it, always keep them in mind and when necessary, make them explicit to the persons you are coaching. Then I've emphasized the importance of being curious and keeping track of keywords. I mentioned the five whys technique to find the root cause of a problem. In a nutshell, don't make assumptions. Just go and see. When it comes to listening and responding. I've explained that a coach favors support response over shift response because it is generally the gentler and safer option. Communication enablers are common language, common culture awareness of the listeners biases and emotions. Enough time at a distraction free environment, and a wide communication channel. Active listening model contains the three phases of comprehending, retaining, and responding. Three levels of listening. Our first-person view me, second-person view you, and third-person view us. I also shared that a coaching conversation is conducted on two levels. The conversation level is where the actual conversation happens. The metal level is where you are observing, reflecting, and designing the conversation. As the coach, you are constantly acting on both levels. At the very start of the conversation, you should spend a little time on making contact with the ones you are coaching. When you are establishing the contract, you invite the other part to talk about the conversation you are about to have. During the conversation, you should from time to time, make a timeout to check up on the conversation. By the end of the conversation, it is time to come to a conclusion focusing on the specific steps the coachee's going to do in order to initiate the desired change. Remember that great coaching questions are open-ended, non judging and help foster new ideas and visions about possibilities. Powerful questions are anchored in all four quadrants of Carl Toms model. The powerful questions can be aimed either at what has already happened past oriented, or what could happen future-oriented. I've found that most of my coaching conversations tend to start in the detective dimension. Moving onto the perspective of an anthropologist, then investigate that future researcher and finally ending up at the captain. I also covered how to hold effective one-on-one meetings by using the grow model. Let's recap. One on one sessions are regular meetings you have with a cocci or with each individual in a team. They can be conducted weekly or fortnightly and go from 30 to 60 minutes. The grow model is one of the more common coaching frameworks used by executive coaches and managers adopting a coaching approach, combining one on ones in the grow model will lead to setting a goal and then thinking deeply about how to achieve that goal by asking lots of open-ended questions on a regular basis. The grow model, relative simplicity and logic makes it easy to understand and adopt, yet organized in a way to encourage results. Use this model to help teams and individual employees improve performance, solve problems, and make better decisions, learn new skills, and reach career goals. The grow model stands for in reality, options. Wayforward. A smart goal is a goal where the smart criteria have been met. Smart Goals stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Okrs help structure goals, objectives, and key results. Okr is the framework used for setting goals. Or objectives are defined and tracked along with their outcomes. Okay, our consists of a clearly defined goal and two to five key results. These are tracked using specific measures. Okay, Our aims to achieve objectives with well-defined, measurable and concrete actions. Results can be measured using different scales, such as a 0 to 100 scale percentage or a currency value, for example, dollar value. Here are some questions you may ask to determine meaningful goals. What areas in their professional life do they want to strengthen? What skills do they want to learn? Slash improved to help build their career. What habits slash behavior would they like to change? When examining the current reality? Discuss questions like, Tell me about what is happening now. What barriers or obstacles will you face? What has prevented you from achieving this goal in the past? Explore the possible options with questions like, what do you think are some available options? What the advantages slash disadvantages of option X? If you didn't have any restrictions or constraints, what would you do? While answering these questions? Develop a mind map on the whiteboard. Last to them. Ask these questions to shift the plan into action. When are you going to start? What are you going to do and when? Who can help you? How can you improve your chances of doing it? As mentioned before, being able to coach individuals as an Agile coach is a long journey, but a beautiful one. For sure it takes time to know how to listen and keep a conversation flowing without actually steering it. How to open up a new coaching conversation and guided to closure, and how to formulate questions so that the coachee provides the content while you provide the structure. But no worries, as jordan sparks said, take one step at a time. There's no need to rush. This course has equipped you to meet those challenges. I'm sure it will help you in your Agile journey.