Marsha Acker

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!

How to Help a Team Become More Agile: Upholding the Agile Mindset

Upholding the agile mindset is the fifth principle of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance.

The five principles include:

Maintaining Neutrality
Standing in the Storm
Honoring the wisdom of the group
Holding the Group’s Agenda
Upholding the Agile Mindset and Practices

If you are responsible for helping a team become more agile, and are looking for a way to assist a team adopt agility without telling them what to do, this is a good place to start.

It’s the Unique Position You Hold as a Part of the Team!

Agile facilitation is not unique because of the skills of facilitation it requires. What sets you apart as an agile facilitator is the unique position you hold as a part of the team.

As a member of the team, when facilitating, your role is to stand apart from the team.

This ‘dualism’ causes tension for many new facilitators.

Therefore it is important to acknowledge that if you are standing solidly in the other four principles of facilitation, you’ll be just fine – even if you don’t uphold the mindset of agility. You are still facilitating, you just won’t be supporting agility.

The Agile Mind Does Not Equate to Tools and Practices

Facilitating while upholding the agile mindset starts with one simple premise:

“You are the guardian of the values and principles of the agile mindset, not the adjuster of the agile practices.”

Telling people what to do, forcing process, or not listening to what’s happening on the team is not what upholding the agile mindset is about.

Upholding the agile mindset does not look like defending the use of retrospectives as a tried-and-true method of starting conversations.

So, what is and what does upholding an agile mindset look like?

Become the Guardian of the Values and Principles

When a team gets bored, or things aren’t working when leaning on practices in a particular agile framework, it’s time to look beyond what you know.

Lead the team and find inspiration in the practices that others have created, and try them.

You can’t ‘break agile’ when trying something new.

In part, your job as a facilitator is to help teams adapt by inventing their own framework for agility!

In David Kantor’s “Reading the Room” he observes that we all model build.

When we learn a new process, theory or skill set, we imitate first, then we feel constrained, and finally we create something new. We make it our own.

It Starts with Practice

Focusing on upholding the agile mindset means learning how to bridge the divide between principles and practices. It’s what we do in the moment. As facilitator, you’re the one who is able to help a team see where they might be living into the agile values – and where they might not be.

Four ways to practice upholding the Agile Mindset

Develop a deep understanding of the agile practices and mindset
Assess how agile the team is and ask, “Am I the right facilitator?”
Uncover the key for upholding agility with this particular team
Provide process, not solutions

In my book ‘The Art & Science of Facilitation’ based on the five principles of the Agile Team Facilitations Stance, I take a deep dive into each of these lessons.

Last Thoughts on Upholding an Agile Mindset

Upholding the agile mindset is not about convincing a team to buy into agile. It’s about helping a team focus on how they work.

It’s about looking for ways to improve how they work so that they can be more effective, empowered, enjoy their work, and experience better outcomes.

Agility in action can look different for different teams. What’s needed is a critical reflection about how well we’re doing at any given moment lives into and upholds the core values and principles.

How To Grow as a Leader: Developing Leadership Competency

Growing as a leader means recognizing that there is work to be done, then taking action to make those changes.

As we say at TeamCatapult: Awareness precedes choice, precedes change.

Agile Team Coaching Competency Model

At TeamCatapult, we have adopted and refined The Agile Team Coaching Competency Model, originally created by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd.

It is agile-framework agnostic and available to individuals and organizations under creative commons to further the journey of individuals becoming agile. It is also the backbone of our work developing leadership competency through the Coaching Agility from Within™ program.

A team coach’s main focus is on partnering with their teams in order to accelerate their performance and achieve their desired outcomes. They do this through maximising the team’s collective intelligence and through developing the team and its members. Team coaches also support the team’s external stakeholders, including Product Owners, in figuring out what is the right product to build and in growing stakeholders’ agility.

These outcomes are accomplished by the ability to fluidly and intentionally move between all of the competencies based on what is needed in the moment.

☆ Agile-Lean Practitioner

A deep understanding of the agile mindset, values, and principles, and the application of them in a variety of agile frameworks that are tailored to the team and its current needs.

☆ Facilitation

A neutral guide who supports a group to achieve their purpose and desired outcomes in a collaborative manner.

☆ Professional Coaching

Ability to engage a person in a creative process to discover their own insights and take inspired action without being attached to a specific outcome.

☆ Professional Team Coaching

Ability to use an understanding of group dynamics and team development to help a team maximize their collective intelligence to achieve their desired results.

☆ Transformation Mastery

Ability to apply organization development, behavioral sciences, and change theory to lead sustainable organization transformation.

☆ Business Mastery

Ability to apply the values and principles of agility to the application of business strategy, management, product ownership, and process improvement.

☆ Technical Mastery

Ability to effectively bring expertise in the technical craft of developing software.

☆ Mentoring

Ability to offer expertise and experience in service of fostering the growth of others.

☆ Training

Ability to develop new skills, mindsets, and behaviors through practice, instruction, or supervision over a period of time.

Leadership Transformation is a Journey!

Of course, in every learning process, the journey from “getting started” to “proficiency” is neither quick nor straightforward. We have found that a program designed for an 8 to 12-month period is most successful.

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

What Happens When You Do Not Invest In Leadership?

By contrast, we have found the cost to organizations that don’t invest in leadership to be quite high:

Teams remain dependent upon leaders to make all the choices, which perpetuates a model of organizational rigidity and individual burnout
An organization lacks program sustainability when an agile coach moves on to another company
The organizational culture remains one of vague dependence rather than defined self-management
Teams feel confused and demonstrate decision avoidance
The status quo within the organization continues to be a barrier for growth within the industry
There is a persistent lack of productivity
There is a pattern of lost timelines and missed deadlines
Team members’ morale diminishes, which directly affects productivity

Coaching Agility From Within™

TeamCatupult’s Coaching Agility from Within™ program is a cohort-based leadership development initiative. Its design encompasses two models.

The first is an 9-month program that brings leaders together from different organizations to deepen and expand their ability to lead effective teams.

The second model brings the program into a single organization over the course of 12 months, transforming team leadership culture across the board to create systemic change.

With the 9-month model, we have seen the program significantly and substantively develop the leadership competency of agile team coaches from a broad range of organizations. Cohort members work in their own organizational environments with their teams, and throughout the program; they receive 360-degree feedback from their leaders, peers, and teams, in addition to their cohort members and instructors. They meet weekly via Zoom and spend an average of six hours a week working on the program.

The unique format of this program combines the act of learning together with the required hours of practice it takes for leaders to be able to turn the theories into action. The degree, purpose, and amount of feedback is combined with specific, tailored, and actionable strategies for leaders to make small microchanges in their presence, language, and behavior.

Over time, these microchanges create impactful results for individuals and teams.

Best Practises For How to Move Leadership Forward

Leaders with range are far more likely to discover a clearer path and lead more sustainable change.

And our experience with this program shows that the best way to grow leadership range is to focus on competency development around mindset—identifying and examining values and beliefs about how change happens and the role of leaders in team settings.

From this foundation, focus can expand to include skill building, learning retention, experiential learning, and reflective practices. At TeamCatapult, we have seen the results of this program create significant, long term 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.

The Value of a Cohort-Based Program

“If you believe that training is expensive, it is because you do not know what ignorance costs. Companies that have the loyalty of their employees invest heavily in permanent training programs and promotion systems.”

~ Michael Leboeuf, The Great Principle of Management

We’ve seen the uniquely transformative effects of cohort-based leadership development. With immersive cohort learning, individuals have the ability to practice their new competencies in the workplace, get feedback, work with a supervisor, and build skills together in such a way that leadership development becomes a force multiplier.

Unlike teaching that focuses on mechanical processes to “become more agile,” the focus on cultural change and leadership competency bridges the gap between learning new skills and actually developing the real-world capacity to use them effectively, pivot when needed, and apply the optimal leadership competency for any given challenge.

We invite you to learn more about our program by clicking the button below.

If you prefer, you may also schedule a call with our team today!

How Collective Intelligence Can Change Culture

Come think with me!

Here are a few questions I have for you as we start this conversation about collective intelligence.

Do you know how to have a conversation?
Have you ever experienced a time when you thought you were showing up to a conversation, but instead you got yelled at?
You showed up to a conversation and instead everyone was multitasking on their phones, or on another device?
Have you ever showed up to a conversation and instead one person really spoke the entire time and you didn’t really have a voice in the conversation at all?

George Bernard Shaw said it best:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Often we think we are communicating when we are really doing something else entirely!

What Kinds of Conversations Do You Have?

Let’s look at metaphorically how the conversations can be broken down.

[This comes from work done by William Isaacs.]

1) Monologue

Single voice.Turn taking. Download.

2) Debate

Beating down. Advocacy. There is a winner and a loser. I am holding strongly to a point of view and my job is to persuade, convince, cajole: to bring you over to my point of view.

3) Discussion

It means to break apart. It feels a bit like table tennis. You take a topic and pull it apart in different ways and then it gets lobbed back and forth a bit.

4) Skillful Conversation

It’s the first time where inquiry comes into the conversation. It’s a bit like plowing a field. We stick long enough with a topic to understand what’s there, we are inquiring and asking questions of others.

5) Dialogue

It’s metaphorically like a pool of water. We’re contributing to a pool of meaning. And everybody has equal voice. There aren’t any particular sides. There is no known objective. The idea and new thinking emerges from conversation, rather than somebody bringing ‘the idea’ into the conversation.

The Art & Science of Conversations

I believe that conversations are the single greatest predictor of success.

Whether we are or aren’t having them and if we can learn to be more intentional about how we invite conversation, how we participate, cultivate and facilitate dialogue, I don’t believe there is anything, any challenge, any initiative that an organization is taking on that they can not skillfully navigate towards an effective outcome!

Active engagement in skillful conversation and dialogue is the key to collective intelligence and culture change!

“The fastest way to change the culture in an organization is by changing the way we talk and think together.”

Mindset Work is Needed To Engage in Meaningful Dialogue

It might take an organisation 1-2 years to put these concepts in play, and practice, in order to realize their full potential!

It all starts by learning the nuts and bolts of the structure of conversations. You need to fully understand what dialogue is and how to start thinking about it differently!

Dialogue Is How We Access Collective Intelligence

Without dialogue, we can’t change culture, we can’t get to agility, we can’t seek the big things in organizations, these solutions, or vexing issues!

Things like higher performance, agility in business, change culture, innovation, looking to anticipate what’s coming in terms of change.

The solutions to these issues emerge from dialogue. Not from tools, processes or frameworks.

Solutions emerge from that collective pool of meaning!

Interested in learning more?

Watch and Listen!

This article is based on my presentation for the Business Agility Conference in June 2021.

It was recorded and can be watched right here!

Dialogue is the Foundation to Increasing Agility

Dialogue is leadership!

It’s not about what happens, it is about how you chose to respond to it! Learn more about dialogue!

Leadership is a journey and your collaborative leadership journey can begin right here.

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