Let Your Style Change

• How long has it taken you to master tai chi? -
• I don’t know yet, im still practicing.
• How did it take you to become a master coach?
• I don’t know yet, im still practicing.

Agile Team Stages

• One good model for mastering anything comes from martial arts.
• Three stages of proficiency
• Shu
• Shu: student copies the techniques as taught without modification and without yet attempting to understand rationale.
• Follow the rule, again, again and again.
• Shu stresses the basics in an uncompromising fashion so the student has a solid foundation for future learning.
• Shu - follow the rule
• Ha
• Having reached Ha - one has attained the basics and now spends time 'reflecting on the truth of everything'
• The student comes to a deeper understanding of the art than the pure repetitive practice can allow.
• The student now instructs others as an additional way to advance their own practices.
• Carefully upholds the principles underlying the practice.
• Ha - break the rule
• Ri
• Ri moves become part of the student.
• There are no techniques, all moves are natural
• The student is now learning and progressing more through self-discovery than by instruction.
• Ri - be the rule
• A team can be in one or all of these stages simultaneously.
• If the team holds the fundamentals constant even as they experiment with new ways of doing things, they will progress through the stages safely.
• The model really gets the conversation about improvement going.

Agile Coach Styles

• I have noticed three agile coaching styles
• Teaching
• Coaching
• Advising
• Attention for modeling and reaching as well.
• Modeling allows you to get to the core of each person on the team to help them become the best agilist they can be.
• Coaching Styles
• Teaching:
• When you teach, you lay down the law and teach the rules.
• You know a better way to work - so feel the steel rod as you teach agile.
• Convey the rules strongly, along with your belief that agile gives us a better way to work.
• Back this up with experiences.
• Ask them to follow you and get agile practices working well
• Coaching
• The coaching style requires the foundation laid by the teaching style.
• Help the team out by asking questions like
• Why does this way of working work?
• What kills it? What renews it? What feeds it?
• Team members minds open to multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing while still  upholding the values and principles.
• They need direct experiences and feedback to be able to truly inspect what happened so they can assess whether the change was helpful or hurtful.
• Advising
• The advising style comes when the team has fully internalized the practices, values, and principles of agile.
• Your responses
• I don’t know, what do you think.
• May I offer you an observation.
• That could work - try it.
• As you move through these styles - ensure that you also pay attention to modeling and reaching.
• Be actively modeling - constantly model the behaviors that lead to success.
• Reaching means reaching out to each team member and the team as a whole to help them achieve the best expression of agile possible.

Feel Free to Let your Style Change

• In the beginning, with a new team, the choice of style is easy - its teaching.
• Your style flows naturally from teaching to coaching as the team moves.
• Move to next step when their conversations about changing practices keep the underlying principle whole.
• They must face dysfunction, at least long enough to name it and decide whether to pursue changing it.
• Change your style from teaching to coaching.
• Teaching has its place - but it has an unintended consequences - it creates a reliance on you.
• Changing from Coaching to Advising
• Advise them and notice your impact.
• You will likely find yourself interacting with them using all three styles for various topics or skills at various times.
• Honor your current level of skill and stay there to master it.

A Refresher

• Teams master agile through stages called Shu, Ha, Ri -
• Let your style flow from teaching to coaching to advising.
• Always model successful team behaviors - reach a person on the team.
• Let it be fluid.

Coach as Coach-Mentor

• My practice of agile coaching up to that point was useful for starting up teams and getting the basics working.
• It stopped well short of tapping into each person's potential to improve the team's overall performance.
• Went to school for coaching - and found that professional work/life coaching applies 100% to agile coaching.
• Applying coaching skills to agile context. We start by defining agile coaching more clearly.

What is Agile Coaching

• In the context of agile teams - coaching takes on the dual flavor of coaching and mentoring.
• You are also sharing your agile experiences and ideas as you mentor them.
• Mentoring transfers your agile knowledge and experiences to the team as that specific knowledge  becomes relevant to whats happening with them.
• The context of agile makes you a mentor; the focus on team performance makes you a coach.
• We are using skills from the world of professional coaching.

What are we Coaching For?

• Agile coaches champion the brilliant use of agile so that businesses achieve their goals faster and better.
• To these end - you coach for
• Help the organization achieve astonishing results - the kind that will matter in business and the team in a fundamental way.
• Help the team develop and get healthier together.
• Help each person take the next step on their agile journey so they can be more successful agilists
• People should be fulfilled in their work - where they spend most of their waking hours.

Coaching at Two Levels

• When you coach an agile team - you simultaneously coach them at two levels
• An individual level
• A whole team level
• You though you channel your coaching intentions at the beginning and end, coaching doesn’t go on vacation in the middle of a sprint.
• When in midsprint - you should think long and hard before bringing a major observation or improvement opportunity to the whole team.
• Midsprint - switch from team to individual

Coach at the Beginning

• As on sprint ends - another begins - the time for coaching the whole team is ripe.
• Keep your eye on the goal - to help the whole team see how agile works when simply done.