Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
We've Moved
We've Moved
Walking Their Talk, Sustainability, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sustainability

I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef

After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.

That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler 

Erich said—

Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.

Sustainability
Short-takes, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sandy’s Take
Sandy’s Take
Short-takes, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
Coaching, ACGW, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building. 

But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—

  • Making + taking the time.

  • Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.

  • Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.

  • Meeting them where they are.

  • Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.

  • Connecting with their language, not yours.

Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

Coaching nuance

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Agile Coaching != Life Coaching...Really?

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Agile Coaching != Life Coaching...Really?

Brett Maytom posted some thoughts on LinkedIn, including an article entitled Exposing the Truth: Life Coaches Masquerading as Agile Coaches. As of March 2, 2023, there were 69 comments on LinkedIn to the post. 

Brett is a trainer with Scrum.org (PST) with over 20 certifications posted on his LinkedIn profile. Simply as a reference, I saw no certifications or training mentioned around any aspect of agile, professional, or life coaching, which I found interesting. He only references himself once as an agile coach in his experience history from 2014 – 2016.

In one of the comments, Brett gives some additional background context behind the article—

Context:
One ruffled my feathers last week, and what they were saying just had no business or product sense.

A few people in my network and local communities are like this. They only talk about agile in the context of a life coach for a few years now. I have tolerated it because I know them personally. I have now had enough of it.

Also, many companies promote life coaching courses, claiming they need this. People are getting suckered into that.

I attended an "agile coaching" course in 2014 (ish), which was more of a life coaching course. I was not impressed. Ken was on it too, and he walked out after the first half day. I should have too but I did not as I traveled to USA for it.