Agile Team

A Coaching Model By Lynn Winterboer, Agile Teams and Widows, UNITED STATES

Agile Team Coaching Model

Coaching is an alliance between the Coach and the Client in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires the client to maximize personal and professional potential. It is designed to facilitate the creation/development of personal, professional, or business goals and to develop and carry out a strategy/plan for achieving those goals.¹ This agile coaching model provides a framework within which the [team name] Team works with its Agile Coach to effectively fulfill the responsibilities of [team charter] by working together as an agile team.

Agile Team

Co-create the Team Coaching Alliance

a.    The Coaching Alliance

• “The relationship between the coach and the client; the intentional, articulated and flexible contract between you that supports and empowers the client and enables the coaching to flourish.”²
• The coach and team/clients work together to co-create the alliance (preferably physically in-person).

b.    Scope& Goals

• What is the business case for change?
• What are the overall goals of coaching the team?
• What are the main challenges the Team and Coach are likely to encounter?
• Who are the clients for the coach?
• The team members
• The team as a whole: The team members working together toward common goals
• Who are the key stakeholders of coaching, beyond the clients?
• Who partners with the coach to support these clients?

c.     Coach Perspective

Agile Coach Offers to Team Members:

• Unconditional positive regard and trust that each person is doing the best they can with what they know and are capable of at the moment.
• Individual and team coaching to maximize personal and professional potential.
• Critical thinking on the pros and cons of decisions the agile team makes regarding mindsets, principles, and practices.
• Process expertise in Agile for team effectiveness at executing work in a lean-agile manner.

Agile Coach Wants from Team Members and Stakeholders:

• Capacity to dedicate me full-time to coaching the team.
• My expertise in agile mindsets, principles, and practices is considered when making related decisions.
• Honesty about what team members understand, agree with, or question.
• Dedication of the team to learn and strive to do the team’s work in a lean-agile manner, while retaining responsibility for final business outcomes.
• Sufficient human bandwidth and skill on the team to achieve the agreed-upon agile goals, as 80% of the responsibility for outcomes lies with the team and 20% with the coach.
• Each team member’s commitment to 1:1 coaching sessions with the coach.
• Access to leaders high enough in the hierarchy to effect the change envisioned.
• Regular, candid feedback from the team and stakeholders on how I’m doing in this coaching role.
• Physically in-person team working sessions once per Program Increment (as company policy allows), to build relationships and trust between team members.

d.    Coaching Client Perspective(to be completed by the client)

Team Offers to Coach

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Team Wants from Coach

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Assessment & Goals

• Identify the appropriate team assessment
• Assess Current State
• What are the conditions under which it would be best not to proceed?
• Define Resulting Goals and Actions

Individual Coaching

• Certified Professional Coach will work with individual Team Members in 1:1 coaching relationships in alignment with the [company] Coaching Center of Excellence and the International Coach Federation, as reflected in the pdf (coachfederation.org)

Team Agile Coaching

Team Agile Coaching involves multiple disciplines:

• Professional coaching – similar to 1:1 coaching, applied to a group of people who are working toward a common goal; aligned with Team Coaching Competencies – International Coaching Federation
• Teaching – Educating the agile team members and stakeholders on agile principles and practices
• Facilitating – Holding a process for the group to achieve an agile development goal.
• Mentoring – Modeling agile principles and practices; advising the team on good next steps given the current context.

Inspect & Adapt

• As a part of the team’s regular Inspect & Adapt process, the coach, team, and stakeholders will review and revise the coaching alliance and practices.

References

1 https://coachfederation.org/about
2 Dorothy Atcheson, CTI