If you’ve never been coached you might not know that the role of a coach is not to offer advice, judgement, or solutions. Their role is to listen deeply, ask powerful questions, help you explore answers you already have within yourself, and help you craft a definitive action that you then take.
We recently attended Lyssa Adkin’s Coaching Agile Teams course. What I loved about the course were the coaching practice sessions. Each and every person on the course got value from being coached, and sometimes those coaching conversations were less than 10 minutes long.
Here is the value I personally get from being coached
- It is very enjoyable to have someone deeply listen to what you have to say.
- It’s enlightening for someone to help you see a challenge or problem you’ve been struggling with in a new way.
- Somehow talking about a problem and coming up with an action makes even insurmountable problems seem manageable.
- It gives me confidence that I actually have the knowledge and skill to solve my own problems.
- It helps me talk through both how I feel about something, and what I plan to do about it, this leaves me feeling certain and comfortable with the approach I plan to take.
- It helps me feel deeply connected to another human being and that someone cares for my well being.
One of the things that many people on the Coaching Agile Teams course admitted was that they didn’t have a place to practice their coaching, or a way to be coached by someone else. It reminded us about the wonderful conversations we had when we were running coaching circles. Given that the number of agile coaches are constantly growing, we thought we’d explore coaching circles again.
Our coaching circles are a great opportunity to work with a small group of coaches or Scrum Masters, and us to explore your coaching skills, get coached on issues you are struggling with, and learn techniques that can grow your coaching skills, and agile knowledge. We run these remotely so people can join from anywhere in the world. If you’d like to know more take a look here.