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

Self-awareness

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ACGW—The Importance of Self Mastery

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ACGW—The Importance of Self Mastery

I’ll get right down to it. I think the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel figure needs to be updated. Not in a drastic way, but more to emphasize the importance of Self Mastery in all aspects of an Agile Coaches daily journey in skills and competency development. 

This post is inspired by one that Joel Bancroft-Connors wrote about the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel on LinkedIn and several replies from Huy Nguyen. Here’s the first—

As I've said before, the self-mastery thing in the middle can sometimes dwarf the rest. There's a lot more that goes into that little circle - and it's easier said than done. Everything gets limited by the person embodying the change - especially if they've never dealt with their own issues before.
Good luck with that. And I’m being serious.

I’m reacting to Huy’s point about the importance of, size of, and understanding of self-mastery in the context of the Wheel. He’s right, self-mastery is the most important, least understood, and hardest to navigate competency.

When mentoring fellow agile coaches, I always start with exploring their self-mastery. And, it’s not self-mastery in a vacuum or as an independent competency, but instead related to each of the Wheels’ other competencies.

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Coachability

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Coachability

In 2018 I wrote a post entitled—The First Rule of Agile Coaching – Be Coachable!

It’s one of the most popular and re-posted of my blog posts. And its core theme is the notion of a coach—

  • Consistently walking their talk

  • Having and growing their self-awareness

  • Having a continuous growth mindset

  • And ultimately, being coachable

But one of the things I struggle with is that, beyond the “be coachable” diatribes, I don’t have tangible tools to offer. Yes, I firmly know what it looks like to me, but it’s hard to share that (or explain or expect) that of others.

And then I stumbled upon a wonderful book…

The Book

I saw this post by Pete Berridge sharing his thoughts on Kevin Wilde’s book entitled—Coach-ability – The Leadership Superpower.

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The 10 Rules of Agile Coaching

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The 10 Rules of Agile Coaching

I wrote this article in 2018 and it’s received quite a bit of attention over the years. I recently saw it reposted again by Comparative Agility and it made me think about the notion of “rules of Agile Coaching”.  

Not don’t get me wrong. I’m not a rules guy. I actually wasn’t that fond of the title of the first article. I guess I may have been inspired by the quote—The first rule of fight club…

But all of that being said, as I mulled it over again, other aspects of agile coaching emerged that I thought I’d share with you. And, if one rule was good, then certainly ten are better. So, here we go—

The 1st Rule of Agile Coaching…

Be coachable