Archives for July 2021

Finding Courage: Ready to Develop and Master your Facilitation Stance?

What is courage?

cour.age

– the ability to do something that frightens one

In chapter 6 of my book “The Art & Science of Facilitation” we discuss ‘Developing and Mastering your Facilitation Stance’.

What the title of chapter 6 doesn’t spell out is that you, the facilitator, have to find your own source of courage. Courage to say what you see, to inquire about difficult subjects, to not walk past the elephant in the room.

It Takes Courage To Lead!

If finding courage in leadership and facilitation is something you are actively seeking, start here:

How courage can create safety

The five cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance explained

How to gain true mastery in Agile Team Coaching

About leadership, horses and the importance of trust

How to gain agility by giving up control

Each of these articles from the TeamCatapult blog touch on courage.

Courage is needed when leading.

What’s at the heart of wisdom is candor, honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability. In other words, being a real human being who is tapped into their inner wisdom. Teamwork and facilitation is not for the faint of heart. Tools, structures, agendas, and post-it notes only get you so far. We all have to do the rest, individually and together!

Building Self-Awareness and Self-Management

The process of self-awareness and group awareness is always on-going. There is a natural progression, an unfolding, in developing your ability to stand confidently in all five cornerstones of your facilitation stance while in the moment.

These five principles include:

To learn more about each of the guiding principles, I invite you to check out my book “The Art & Science of Facilitation” in which I’ve dedicated one chapter to each of the five principles.

How to Get Clarity and Be Grounded in Your Own Practice

I’d like to give you 7 lessons to help you with the self-work needed for facilitation, lessons that will be on-going throughout your career.

1 Work with a Co-Facilitator

One of the best ways to get better at the practice of facilitation is to co-facilitate!

2 Start a journaling practice and ask yourself tough questions

Journal after each time you facilitate. You will start noticing patterns in your facilitation behaviors and default actions, which will deepen your self-awareness in the room.

3 Change “roles” in order to share your opinions and perspectives

The trick to sharing your opinions and perspectives is learning to share in a way that does not make you right and the team wrong.

4 Work with a supervisor

No matter how developed your practice, your facilitation skills can always be deepened through outside perspective.

5 Intervene to break patterns

Sometimes what a group needs is something to disrupt their familiar habit. Yet disrupting habits, naming things that the group is unaware of, or surfacing topics that they might not want to address come with high stakes – for you, and for them.

6 Articulate what’s happening in the group

Being neutral does not mean that you are passively standing by and watching. When you have the impulse to jump into the content, practice using your model for team dynamics. Name what you see, without judgement.

7 Develop your model for facilitation

The notion of model building, applies to you in your facilitation practice as well! As you practice, you will begin to feel constrained by some of the guidance offered. It’s a good indicator that you’re ready to define your one stance for facilitation!

My Final Word of Guidance

As you embark upon the journey of facilitation, remember that responsibility in facilitation means owning your part and helping the group own theirs!

How I Became a Leader: Stories of Competency, Experience, Inspiration and Motivation from Cohort Participants

Leaders aren’t born to lead and great leaders don’t set out to be leaders. They set out to make a difference. It’s never about the role, it’s always about a bigger purpose.

If we are not born as leaders, how then do we become leaders? We need to develop and master leadership skills.

How To Develop Good Leadership Skills

At TeamCatapult, we also see the transformation inherent in leadership competency development as a winding road best navigated in a cohort.

It’s a journey, an inside game.

It takes time.

Team coaches need time to…

Experience a new way of leading
See new behaviors and different ways of working (and see them modeled)
Try these new behaviors out in a safe space for learning
Notice different impacts and learn how to make the decision to try something different

This is the arc that sits at the core of all of our programs. Our experience and data over the last decade has shown that it is an absolute necessity for leadership development that will create a lasting organizational impact.

Next we’d like to share several leadership journey quotes with you, from several of our cohort members.

The Pathway to Competency

“There are over 100 Agile certifications in the world! I wasn’t seeking the certification seal, I was seeking the practice and skills that come with being able to demonstrate with the certification process that I possess the capabilities with the kind of professionalism that I hope to bring to my teams in everything that I am doing. I thought that this cohort and this particular education path was the right one for me because of its focus on practice, its focus on community. That I would be working with other coaches with a similar capability or a similar level and that I would be guided through this process by expert coaches who had been through this process before. What brought me to this particular path was improving my game and upping my capabilities.”

~ Christopher Curley

“I’ve been able to sharpen the knowledge I’ve attained with the book knowledge and getting not just the certification.”

~ Rick Gonzalez

The Importance of Gaining Experience

“Being in the course is an amazing opportunity…even if you think you have enough knowledge or experience you will find more!”

“Very informative…Real life application…”

“The biggest difference between then and now is I’m able to listen more attentively and hear from multiple perspectives. With this experience I’m more prepared and humbled to see what the future will bring. I’m expecting more fulfilling work.”

~ Shivakumar Venkatraman

“This is the real deal because I can speak like a true coach. The practices and the dedicated coaching session helped point me in the right direction as well as listening to my other classmates’ journeys.”

~ Rick Gonzalez

“The most impactful (part of this experience has been the) approach to the coaching opportunity. I now have the skills to ask a question in a way so the team can hear the question and transfer ownership to the team. I’ve gained the confidence to be okay with not having the answer to questions.”

~ Chris Kaeberlein

Leadership Inspiration Is Everywhere

“…a great opportunity to learn new tools that can be used not just for work but in your personal life…”

The cohort leads me into the future – it leads me to exploring more about my future, how I can use my skills, other than what my original intention was. I find that I am using it more in my day to day life. It makes me more intentional in my interactions with others for a better outcome. Even at the grocery store and talking to the clerk, it makes your experience more uplifting to learn more about others, and interacting with them in a different way.

~ Rose Hyde

Motivation To Keep Learning: Leadership is a Journey

“This is the start of a journey for me, not the end. The cohort has given us room to grow.”

~ Christopher Curley

I joined (the cohort) because of “curiosity, passion and desire to grow…to discover myself. I know who I am and discovered my strengths and was able to experiment with my coaching, training, mentoring within a structure. I think I am at the beginning of a long path. I really want to deepen it everyday. The cohort taught me that we are in continuous evolution. For my role in the future, I will practice my role in a more structured way, maintaining neutrality and being more present! I completely changed my perspective with the abilities the cohort brought to me.”

~ Cristina Paternoster

Becoming a Good Leader with TeamCatapult’s Guidance

TeamCatapult helps leaders and their teams have different conversations to move through change to create better results without sacrificing relationships in the process.

Imagine leaders at all levels who are able to realize the true promise of collaboration.

Collaborative leaders have access to their full leadership range and are able to:

Guide with influence and vision
Can lead from the front and the back
Grow other leaders
Navigate complex change
Read a room and unstick stuck teams
Demonstrate communicative competence in difficult conversations
Access the collective intelligence of the whole

Are you ready to take a new path? Are you excited to start your leadership journey?

Start here!

Why Leadership is a Craft that Requires Investment and Growth

How are you doing? And how are you feeling about how you are doing? Are you not just adjusting to a “new normal” but thriving? We sure hope you are.

We are now halfway through 2021 and the changes we saw happening in our work environment back in 2020 are still evolving: we are at a critical juncture in our organizations.

A global pandemic has shifted much of our teamwork online, but this change has only compounded the challenges already facing organizations that rely on constant innovation. In order to survive in a rapidly changing environment, agility is table stakes.

A comprehensive cultural shift is needed for organizations to create sustainable change. The key to keeping up in a rapidly changing work environment and global marketplace is to scale leadership – and scale in new ways!

Growing Leadership Competency is a Game Changer

Growing leadership competency is a cornerstone of creating organizational change

Increased performance outcomes are the direct result of the fact that the competencies of individual coaching, team coaching, mentoring, training, and facilitation help leaders build their range of leadership.

At TeamCatapult, we call this “leadership range.” It refers to the ability of individuals to lead from the front and set a clear direction. It also refers to their ability to lead from behind, empowering others to make the move and understanding how to support ideas and create space for all voices to be heard.

Competency Development — How It Actually Works

Competency development means recognizing that becoming an agile team coach requires people to examine and challenge their existing beliefs so that they can experience new, more productive ones.

What we have found and implemented through the Coaching Agility from Within™ program is that there are specific competencies essential to effective leadership.

Collectively, these competencies signal that a collective leadership culture begins with how individual leaders show up. It’s about how they engage with and impact their teams, and it’s about the self-awareness that it takes to know our impact and make choices that align with our intentions.

Awareness Precedes Choice, Precedes Change — The Road to Leadership

Anyone can call themselves an agile coach. What sets a truly agile leader apart, however, is someone who has a demonstrated proficiency in agile team coaching. After all, adaptive challenges do not come with roadmaps, they require new ways of engaging and leading through the process of dialogue.

At TeamCatapult, we have adopted and refined The Agile Team Coaching Competency Model, originally created by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd. This competency model is aligned with the ICAgile Agile Coaching Competencies and serves as a metric and guide for the learning journey that we provide as part of our longtime alignment with the mission of ICAgile.

Leadership Competency Development is a Winding Road Best Navigated in a Cohort.

In every learning process, the journey from “getting started” to “proficiency” is neither quick nor straightforward. As our case study highlights, we have found that a program designed for an 8 to 12-month period is most successful.

How to Increase Leadership Effectiveness and Team Performance

TeamCatupult’s Coaching Agility from Within™ program is a cohort-based leadership development initiative. Its design encompasses two models. The first is an 8-month program that brings leaders together from different organizations to deepen and expand their ability to lead effective teams.

This program is designed to guide agile coaches along the pathway to proficiency in each leadership competency, providing key solutions for teams needing sustainable, systemic change.

It offers insight into best practices for how to move leadership forward by:

Growing your own, internal leadership
Growing leadership at all levels
Developing a team coaching capability
Turning theory into action

Force Multipliers – a Case Study

We have seen the results of this program create significant, longterm change for participants and their teams. It supports their awareness of how they, as leaders, can best support a team’s ability to perform more effectively.

To read the “Cohort Learning Within an Organization to Boost Performance from Product Development to Delivery” case study, click here.

Achieving Competency in Agile Team Coaching

If you are searching for a way to achieve Agile team Coaching competency, if you are ready to become a leader among leaders, if you are craving significant change….

…look no further!

We invite you to “team up” with us!

Congrats, your first step (awareness) towards competency has been completed.

Next step? Let’s have a conversation!

We are looking forward to hearing from you!