Agile Leadership

Thoughts on Agile Coaching

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There are many ideas and definitions of agile coaching.  I was talking to with some people this week about agile coaching and figured I’d summarize a bit of the discussion here.

Given that each agile coach is helping unique people, who make up unique teams, who make up unique departments, and organizations — we should expect there to be a large degree of variation as to what an agile coach does. People, teams and organizations are at different points in their agile journey. This necessitates that as an agile coach, you meet people where they are. There are so many variations of clients and situations that attempting to propose a prescription is unwise.

Agile coaches work in service to and with clients, helping them achieve the amazing results they are capable of.

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Don’t Let a Few Thought Leaders Make Us Stupid

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What is a thought leader? If you Google ‘thought leader definition’, you get something like: one whose views on a subject are taken to be authoritative and influential. That seems like a good place to start. While this article applies to thought leaders in general, a few of the references I make are about thought leaders in the agile, leadership, and agility domains.

I will consider types of thought leaders, why they make us stupid, and how we can help ourselves as well as thought leaders improve!

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Cursing Your Vision Statement

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I was coaching someone a while back and asked them to tell me what their vision statement: what motivated him? When I heard the answer, I was not moved. What I heard was boring. I knew this person had passion for what he did. What happened to it?

If I ask you to tell me why you do what you do, and you are not jumping up and down a bit, getting a bit fired up, I don’t buy your passion!  Here are some ideas to find the passion in your vision statement.  They may not be for everyone, but I know they have helped some people already, so I wanted to share.

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Improving Yourself with StrengthsFinder 2.0

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I am often asked by folks I’m coaching for ideas of assessments they can take to help them grow.

I’m working on a few articles about different types of assessments and improving yourself (subscribe if you are interested in being notified). I thought I’d take some time to explain some of insights I got from taking the StrengthsFinder® 2.0 assessment a while back, as well as explain what it is and how to take it.  This is the first of three articles on assessments. The other two will cover MBTI® and The Leadership Circle Profile® .  All three are very different in a number of ways, which I will discuss in those articles.

Agile and Agility are about people, learning, and collaborating – a foundational part being able to collaborating and learning with others is personal mastery.

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Thoughts on Professional Coaching

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I get a lot of questions about coaching – what is it, what do you mean by the word ‘coach’, is it the same as mentoring, is coaching just asking questions… and many more.

Who do you coach?

I coach people.  🙂   These may be individuals, pairs, couples, teams, organizations, or systems.

Can you tell me more about what the word Coach means to you? 

Professional Coaching is the Key to Learning and Finding New InformationThe word ‘Coach’  tends to have a lot of different uses.  When I talk about coaching, I am referring to professional coaching, which in the US, tends to be associated with standards laid out by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).  I view coaching as helping people find the internal wisdom to achieve their goals by moving beyond whatever is stopping them or slowing them down.  Coaching is NOT about telling people what to do or judging them – the coach may be an expert on “coaching” but is not the expert on the person or the goals they have.  This is concept is misunderstood by a lot of people.  A coach is not the person who says “do this” or “don’t do that”!  Coaching is always about the clients agenda – NOT the coach’s!   The coach relies on the client being fabulous, amazing, and wanting to move forward toward a goal!  That sounds over the top to some, but it really isn’t, it’s about having faith in the person!   The key is that as a coach, I need to fully believe that the person (or people or system) I am coaching has the wisdom to solve their challenges.  They might need some help in finding or accessing that wisdom or working through different options, but they can access the information to let them move forward!  This is not always an easy place to stand, but believing in the client is a fundamental part of professional coaching. It does not work without it.

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