Software Engineering :: Agile :: Courses :: Becoming an Agile Coach :: 4. Coaching Skills and Mindset
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As you strive to either hire a coach for your organization or become one yourself, there are key skills and experience to have.
An agile coach needs to have deep, practical experience with agile processes. While it would be great to say there's a minimum number of years necessary to become a coach, it really isn't that simple.
NOTE: You can coach other scrum masters when you are one yourself. If you happen to be the first scrum master in an organization, it is very likely you'll end up coaching the other scrum masters by default.
A coach should be skilled at starting up agile teams...
It doesn't sound like much, but it's much broader than you might think. Consider this: when starting an agile team, you're building on your practical agile experience by teaching others how to do it. Further, you're going to have to coach the roles and the entire team on practices and interpersonal skills. Finally, you'll have to help the new team master conflict.
- Teach others agile practices
- Coach on roles, practices, and interpersonal skills
- Help the team master conflict resolution.
Starting an agile team isn't as simple as laying out the agile framework and letting them go. It's the deepest coaching experience and the most important foundation you can establish.
Self-mastery is knowing your tendancies and shifting them, in the moment.
The hardest coaching skill to develop or look for is the skill of self-mastery. It's a journey with no finish line. The coach needs continuous reflection and willingness to adapt. It helps to have a mentor, a more experienced coach to help you. Ask them to provide you with feedback on blindspots you may have.
Coaching is a partnership. The person or group you're coaching are your partners. They've invited you, the coach, to help the on their journey to learn, grow, and change.
As a coach, you need to beleive the coachee is someone who is smart and resourceful enough to identify and solve problems themselves. Your goal is to support them on their own path to discovery and celebrate their milestones with them. You help them by both teaching and mentoring. Your goal is to trigger different perspectives (transformative moments) within the coachee.
- Understanding of the partnership
- Beleif in the coachee
- Ability to trigger transformation (transformative evolution)
Scenario: team member doesn't want to share their work with the team members until they decide it's done by their own standards
As an Agile expert, you know that sharing along the way builds great products and team members... At the same time, you're seeing a whole person who perhaps fears vulnerability.
You're also seeing the boarder Agile perspective of transparency.
As the coachee becomes more comfortable with the tactical sharing of their work, it can become a transformative evolutionary moment for them.
It helps a person be vulnerable at any moment, thus deepening all the relationships they have across their whole life experience. This is what it means to have a coaching mindset. You see the whole fully capable person and partner with them to find the transformation they want.
When you maintain a coaching mindset, you can help your coachee achieve the dream of they are striving for.
Curiosity is something that all coaches need to harness in themselves. When you do harness it, it deepens your relationships with your coachees. This is because, when you're truly curious about something, you step out of the perspective of an expert. As soon as you remove the expert view, you move deeply into the partnership with your coachee.
It's not enough to simply ask questions. It's really about asking the right questions.
My son would come home from school and I'd say, "How was school today?". He'd reply with a one word answer, usually the unenlightening word "fine", and that was the end of the conversation. However, I was asking the wrong questions. We've all been trained during our school years to ask information gathering questions. My son answered my question and I gathered information from his response; however, every time I asked this type of closed question, I missed a chance to deepen our shared experience. Then I began asking different questions. I moved to open questions like "what was the best thing that happened at school today?" or "what didn't go your way today?".
focus on using open questions that require more than one-word answers (i.e. what do you think this metric will provide you, or, are these the only options you see for the situation)
Questions like this open the door to a relationship of discovery and partnership where you're learning together. Every question triggers an immediate solution response in the person you've spoken to. As a coach, you want the coachee to find their own solutions and asking the right questions can help them get there. Using our question, "are these the only options available to you" as an example. You may already know of other options for the coachee, but telling them what to do or what's worked for you in the past may not be relevant. Further, you are preventing them from triggering their own creativity to solve the issue they're facing.
As a coach, curiosity can be your biggest asset. It will help your coachee get the creative solutions they need for themselves.
- deep Agile experience
- product ownership
- self-mastery
- starting an Agile team
A coaching mindset helps you see the coachee as a whole, fully capable person who you _____ to help them transform.
- can direct
- can partner with
- can push
- can command
- deductive questions
- closed questions
- rhetorical questions
- open questions