An Agile Coaches Guide to Finding Help
Four places to look
My previous post explored roadblocks or impediments to Agile Coaches asking for help. In this post, I’m assuming you’ve crossed those barriers and are ready to get yourself some help.
But now your next hurdle is…from where?
Embracing Self Mastery
Before sharing sources and ideas to get help, I thought it was essential to set the context. The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel sets self-mastery at its center or hub. There are multiple aspects of self-mastery, but one of the most important is your continuous learning and growth as an Agile Coach.
Many coaches express this principle to their clients, but when you look at their behavior, they’re not walking their talk. Don’t be one of those coaches. It does you and your clients a disservice. If you declare yourself a professional Agile Coach, you have ongoing work to become insatiably curious, adopt a growth mindset, and help others grow.
Comrades and Colleagues
There’s a saying that leadership is a lonely place to be, and I resonate with that. But that’s not the posture for Agile Coaches and coaching. Instead, you’ll want to surround yourself with the best team of collaborators, supporters, mentors & coaches.
Let’s explore a few categories of people and where you might look for help—
Internal colleagues—look around you in the workplace. This is not just in your functional area but cross-functionally to see if there are role models and mentors who can help you. Then, approach them with a specific request.
External agilists—looking beyond your company to your local agile community. Most areas have agile meetup groups; you can also go virtual here. Attend the groups for content, but also look to establish connections that might lead to finding a coach or mentor. It’s essential to approach these collaborations with a win-win mindset.
Pair-coaching—one of the best ways to learn is to have someone who teaches, mentors, and models for you. Pair-coaching is an excellent way not only to learn but to share and teach as well. Look for pairing opportunities in any of your one-on-one collaborations.
Badass Agile Coaching community—and many of our BAC community coaches are ideal collaborators if you want to up your coaching game. Yes, there will be a cost, but you’ll also get to work with expert and pragmatic coaches.
Communities of Practice
Almost every client I visit nowadays has a variety of Communities of Practice (CoPs) (LACE, Centers of Excellence, Guilds, etc.) operating to improve the craft of various roles. A common CoP is focused on Agile Coaching. Now, that’s the good news. The bad news is that these CoPs almost always lose momentum and become by-rote meetings without fostering continuous improvement.
The coaches in the Badass Agile Coaching community can partner with your CoP to—
Help them craft a compelling Mission with a focus on Professionalism & Craft.
Assist them in navigating the forming, storming, performing, and sustaining stages.
Help to reenergize and refocus their efforts.
Facilitate dojo practice sessions and demonstrate coaching in real-world scenarios.
You can either engage a focused coach in this capacity or rotate your coaches to increase the depth and breadth of the experiential learning.
The Agile Community
I view communities of practice to be an inside community. However, growing as a coach requires various perspectives; collaborating more broadly is the only way to gain those. The good news is that there is a broad list of groups and events to engage with in our broad agile coaching community. Here’s a list of just a few—
Scrum Alliance – Agile Coaching Retreats
iCAgile’s Agile Coaching Circles
Agile Alliance – Agile Coaching Network
Local meetup groups – for example, Nashville, Denver, Austin, and Dublin
Joanne Stone’s Toronto mentoring groups
My Moose Herd group is another avenue to grow and learn.
Finally, the Badass Agile Coaching community coaches are active, agile community members who participate and present. The entire group takes personal responsibility for sharing everything related to Agile Coaching.
Advanced Coaching Career Guidance, Classes & Cohorts
I can’t tell you how often Agile Coaches, whether individuals, teams, guilds, or organizations, come to me for career guidance, as the number of learning options is vast. At the same time, your budgets and time are often limited.
Our affiliated Agile Moose BAC coaches and I are adept at coaching agile coaches—
Individual coach level,
Group, cohort, or CoP level,
Organizational level, and
Providing SuperVision (in the ICF sense) for coaches.
We’re often called on to support competitors trying to improve their agile coaches' consistency and breadth. That’s how much our coaches stand out from the crowd.
Leveraging the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as a baseline competency framework, We can help you select more advanced coaching learning programs to round out and grow your skills. such as—
ORSC
Co-Active
iCAgile Coaching paths
Integral-based Coaching
Presence-Based Coaching
We also deliver our Badass Agile Coaching Masterclass learning with our coaches. While we’re undoubtedly biased, we think there’s no better way to “raise the bar” of your coaching than spending six minutes of deep immersion in one of our cohorts.
Prerequisite – Be Coachable!
To be clear, you’ll need to look deep and validate that you are curious and open to new learning and coaching. In other words, join us with a mindset of coachability.
Wrapping Up
I taught evening computer classes at a local community college many years ago. It was one of my first teaching gigs, and I was nervous about it. As I began to run classes, I realized that I learned as much as the students in each class by the nature of their questions and how I needed to adapt in answering them. It was a revelation for me.
Bringing that back to this topic, I think one of the most important things you can do is BE a coach and mentor for others. The learning is often subtle yet powerful. Finding the learnings and guiding your growth requires a bit of reflection, but I’ve seen it be priceless.
It also serves to pay it forward to others. Food for thought, and here’s to your learning journey!
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.