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

Resilience

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Change & Resilience

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Change & Resilience

This post is an Eric Hannan, two-fer. Two thought-provoking LinkedIn posts by my friend and colleague, Eric Hannan that I thought I would share.

Change

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eric-hannan-0820516b_change-changemanagement-coaching-activity-6916471769499353088-jGq0?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

Change seems to only happen at two points:

  1. Someone is ecstatic about the change

  2. They feel the pain of the current situation and see the need for a change


This is probably overly simplistic as there may have been extraneous variables related to the pain that caused person number one to seek change, but this isn't a peer-reviewed journal entry this is just some musings of my mind.

I've been thinking about change recently because I was working on a new process for our organization and upon reflection, I realized I am square in the middle of one and two.

Each changing point requires different actions to accomplish the change. Point One may require more curation in my opinion, as the stress that comes with the change may thwart full adoption unless people embrace not just the enthusiasm for the change but also the value of the change. The perceived value of the change must be greater than the stress of the change otherwise people will abandon the change when things get rocky. Thus, consistent curation of enthusiasm and value (they why) must be done.

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Exploring Resilience

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Exploring Resilience

This is something that’s been running around my brain for quite a while now. The notion of resilience.

  • What is it?

  • Why is it important?

  • And, how do we build muscle around it?

I think the genesis point for me is when my friend Mary Thorn shared her intent to do a keynote focused on the term Grit or Gritty, at the 2020 Spring AgileDev conference. If you know Mary, she is incredibly gritty. Mary is smart and experienced. But her ability to preserver over diversity and around resistance is what makes her a phenomenal coach.

Here I want to explore it as the term resilience and see where things go…

What is it?

There were two definitions that came from a dictionary search—

1. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

2. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

I also discovered this definition from the American Psychological Association—

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.

Why it’s important?

I liken resilience as an extension of our fight or flight reactions. It’s how we recover, how we respond, and how we grow.