Discover Your “Inner Agile Coach”

Various types of strong communication skills that incorporate having crucial conversations at times, active listening, psychological safety and facilitation are very important role of an Agile Coaches day-in and day-out.

Crucial conversations: A crucial conversation is a discussion between two or more people where the stakes are high, opinions very and emotions run strong. They happen day-to-day in an Agile Transformation where different areas of an organization are making changes to their process, methods and culture. Most people tend to avoid crucial conversation because they are often are handled poorly because opinions may vary. As an Agile Coach you may have to …. Focus on the conversation, learn how to speak persuasively and not abrasive

Active listening: Rather than giving someone a fraction of your attention, active listening is making a conscious effort to hear, understand, and retain information that’s being relayed to you.

It involves more than listening to the words they say. Instead, you consciously analyze what you hear, and try to pick up on intent, content, and emotion from the speaker. Active listening requires paying attention.

Agile Coaches spend a great deal of time communicating with a vast number of people to do their work. Most of that communication happens in meetings.

Agile coaches attend meetings, and have the ability facilitate every type of meeting you can imagine: individual and team coaching sessions, Scrum ceremonies, workshops about Agile topics, strategy sessions with executives, Agile training sessions and more.

The purpose of a meeting it to serve the Team. Agile Coaches are looked to as being quipped with recommendations and insights and can embed the principles of the Agile Manifesto into meetings to make team gatherings more effective, inclusive of all voices, and… actually agile.

• Know when to call a meeting – don’t have one just to have one
• Make sure a meeting has a purpose – set an agenda and have necessary artifacts available so people feel their time is valued
• Leave meeting with actionable items to move forward - make a decision, create a plan, or find a solution to a problem that creates value to the end user/customer
• Don’t let the loudest voice in the room be the only voice – make sure everyone feels they have the ability to speak up and be heard

Tips for effective meeting facilitation (remote & in-person):

• Identify objectives and create an agenda
• Provide helpful resources, set expectations
• Listen first, talk second
• Track time, keep your timebox
• Identify action items & follow-up

An article posted by the Center for Creative Leadership says that organizations benefit from diversity of thought, and groups of people with different life experiences are better able to recognize problems and offer up creative solutions than groups with similar life experiences. Unfortunately, many people do not feel comfortable about speaking up in the workplace – especially in the workplace (sccording to a 2017 Gallup poll).

A Gallup article says the behavioral side of culture is built person by person, team by team, day by day. Team and individual safety are both essential, but individual safety must come first in the process of building psychological safety.

An Agile Coach can create and incorporate a psychological safety by making it a priority to get to know their Team, leaders and other coaches by establishing Team norms, showing vulnerability at the right time and giving appropriately delivered feedback.

Tips for creating psychological safety

1. Prioritize

• Getting to know your Team

2. Norms
   • Establish Team norms
3. Create
   • A space for new ideas
4. Embrace
   • Productive conflict