Description

Coaching Stance: Up-shifting Your Agile Coaching

Come learn and experience what the world of professional coaching has to offer the agile coach. In this course, you will be steeped in the skills and mind-sets of professional coaching while being firmly grounded in our agile context. Everything is 100% applicable to your real-world situation of coaching agile teams and organizations and you will both learn and practice, practice, practice throughout the course.

Outcome

Just like with the Coaching Agile Teams course, by the end of this course you’ll walk away with your personal coaching improvement backlog – a tangible plan you can use to thoughtfully improve your coaching when you’re back in your daily circumstances. We use agile scenarios throughout the class allowing you to craft powerful ways to address the real world challenges you face. You’ll also have many new things to try and you will probably depart with a few provocative ideas to chew on (in fact, maybe wrangle with for a while). All of this adds up to your ability to become the excellent agile coach your teams and organizations need.

Content

Course Content

• Deep dive on core professional coaching skills such as Levels of Listening, Powerful Questions, Articulating What’s Going On, Acknowledgement, Clearing, Self-Management, Finding Values, Curiosity and more
• Designing the coaching alliance with sponsors, managers, teams and team members
• The anatomy of a coaching session (and a lot of practice!)
• Making clear requests and achieving accountability
• Agile coach competencies framework and the coaching stance
• Dealing with complaints
• Working with resistance and strong emotions
• Perspective coaching: reframing circumstances to move from being stuck into a world of useful possibilities

Attendees

Audience

The Coaching Stance is meant for ScrumMasters, agile coaches, project managers in transition to agile and managers of agile teams.

This course is tailor-made for you if:You sense you can have a bigger impact on the people and teams you coach but don’t know how to make it real.

• You notice that the agile transition seems to take a step backwards as soon as your turn your back.
• People, teams, and organizations continue to serve up challenging circumstances that your well-honed skills of mentoring, teaching and consulting don’t completely address.
• Organizations want the great results of agile but don’t know how to change themselves to truly get them, and you wonder what skills you can bring to “help them see it” and then, help them get it.
• You face resistance about agile from people and teams and have learned that the strategies of ignoring it, muscling through it or compelling people to “just do it” fall short.

Prerequisites

You must be a practicing agile coach with at least 6 months of hands-on experience. Ideally, you will also have Certified ScrumMaster or equivalent agile training.

This is not an introduction-level course and we will not be covering the basics of agile or Scrum. In addition, you will be asked to use what you know about your real teams throughout the class so that you can leave with ideas for helping them as soon as you get back.

You do not have to complete the Coaching Agile Teams course before taking this course, although it is highly recommended.

Lyssa Adkins

Since 2004, I have taught Scrum and Agile Coaching to well over a thousand students, coached many agile teams, and served as master coach to scores of apprentice coaches. In both one-on-one settings and small groups, I enjoy a front-row seat as remarkable agile coaches emerge and go on to entice the very best from the teams and organizations they coach.  With ACI, I have had the pleasure of training over 2,000 people in the skills and mindsets of great agile coaching. Prior to agile, I had more than fifteen years of expertise leading project teams and groups of project managers (I was even a PMO Director — twice!), yet nothing prepared me for the power of agile done simply and well. I believe that agile is more than an alternate project management methodology and I am passionate about deepening the roles in agile – specifically agile coach and agile manager – to help agile move into its fullest expression. I hold an alphabet soup of certifications: Certified Scrum Coach (CSC), ICAgile Expert in Agile Coaching (ICE-AC), SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), Project Management Professional (PMP), Six Sigma Green Belt (SSGB), Organization and Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC) and Associate Certified Coach (ACC).  I am also a trained Co-Active Coach and Leader. In 2010, I authored Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition.