Will I Be a Good Coach?

• Nothing prepared me for the power and simplicity of agile done well.
• Project management was serious business - project managers orchestrated the working of the whole machine.
• Mental model of project management was outdated.
• First week - had produced real work. - that would have taken us months to do in the past.
• If agile teams are going to have these kinds of stellar experiences with agile - they need coaches who can provide the right teaching, coaching and mentoring to make it possible.

Why Agile Coaching Matters

• If you're like most aspiring agile coaches - very little has prepared you to be an agile coach.
• Questions like
• What is my role in a self-organizing team
• How do I help the team yet still stay hands off.
• Understand the world you coach in - and the people you coach.
• Most coaches will go too far in either extreme.
• The world feels far more uncertain than anyone can remember.
• The people I coach want to know that they matter - they are no longer happy being a cog in the wheel.
• Their contributions are seen as valuable too.
• The people I coach are not motivated by carrots and sticks - they are motivated by a sense of worth and purpose.
• Agile coaching is important because it helps in two areas:
• Producing products that matter in real, complex and uncertain world
• Adding meaning to people's work lives.
• Agile focuses us on the critical products to create and makes it possible for us to create them.
• Most important after most important.
• Teams need coaches who bring a view of agile done well.

The Agile Coaching Context

• Agile itself is sufficient - coaching deepens it.
• Small set of practices to teach.
• Easy to get going - but hard to do well.
• Agile exposes the dirt that has been swept under the rug for years.

The Doing of Agile Coaching

• Agile is a set of values, practices, principals and roles we uphold as we coach people.
• Become their facilitator, teacher, coach, mentor - bring to them other things we have learned.
• Model has room for what you have learned.

The Being of Agile Coaching

• You must know your job as coach and your way around agile and be constantly searching for that next breakthrough idea for the team.
• Agile coaching is 40% doing and 60% being.
• An agile coach - models agile all the time. How you interact with the team.
• The most important thing you can do in in the face of a mistake is to model the agile value of openness.
• Imagine a team that admits mistakes, reinforces their shared values, forgives one another, and moves on.

Lets' Get Our Language Straight

• A scrum master who takes teams beyond getting agile practices up and running into their deliberate and joyful pursuit of high performance is an agile coach.
• Coach multiple teams - seen a range of possibilities and limitations and successes and failures across a variety of situations.
• An Agile Coach is:
• Appreciates the depths of agile practices and principles - help team appreciate them too.
• Someone who has faced the big dragons, organizational impediments, has become a coach to managers and other outsiders
• Someone who can help management see the benefits of agile practices.
• Someone that has brought ideas from professional facilitation, coaching, conflict management…
• Agile Mash-Ups
• When teams mashed up scrum with something else - such as lean or user-centered design  - when they let agile fall by the wayside - they often struggled and sometimes outright failed.
• The seed of the downfall - is finding a way of working that fit them best.
• Agile Coach - plays the field and keeps its options open.

Moving Toward Agile Coaching

• Each person's journey to becoming an agile coach follows a different path - some of the street signs along the way may look familiar

The Road From Scrum Master to Agile Coach

• A scrum master gets a team up and running with scrum practices and agile principles.
• After a few sprints the scrum master often notices a significate depth to each of the scrum practices
• Scrum master realizes that a significant amount of time gets spent coaching people in the wider organization to support the team.
• An agile Scrum Coach is
• Appreciates the depths of agile practice.

The Road From Project Manager to Agile Coach

• A project manager and agile coach are like a house cat and a jaguar - they are simply not in the same family.
• A project manager plans and controls  - supervising throughout.
• An agile coach - Guides
• The road from project manager to agile coach may be a bit longer for some.
• Order to become an agile coach
• Training in agile
• Practice on teams
• Leads to multiple teams in succession
• Mentored by someone who has made this transition from project manager to agile coach.
• An agile coach mentor offers in-the-moment coaching to help you see how agile works and to bring it to your attention when you inadvertently fall back into plan driven mind sets.
• The coach focuses on the getting teams to do agile well.

The Role From Tech Lead to Agile Coach

• Sometimes agile coaching skills get added to one's bag of tricks as a way to further assist people developing their technical skills
• Over time they being to mentor other developers.
• Then the teaching and coaching cross multiple teams.
• At some point the tech lead starts using the term agile coach.

An Agile Coach Emerges

• As you successfully being to work with agile teams - you begin to change
• What you do as a coach and what you talk about shift as you move from managing to coaching.

Native Wiring

• People who make resoundingly successful transitions into agile coaching have a few things in common
• Ability to read the room. - read the emotion in the air.
• They care more about people than they do products. - caring about people.
• They cultivate curiosity - they know what they don’t know.
• They believe that people are basically good. Meet people where they are.
• They know that plans fall apart. So they act in the moment with the team.
• They have a thirst for learning.
• They believe that any group of people can do good things in the world.
• They have a low tolerance for institutional reasons that hold people back from excelence
• Yeah I know it’s a waste of time - but that is how we have always done it.
• They believe that disequilibrium is essential - chaos and destruction are simply building blocks for something better.
• They risk being wrong. - own up to it and move on.

Make Agile Coaching Your Personal Experience

• Find your own voice  as an agile coach.
• No one does agile coaching the same way.

Refresher

• Becoming an agile coach - education, experience, and practice.
• Being an agile coach in all that you do - is a powerful example.
• Path to being an agile coach are many and varied.
• Qualities of successful agile coaches
• Openness
• People Orientation
• Deep and passionate pursuit of personal and professional excellence.