Agile Team Coaching

How Interrupting a Pattern of Behavior Helps Conversation Flow!

Conversations are an essential part of our daily lives, and they play a crucial role in building and maintaining relationships. However, sometimes conversations can become stagnant, and the flow can be interrupted by patterns of behavior that prevent open and honest communication.

Whether it’s the tendency to interrupt, dominate the conversation, or avoid certain topics, these patterns of behavior can create barriers to effective communication.

The Case Study: Setting the Stage

In this story, the leader of an organization recognizes that the current approach to a reorganization is not working and is causing resistance and opposition among his team. He decides to try something different and interrupts the pattern by taking a break and listening to the team’s concerns.

This shift in approach leads to a more productive conversation and a greater willingness among the team to engage in co-creating solutions to their challenges. The leader’s actions demonstrate the power of suspending one’s own point of view and actively listening to others in order to create the conditions for change to occur.

The Story Starts Here: Leading a Reorganization

There once was a leader who was leading a re-org in his organization. He had been working with me for a while as part of the organization’s transformation process because he recognized that there were a lot of entrenched behaviors — including his own — that needed to shift if the re-org was going to be successful.

Then, one day, he was in a meeting that was going in the exact same direction as meetings had been going for weeks: it was heated and he was on the defense team. He was caught in a familiar pattern of explaining, justifying, and trying to convince others of his perspective and help them to see his viewpoint of why the reorganization was needed.

Recognizing a Pattern of Behavior

But on this day, in the heat of the moment, he had a moment of noticing. First, he noticed that he was in a familiar pattern. Then he noticed that the pattern was him digging in his heels, defending his point of view, and getting into a heated debate with his team.

This was his aha! moment.

He then decided to move through the steps of the “pattern interrupt” he’d been practicing with me in coaching sessions.

First, he called for a brief break and he got up and took a walk around the building. Then, when they reconvened, he sat down and acknowledged that he was defending what he believed to be right. And then he voiced his decision to shift into the mode of curiosity.

He shared with the team that he was going to listen. He was actually going to pause his active participation in the meeting so that he could really listen to what they were saying.

He moved to the back of the room, and he asked them to resume the conversation they were having previously about their concerns. The team began to talk with one another again, sharing the risk they saw, the personal impact this org change would have, and the individual fears that everyone shared. They also talked about the deep pain and frustration they had been experiencing because they felt like none of their concerns had been heard even after multiple weeks of trying to share them.

The Power of Pausing and Listening to Interrupt a Pattern of Behavior

After 45 minutes of listening, the leader re-joined the conversation and shared what he had heard. For him, it had been deeply moving and it radically shifted his understanding of what was happening to them. They weren’t just resisting his viewpoint, they were feeling totally unheard in their viewpoint. So, he apologized for the impact he had been having on the team, acknowledged the hurt and pain, and shared how he totally saw what they were seeing now.

When he finished sharing his experience of listening to them – one by one each leader leaned into the conversation and said ‘I’m in, let’s do this…’

A Defining Moment of Leadership

The executive would later share with me that it was the most profound moment of his leadership and that he didn’t really understand what he had done.

Here’s what I told him happened. You suspended your point of view long enough to hear their perspective and experience. By doing this, you brought the real conversation in the room – it actually wasn’t an opposition to the re-org as much as it was opposition to not having their concerns addressed.

By the leader’s action, people felt seen and heard, and were ready to engage in co-creating solutions to some of their challenges instead of resisting and blocking the change.

Creating Space for Change to Occur

This is the power of the conversation. It had created the space for change to occur, it helped people feel seen and heard so that they could buy-in to the change.

There had been a pattern established by the leader resisting their perspectives. He was advocating rather than inquiring — defending rather than suspending. As a result, the concerns of the group continued to persist in the form of roadblocks and opposition. And what you resist ALWAYS persists.

Once this leader had shifted the course of the conversation by starting to inquire more, when he recognized that it was time to stop resisting, …something new happened.

By creating the conditions for change to really happen, he was able to lead the change within his organization in a radically different and more effective way.

When You Are Stuck, Try Interrupting Your Pattern of Behavior!

Interrupting patterns of behavior is a powerful tool for improving the flow of conversation and enhancing the overall quality of our interactions with others.

Next time you find yourself stuck in a conversation or relationship that is not flowing well, try interrupting your pattern of behavior.

This can be as simple as taking a pause by stepping away, changing the subject, or listening more actively. By interrupting these patterns, we can create new opportunities for growth and connection with others.

Remember, effective communication is not about being perfect, it’s about being open and willing to make changes when necessary.

Are You Limiting Your Team’s Ability to Make Important Decisions?

Making important decisions is a crucial part of running a successful business. However, many managers unknowingly limit their team’s ability to make these decisions, which can have a significant impact on the overall success of the company.

Whether it’s through micromanaging, lack of communication, or a lack of trust, there are several ways managers can unintentionally stifle their team’s decision-making abilities.

The Leadership Team That Couldn’t Make Decisions

In this case study, the hired consultant realized that her focus on process-oriented conversations was limiting the team’s ability to make important decisions.

She realized that people need space to talk about how changes will impact them personally, and that ignoring these personal factors can create roadblocks to success. She has since devoted her career to helping teams create space for these types of conversations and addressing the personal impact of change.

Setting the Stage: My Experience and Point of View

At the time, I was an experienced consultant and leader, with two degrees in software engineering and ten years of experience working with companies to help bridge the gap between end users and developers. I was about 3 years into a slightly new career of working with teams in large-scale transformations. Being the seasoned techie and ‘process chick’ that I am, I was prepared to come in and help this organization reach their desired change – and I knew just how to do it: with re-engineered processes and new tools!

I’m sure no one else has ever entered a team with all the answers but here I was… convinced that I could help them do this “the right way” and it was too focused on process.

An Executive Team and Difficult Decisions

Then one day, I was sitting in a room with the executive team I’d been working with for about nine months. We were in the deep end of the pool. They were making one of the most difficult decisions of their careers – to fundamentally re-organize – not just positions but departments and workflow. It included major geographical relocations for virtually everyone in the company and collectively rethinking everything. It was big.

So far, my approach had been to give people space to talk about the process of the transformation: the business decisions, the data analysis, cost analysis, and defining the scope of the transformation.

But at the crux of this particular conversation — the conversation that changed everything for me — the leaders were being asked to weigh-in on a decision that would impact them both professionally and personally.

They were torn between making a decision that could result in them either losing their job or having to uproot their families and employees. There was arguing, tears, anguish, strife and ultimately a stale-mate.

They simply could not reach a consensus on the future.

The Aha Moment That Changed Everything

This is when I had one of the biggest aha’s! of my entire career. We had spent so much of our time focusing on the process that we had not created space for people to talk about how this massive transformation would actually impact them.

We were re-engineering processes, identifying desired outcomes, and collecting data, but nowhere had anyone done the “dangerous” thing – of asking how people felt – either as individuals or as a group. They were being asked to “check their personal baggage at the door” and yet have a conversation that had a radical impact on them and their teams personally.

They were being asked to transform everything about their professional landscape, including their job functions, their rank in the organization AND where they would be living – and we’d never asked the question about how it would impact them personally!

Probably not too unlike being a project manager and one day being told you’re now an agile coach, moving from managing tasks to leading change.

And oh by the way, you’re in charge of figuring out what that really means.

Or executives that are told to be agile but also meet the quarterly financial returns. And they get lost in what feels like a dichotomy of figuring out how exactly to be agile and meet unrealistic goals.

It can be a complete identity change.

My Career Changed By Talking About the Scary Things!

This experience with this executive team haunted me. It has become my origin story — the basis for everything I have devoted my career to for the last 25 years. I had seen in no uncertain terms the limits of relying on process-focused conversations. And time after time since then, I’ve seen that it’s the things people feel like they can’t talk about that become the roadblocks.

In this team, it was a strictly business and numbers conversation that was not giving space for the personal impact conversation that held them back from making a final decision.

How to Overcome the Roadblocks

I have also worked with a team where the leader would pull people aside after meetings to give them feedback about needing to have better-informed answers in the next meeting. And he was not the least bit curious about what might be the reason the person did not have a solid answer in the first place.

And then there was the department that continues to re-org in an effort to improve performance but does not talk about what’s really impacting performance in the first place.

Just think for a moment, where might you be experiencing a scenario where there is something in the conversation that is not okay for you to talk about. You might even make a note as we go through today about where familiarity comes up for you. These are places I would invite you to come back to and think about — these are the places where there are roadblocks, and this is where to start overcoming the roadblocks.

These kinds of roadblocks come up when there is a tendency to defend our assumptions and perspectives. To assume we’re right. And to either not ask questions of what other people think, or to not share our perspective when we think the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

This I Know To Be True About Making Important Decisions as a Team

For me, I vowed at that moment that anytime I led change in the future it would be from the perspective of helping people talk about the things they didn’t think they could talk about or were scared to bring into the room.

And these two things I know now to be true:

Change cannot happen until people feel seen and heard
What you resist persists.

How hard is it for you to talk about the things that scare you? Are you allowing your team to bring scary things into the room?

All along, it might have been you who is limiting your team’s ability to make important decisions!

Are you ready to make a change?

~ Marsha

7 Keys to Successful Delivery Culture Change

This is a case study, a story, of how one organization changed their delivery culture and used Agile training as a cultural intervention to level up their delivery leads and their teams.

The Delivery Culture That Wasn’t

The Client:

A mid-sized tech development company who was growing fast and experiencing the consequence of growth pains. They were what they called ‘practicing agile’, and yet they were struggling with team cohesion, decision making and delivery.

The Struggles:

Teams did not feel heard.

Teams felt like they were getting stepped on.

Ideas from younger team members weren’t taken seriously by older team members.

The attitude around meetings was ‘Why would I bother coming to a meeting where you’re going to ask me my opinion, but you’ve already got a solution figured out? Why don’t you just tell me what to do, and I’ll go do it? Don’t waste my time.’

Team leaders were frustrated by on-going team resistance. They struggled to get their teams on board with new ideas or changes in the direction that the leaders knew needed to happen.

Teams would revisit topics that had already been discussed and decided, because, in fact, they hadn’t really been decided.

This lack of team cohesion and the constant resistance to ideas and change impacted product development and delivery. The process impeded creativity and efficiency. It caused frustration for everyone involved.

None of this is good for a growing tech company looking to break through the market and survive long-term.

This company was growing quickly and knew they needed to be more adaptable in their execution. They had laid down the core principles of agile. They thought they knew agile well.

But why were they still not seeing the results they needed? They had spent thousands of dollars in agile training, but they were not seeing the improvement results they expected or needed from this effort.

What was going on? How could this be fixed?

The Pitfalls Before Delivery Culture Change

The world of work is becoming more adaptive. No longer do we create five-year strategic plans or twelve-month project plans and expect them to be relevant past the end of the week. Markets and needs change quickly.

1 We need businesses who understand agility and adaptability at a core DNA level. Training is just one component.

2 We need leaders who can guide the process internally. Agility does not happen in big movements; it happens in small decisions that get made at a moment in time. The point where a leader says: I’m going to choose emergence over knowing all the answers upfront. Or I’m going to trust that the team will produce value, even if I don’t quite understand exactly how it will happen at a level that would make me comfortable.

3 The problem is viewed as a knowledge gap rather than a systemic issue. Sometimes in the case of facilitation, yes, it is a knowledge gap, but it’s also so much more. Just acquiring the new knowledge will not solve the systemic challenge in an organization that has a culture of leaders showing up late to meetings, refusing to hold themselves accountable to working agreements like ‘no technology’ during the meeting

4 No internal champion or sponsor. Training is procured by a vendor or even developed in house. Intervention and culture change at this level requires someone with seniority and gravitas inside the organization to be an ongoing champion

5 Training staff in the practices of agile without skills in how to help teams implement them – beyond the “what”, ensures that your teams spend their whole day in meetings without the skills to make them effective. It also makes everyone hate meetings.

6 Helping teams, scrum masters and agile coaches make some of the key mindset-shifts needed for agile, but failing to engage middle management and executive leaders or provide them a path for their own leadership growth.

7 Keys To Success of Delivery Culture Change

Today, this company is thriving!

Teams are high-performing, and the delivery leads are equipped to handle challenges as they come. Newer team members have more senior delivery leads they can lean on to help mentor them through tough team dynamics.

These are the reasons of how they got there:

Laid down the foundations of agile – mindset, practices, key principles. They know why agile is important. They understand why you’re doing it.
Effective collaboration and facilitation skills are table stakes for agile transformation. Facilitation is not optional. Everyone in an organization needs to understand what makes meetings effective. We need to wage a war on ineffective meetings that waste time and just repeat the same conversation over and over again.
Used a competency model for agile coaching – scrum masters and agile coaches are being asked to lead teams in different ways. We are leaving behind the days of telling people what to do, putting everything in a project schedule and managing to the schedule. Effective meetings and collaboration are at the heart of agility.
Developed the skills of facilitation and coaching throughout the organization – at all levels. Patrick Lencioni in his book “The Advantage” said “there is no greater way to change the culture of an organization than by starting with how they meet.”
Leaders went first. Leadership must model and support this – not contradict it. Leaders hold power and privilege over those learning. The fastest way to frustrate someone who has just learned a set of skills that light them up is to not support it. Mid and senior level leaders in the organization need to develop their own leadership.
Setup systems that support and reinforce what people are learning. When the skills of facilitation and coaching are not supported by the organizational structures they will not stick. Training in large organizations we often hear, “When will my boss go through this training?”
Built the competence of facilitation and coaching. Facilitation and coaching are professional bodies of knowledge. To become certified in either one requires hours of learning and practice, which helped to embed these skills through competency development programs.
1. Competency cohort with certification
2. Learning circles
3. Coaching circles
4. Work with a professional coach
5. Get mentoring and supervision from a professional facilitator

You Can Facilitate Delivery Culture Change Too!

Training programs CAN be one component of a successful intervention. If you want to change the culture, start by changing the way you meet. Management must get on board. Agile as a culture starts at the top. The leadership team must lead by example to create real cultural change. Companies who are willing to invest in this change can have real, lasting impact on employee morale, creativity, efficiency, future change and pivots.

An agile culture leads to greater productivity in less time, tapping fully into the creative and intellectual capabilities of the entire team; making employees feel valued, heard and a part of something bigger than themselves.

We Are The Team To Help Your Company!

We at TeamCatapult are a team of passionate, caring agile coaches who want to help your team transform, find your path and flourish. We want to help you get unstuck. We want to help you find true collaboration, creative process and team efficiency.

We believe deeply in the principles of Agile.

We are:

Adaptable
Able to bring clarity to complex situations
Experienced
Results-oriented
Growing in Capacity and Capability
Committed

We believe:

Conversations are fundamental
Performance is directly tied to leadership effectiveness
Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get
Challenges are addressed from a whole new system view

In research and real-world application.

How to Feel Competent and Experienced in Your Agile Coaching Practice

How are you viewing the role of agile coaching with individuals and with teams?

When do you make the time and focus on your leadership skills?

What if… you could focus your efforts on learning and then practice what you are learning, all within the same learning arc?

What will it take to feel competent and experienced in your agile coaching practice?

We know from our experience as Agile coaches that the following exercises will help you gain confidence and competence

skill drills
peer coaching
team coaching
ongoing group work
professional one-on-one coaching
one-on-one supervision of actual Agile coaching sessions in your own work environment

Let’s get this straight: scaling a coaching business or working as a leader in a large corporation can feel lonely. We know, as we’ve been there ourselves.

Connecting with and being surrounded with like-minded leaders can mean the difference between success and failure, confidence and doubt.

The TeamCatapult Cohort Program is an in-depth, 9-month program emphasizing rigorous practice accompanied with feedback opportunities in your own work environment.

Leaders and coaches gain competency in

Learning how to evaluate and assess where a team is at on their journey to high performance
Stepping in and helping teams have difficult conversations with grace and ease
Understanding the capacity to grow teams and individuals

How to Attain Transformative, Empowered Leadership Skills

“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life forever.”~ Amy Poehler

You can not become a leader all on your own. You need a tribe of people who you can go on this journey with. The Coaching Agility From Within Cohort offers this opportunity to leaders wherever they are!

In our program, the support from peers as well as cohort leaders is phenomenal. To attain transformative, empowered leadership skills, our cohort members experience the following as part of their cohort participation:

1 Weekly Group Cohort Calls

Weekly calls can vary in format to include case studies, triad and dyad practice, and coaching. The program includes over twenty group cohort sessions

2 Residential Retreat

At the residential retreat, cohort participants take a deep dive into the practice of team coaching. Participants take all of the learning in each competency and practice integrating it into their work with teams. This retreat prepares participants to level up their work.

3 Capstone Agile Coaching Stance

The program will conclude with the development and articulation of an Agile coaching stance, including how participants work with teams and why they do what they do.

4 Individual Professional Coaching with a Certified Professional Coach

One of the best ways to learn coaching is to receive individual coaching. These calls provide space for personal growth by providing rich time for reflection and feedback.

5 Reading and Journaling

Developing the skills of an Agile coach requires attention to your own development first. Each month, participants complete assignments designed to expand one’s knowledge and self-awareness.

6 Small Group Calls

Periodically throughout the program, there will be small group calls focusing on skills practice or on group supervision. These calls are designed to deepen overall understanding and awareness.

7 Supervisions

The program includes one-on-one supervision with a cohort co-leader. Each session assesses a video (or audio) that you provide, in a real-world situation and you get supervision and feedback.

At the end of the program, you will have 100 hours of coaching, team coaching, mentoring, facilitation and training practice!

After the Cohort

Our cohort participants don’t stop learning after nine months. They continue their journey together. Past participants may choose to be part of our Cohort Community, where one can continue to share, learn and grow leadership range in the community setting

From a cohort participant:

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

Are You Ready to Grow Your Leadership Range?

Cohort members come from all places in the world, from all walks of life and have a vast variety of work and life experiences. What unites our participants is the drive to grow, to learn and to become a better leader.

We would love to talk to you and learn more about you.

Schedule a 15-minute meeting to ask questions, get more details and meet with a Cohort Co-leader.

Leadership Lessons: The Art of Being with Other Human Beings

Leaders lead companies, boards, teams, groups, cohorts.

In other words, leaders lead… people.

How do leaders do it? How do leaders connect to and stay connected with the people they lead?

Keep on reading!

1 Listening, Not to React, But to Hear

Leaders should be curious. They should listen with intent to hear, not to respond and react to what is being said.

How do you do this?

Intentional listening is a skill that involves suspending judgment while focusing on the person who is talking, giving them undivided attention. Intentional listening is a way of listening to understand what is being said.

Learn more about international listening and curiosity here.

2 Dare to Dialogue

Leaders, I challenge you. Dare to dialogue.

Having real conversations with real people is a leadership skill.

“In dialogue, like in debate, you can have a perspective, but your viewpoint doesn’t guide the conversation. In fact, in dialogue you suspend your point of view, not only to hear the other’s perspective, but to ask them more about it. This is the space of curiosity and inquiry and listening without resistance, because this is where new thinking and innovation live.”

Dialogue is where leaders gain greater insight and agility.

3 Shared Common Interests

The art of being with other human beings requires you to be human. That means showing up as a human and being willing to share that side of you with your team.

Leaders inspire by doing, by leading, by setting the right example.

If you are active on LinkedIn, you will know what I mean. There are so many wonderful leadership stories on LinkedIn these days, great examples of how leaders share common interests, and are showing up for their teams.

4 Body Language

While in 2022 more and more people are working from home, and meetings are often conducted behind a screen, body language continues to be an important tool for leaders to connect with the people on their team.

Sitting behind screens vs being in the same room, makes reading body language a bit more complicated.

In this recent article about hybrid meetings, we emphasized the need for the meeting facilitator to recognize the importance of the webcam!

“As the facilitator, you will have some specific requests for participants in order to make the session the most effective. Be sure to share these, along with other logistics and joining information, with participants ahead of time.”

One camera, one mic, one mouse per person

Be on camera
Be off mute
Be prepared to be called on

Whether you meet with the team you lead in person, virtually or in a hybrid form, being able to read body language is of utmost importance.

Why?

This “7-38-5 rule” states that 7 percent of meaning is communicated through spoken word, 38 percent through tone of voice, and 55 percent through body language. This 7-38-55 rule was developed by psychology professor Albert Mehrabian at the University of California, Los Angeles, who laid out the concept in his 1971 book Silent Messages (1971).

5 Keeping the Connection

Last but not least, leaders put effort into keeping the connection with their team! Everything you do, including the words you use and the energy you have, matters!

Leaders bring the weather!

“Early in my career, I worked at a small startup and we had a private chat channel. When the CEO arrived each morning, someone would give a weather report in the chat. It’s cloudy, it’s sunny, it’s stormy, literally what the mood of the CEO was. This weather report informed my plan and others for the day. On sunny days, I knew I could have important conversations that mattered. If the weather was stormy or cloudy, those were the days that I wanted to lay low and go home early if possible. As leaders, you don’t have to have a title to be a leader, but you bring the weather. So, your words, your energy, your tone, all matter. When you are frantically running down the road, too busy to pause and ask questions, you send the message that there’s no space for conversation here.”

Bring the weather, day after day and stay connected to your team by meeting in small groups like Ahmed Sidky did.

Leadership Lessons. A Journey to Agile Team Facilitation

We invite you, the kind of leader who wants to continue on their leadership journey to check our offering of workshops.

In particular, our virtual Agile team Facilitation Workshop touches on many of the leadership lessons mentioned in this article. If you are a team leader, don’t miss this chance to learn to design and lead engaging, purposeful and fun meetings…and achieve results every time.