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What Makes a Great Agile Coach

June 14th, 2010

I wasn’t the session originator, but I have the following notes

Session: What Makes a Great Agile Coach and how to you get to be one?

First the group attempted to identify the attributes of a good Agile Coach and the list is long:

Patience, Good/Active Listeners, knowledgeable and passionate, inspiring, facilitation skills, life-long learning, a ‘good bartender’, fearless and honest. Many more leadership qualities so…

Discussion evolved into the question: we should define the difference between Coach and Leader.

Coach – a facilitator of growth and change

Leader – leads teams towards a specific destination, but established that this could be a single person or a group of people.

How to become a great Agile Coach:

Find a mentor: work with other coaches, peer:peer groups. Someone asked : what are the non-software coaches doing? This question was not answered in this session.

Trial and Error: be brave

Learn from other people in different environments: field trips

Become a bartender: coaching dojos, build a toolbox with options to pull out to suit the time/place/dynamic

Recognize what pushes your buttons and learn how to choose not become hooked.

Teach people how to fix their own issues….

Time up….

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Posted in ACCC Sessions, What makes a great agile coach?

What Makes a Great Agile Coach and How Do You Get To Be One

June 14th, 2010

“What Makes a Great Agile Coach and How Do You Get To Be One” (Gil Broza, http://www.3pvantage.com/profile.htm, http://www.linkedin.com/in/gilbroza)

Another session was merged into this one: “Coaching inside-out” (about the differences between internal coaches and external ones), suggested by Linda Cook, and we found few differences all in all.

We found ourselves listing qualities of great coaches that also applied to great leaders, so we took the time to distinguish the two:

Coach = Facilitator of Growth and Change. An overt *role*, focusing more on the journey. More like a sports team coach.

Leader = A sublime *quality* (and thus present in many people), focusing more on the vision and the destination, and empowering followers. More like a sports team captain.

Attributes, skills and activities of a great coach:

- patience

- good/active listening

- sales person

- knowledge and experience of Agile

- passion

- leadership

- inspiring

- facilitation skills

- people person

- reflective

- humility / self-aware / checked ego

- lifetime learner

- intuition

- empathetic

- bartender (the parallels to bartending drew a lively discussion)

- fearless

- honest

- creates a safe environment

- provocative (provoke a team into learning)

- be a model: demonstrate the values

- challenge people positively

- affects people’s energy positively and productively

- questioning / not taking for granted

- observer

- respectful

- creative

- rule breaker / bender

How do you get to be a great coach?

- Build a war chest / toolbox. Have options, and do not foear modifying tools.

- Learn how to connect with people. A large component of that is self-awareness; you can also bring it about through communication and excellence studies such as NLP.

- Have a mentor. Work with other coaches, participate in peer-to-peer groups. Learn what non-software, non-Agile coaches do.

- Trial and error. Be brave!

- Learn from other people’s environments. Take a “field trip”, visit other professionals.

- Become “a bartender”.

- Participate in coaching dojos.

Some of the initial participants: Sandeep Kamat, Thanou Thirakul, Linda Cook, Mujahid Chaudhry, Todd Charron, Peter Yu, Darcie Birdsell, J.F. Gingras, Morley Howell, Ann-Marie Kong, Gavin Bee, Marc-Andre, F.P., Ellen Grove, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Yvonne Kish.