Scaling is often frowned upon in the Agile world. Scaling coaching from individuals to teams and to organizations is the only way to bring the systemic change to bigger and wider systems and we believe that scaling coaching through systems thinking is the way to go.
Cherie Silas, MCC, CEC is introducing our Coaching Tools & Tips Meetup audience to the practice of reflective coaching supervision, that is dubbed as coaching for coaches.
Best Agile Articles Conference is a Quarterly event where Best of the Best Authors share their wisdom. We were thrilled to host Allison Pollard.
A Few weeks ago while attending a Coaching Agile Teams class I heard one of the instructors (Lyssa Adkins) make a reference in passing to “signal to noise” ratio in reference to our ability to communicate with others. Her comment intrigued me because I’d never heard that phrase before, so I started to do some investigation.
Signal-to-noise ratio (abbreviated SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise.
Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant information in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as “noise” that interferes with the “signal” of appropriate discussion.
This week I was particularly impressed with a method used by a Scrum Master to help his team understand which stories on the backlog were “ready” and which were not. It’s amazing how such a simple technique can bring the transparency needed to help a team prepare for a successful sprint. His technique is to use colored stickers as markers on the ordered product backlog hanging on the wall next to the team’s scrum board to indicate the state of the story. If the story is not ready it gets a red sticker.
This is me. I’m an agile coach and I love being a scrum master whenever my path allows me to step into that role for a few months in order to start up new teams and develop scrum masters. I’ve been scrum mastering a few teams for the past couple of months and having the time of my life! But now comes the real test – mentoring a few brand new scrum masters.
The other day when working with a few scrum masters I recognized how important coaching skills are to this profession. I know that coaching is important and I teach new scrum masters that they are the coach to the team. But, when working with these new scrum masters it brought to light that coaching skills aren’t something that we just know – they are learned on purpose.
When I ask people about their coaching skills they often point to allowing the team to be self organized and make their own decisions. They view coaching as asking questions that help people figure out the answers. I agree. Those are aspects of coaching that are very powerful for teams. But there is an underlying skill that cripples the ability to ask powerful questions if it isn’t first mastered. In order to ask powerful questions a scrum master must first learn to listen.
I am realizing that the most powerful coaching skill a scrum master can learn to master is listening. It is foundational to everything else.
Over the past several weeks I have encountered multiple people from completely different companies that are implementing scrum. Some have been trying this for a few weeks. Some have been doing it for a couple of years. Others are somewhere in between. Some received formal training. Some read books. Others supplemented with You Tube videos.
Everyone I spoke to had a different reason for meeting with me, an agile coach. Some were people I was interviewing for clients to hire onto their full time staff. Some were clients and potential clients. Others were people in the agile community that asked for mentoring.
They all had something in common – doing it alone. In each case, they got information about scrum and tried to implement change. In each case they are struggling. Half of the struggles they are facing are around simply understanding how to implement the scrum framework properly. This stems from brain overload and trying to cram too much understanding into their minds from a two day class or a book and attempting to remember it with no context to their real world. Then, trying to implement the things they learned in their own environment while not forgetting anything. Yeah, right.
I have heard people say all my life, “Failure is not an option,” and today, I would like to challenge this belief and say that in order to succeed, failure must be an option.
One of the things you learn when training to be a coach is the art of deep listening. When practicing this art with a team, the coach is listening to people and hearing what they are saying. You also listen to things like tone of voice because much information can be heard in what is not said. Changes in tone, pace and volume when they speak and the inflection in their voice can give clues to what the speaker is thinking and feeling.
The coach is listening for things like passion and energy when people speak, they are listening for things that reveal the teams core values, strengths and areas of weakness or greatness where probing questions can begin to push them to new levels or wider areas of thinking.
Earlier this week I met with a group of coaches of various experience levels from different backgrounds to talk about coaching teams. We discussed together our successes and failures in attempts to learn from one another. What follows is a list of the results of what we discovered together.
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