agile team coaching cohort

How The Best Leaders Will Inspire and Guide, Not Boss Their Team Around!

Leadership is a behavioral choice. How you lead, and how you serve your team is up to you, the leader. It’s a choice you make each time you interact with your team.

“Leadership is messy.” ~Ahmed Sidky

In a recent podcast episode of Defining Moments of Leadership, we learn more about this human-centric approach to leadership from Dr. Agile himself, Ahmed Sidky.

How do leaders inspire and guide? Listen to the full episode here.

Leader vs Manager vs Boss

Not everyone understands what it takes to be a great leader. Some take to leadership by assuming the title, but not the work. Others confuse being bossy with leadership.

The best leaders will inspire and guide, the worst will boss their teams around until they fall apart, revolt or even breakdown.

Here are 3 ways leaders can become great leaders.

1 Building Relationships vs Building Systems

While systems play an important role in leadership, managers can set up systems. You do not need to be a leader to be good at systemizing the tasks you need your team to perform.

Instead of building systems, great leaders build relationships with their team members. Building relationships takes time, effort and can’t necessarily be measured with data. As Ahmed Sidky mentions in the podcast “untangling the human web is messy. It’s about people not systems.”

COOs are usually about the process, but once they realize it’s about the people, not just the systems, the investment in relationships will solve most of the problems.

2 Leadership vs Bossiness

The difference between leadership and management or bossiness is this:

“Leaders inspire and guide; management tells.”

There certainly is a negative connotation of “bossy.” Leaders are not always right. When they stay curious, ask questions, and have a genuine interest in the human side of the company they work for, magical things happen in their team. Bosses on the other hand, tell people what to do, what to think, how to act. Bosses do not leave room for spontaneity, dialogue or team member empowerment. They just want to get the job done by telling someone what to do, how to do it, and when.

While leaders are bosses and most bosses have core leadership skills, not all bosses are leaders. And know this: Bossiness is not a leadership trait.

3 Practicing vs Knowing

Great leaders invest time in learning new leadership skills. Awesome leaders take time to practice their skills and take time to build relationships (as mentioned earlier).

The best leaders understand that leadership is a lifelong journey that never ends. Time and effort to gain new skills is great, but the stellar, iconic leader will apply the intentional effort to put these new skills into action!

Leaders Embrace Professional Development

No matter where you are on your journey to leadership, “great” steps include professional development with opportunities that will enhance your competency, not just get you there faster.

At TeamCatapult we hold this value that leaders can expand their leadership range.

Will you do that by intent or practice or hap-in-stance?

I invite you to take an intentional step and begin imagining how this can happen within the context of a cohort of like-minded leaders. Coaching Agility from Within Cohort is the single-best step you can take. Don’t take our word for it. Listen to the video of others, who like you, wanted to become the best leader they could imagine.

The cohort is designed for those eager, like you, to become the leader who inspires, motivates and empowers high-performing Agile teams. To facilitate, train, coach and mentor teams with confidence that is developed through engaging practice with your fellow cohort members.

We start the next cohort in May. Transformative. Empowered. Leadership. Starts here.

Or, if you prefer, hop on a 15-minute call with us.

How To Take Your Agile Team Coaching Skills To The Next Level

If you are a team facilitator, and you are looking to grow your leadership skills, this is the place to be! In “7 Tips To Improve Your Team facilitation Skills” we learn that team facilitation starts with developing the right mindset and meeting preparation process.

It’s informed by the things you believe as a facilitator, such as believing the group has the collective wisdom to solve the challenge at hand. Being aware of your bias means understanding how you can intentionally or unintentionally influence the group process.

No matter the kind of meeting you walk into, your job is to help the group get over the hurdles of face-to-face communication. We’ve put together a checklist of what ‘Basic Agile Facilitation’ feels and looks like.

Step 1: Basic Agile Facilitation

Purpose: Lead the process of a meeting

Personal:

Process for tasks and outcomes
Focus is on making meeting run better and more collaboratively

Symptoms: Team needs help with meetings

Sounds like: “Help us get better at running our release planning meetings”

Leadership: Active leadership from the facilitator who takes the process lead and designs a process to help the group achieve their desired outcomes.
Outcomes: Achievement of a specific goal or deliverable (i.i team charter, decision on work priorities, release plan etc.)

As well as:

What are you doing?

Creating a clear meeting purpose, agenda, working agreement and a process that engages the whole group.
Helping the team learn the agile practices – stand-up, team chartering, iteration planning, release planning, retrospective.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Notice the four action stances and how to bring or call for another action in the moment.

How are difficult problems handled?

Mostly off-line or 1:1 with feedback about impact.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Awareness of your own behavioral profile and how it might impact how you work teams.

Leveling Up Your Facilitation Skills

Once you have these skills and understand this framework, you will be able to move on to Advanced Team Facilitation.

The five cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance include:

Read the following checklist about what Advanced Team Facilitation feels and looks like.

Step 2: Advanced Team Facilitation

Purpose: Empower the team to facilitate themselves

Personal:

How the group is working.
Focus is on improving interactions, communications and decision-making skills of the team.

Symptoms: Challenges with behavior or interpersonal relationships

Sounds like: ”Help us improve how we work so we can facilitate our own work.”

Leadership:

Active leadership from the facilitator that happens more from the back than the front.
The emphasis is on the team’s capability to be more self-facilitating and self-organizing.

Outcomes: Improvement in awareness, skills and effectiveness as a team.

As well as:

What are you doing?

Naming structural patterns so the group can become more aware of their helpful vs unhelpful patterns.
Designing group processes to help change the patterns you see in the team.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Diagnose a stuck pattern in a team.

How are difficult problems handled?

Name challenging patterns in the group, help them navigate the challenges or develop working agreements to prevent them.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Increasing awareness and able to see patterns in the moment – yours and others.
Expanding your tolerance for difference.
Becoming “multi-lingual” and able to change your vocal range when needed.

Check out this Facilitation Toolkit!

Leadership Journey to Agile Team Coach

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.

Look at the following checklist to see if you are already at the next step!

Step 3: Agile Team Coaching

Purpose: Empower the team to lead and tackle more systemic challenges.

Personal:

How the system is working.
Focus is on the system as a whole and how it’s working or not working.

Symptoms: Systemic challenges and stuck patterns that are keeping the team from their full potential.

Sounds like: “Help us develop as a team so that we reach high performance.”

Leadership:

Active leadership is happening within the team.
The team is doing their real work either in a meeting, work session or at their desks.
The coach is observing and intervening when appropriate or needed.

Outcomes:

Positive changes in individual and team performance.
Individual and groups shift in mindset, deepended awareness and intentionality about working together effectively.

As well as:

What are you doing? Live and “in the moment” coaching opportunities within the team to neutrally name what is happening so the team can see it and take their own actions.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Diagnosing a stuck patterns in a team and revealing it to the team so they can see it, too.
Changing theme “in the moment” so that they are able to change the nature of their conversation for more productive outcomes.

How are difficult problems handled?

Problems are seen as systemic issues rather than 1:1 conversations and are with the system in the room.
“Bring the conversation in the room” becomes a guiding principle.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Changing your behavior in order to help the team change their pattern and get different results.

Next Step: Coaching Agility From Within Cohort!

Where in this journey to masterful agile team coaching are you?

Once you’ve mastered basic agile facilitation, advanced team facilitation and you’ve become an agile team coach, what’s next is an exciting journey! We invite you to learn more about “A Cohort Journey to Masterful Agile Team Coaching”

This 9-month TeamCatapult cohort starts on 10/25/21. We are accepting applications now. Click here to apply. We also invite you to learn more about this program by reading what those who’ve completed the program are saying.

How to Gain True Mastery in Agile Team Coaching

How we lead and how we manage are the basic competencies in team settings. But leadership is a craft that requires investment and growth. Now more than ever, the survival and success of our organizations depends on making strategic change where it matters most.

Agile Team Coaches are called upon daily to help teams grow, develop and become high performing agile teams. To do this well, Agile Team Coaches need depth in a variety of competencies.

Mastery in agile team coaching is about being able to sense what is needed most in the moment and dance among various competencies in order to show up in the way that will best support team growth and performance, in that moment.

In the ICAgile Coaching Track we identify five discrete competencies, the sides of the Agile Coaching Competency Wheel: Facilitation, Professional Coaching, Professional Team Coaching, Training and Mentoring. Let’s start with the two competencies on the left, the ones that require that we know what we are talking about, that we have content knowledge.

Training

When the people we work with have a gap in their understanding of Agile, or the frameworks, principles, values or techniques, even the mindset, education is where we turn to. If they simply do not know, it is our job to provide them with the knowledge, something which is often the case at the start of someone’s Agile journey. When we think about training we tend to think of formal workshops, leveraging theories of adult learning, but training can also be in the moment, sharing context appropriate knowledge on the spot. The right information, at the right time, in the right way.

Mentoring

As people progress on their journey the emphasis moves to applying the knowledge they have acquired. At this point the competency of mentoring – providing one’s wisdom and guidance of the subject matter to guide the situation at hand – becomes important. The mentor is clear about what they know and what they don’t and they use a coaching approach, rather than telling the client what to do. Mentoring may include coaching, counseling and advising, but the action taken stays the choice of the individual being mentored.

Agile Team Coaching Certification

Coaching as powerful leadership, our Agile Team Coaching workshop and certification, gives coaches the space to explore and apply a model for coaching and mentoring conversations so that they are able to distinguish the difference between them and know when to intentionally use which

Practice coaching skills in one on one and small group conversations
Guide others to make intentional and empowered choices so that they achieve their desired objectives
Coach the journey to team high performance so that they work as a holistic integrated system.
Explore the unique characteristics of an Agile team.
Uncover and effectively resolve team conflict, resistance and dysfunction so they learn how to self-manage.

If you are interested in attending this workshop, learn more and register here.

Agile Team Facilitation

Another, second, highly recommended certification that pairs with Agile coaching is the Agile Team Facilitation workshop.

During the Agile Team Facilitation workshop participants learn to design and lead engaging, purposeful, and fun meetings that achieve the desired results every time.

Explore the cornerstones of the facilitation stance so you confidently know what’s needed from you in any situation.

Practice the steps of planning and design, using pre-defined templates so that you can stop spinning your wheels and wasting time before every meeting.
Practice facilitation where you will learn to put the stance and skills into practice.
Apply the facilitation mindset where you will learn to put the stance and the skills into practice.
You will plan and design a facilitated session with mentoring from your instructors.
You’ll conduct the facilitation and get feedback from your instructors and participants.

Coaches with both an Agile Coaching as well as the Agile Team Facilitation certifications, are offered a unique opportunity.

An 8-month cohort to gain a true mastery in Agile coaching!

Mastery through Practice

While you can learn concepts and practice skills of agile team coaching, real mastery is grown through practice – with real people and real teams in your real world. Imagine having the opportunity to practice and getting specific feedback that helps you, as an agile coach, grow.

Emphasis on practice and feedback opportunities through skill drills, peer coaching, team coaching, ongoing group work, professional one-on-one coaching and one-on-one supervision of actual Agile coaching sessions.

Students will have ample opportunity to learn from.

What Will a Cohort Expose?

You’ll no longer feel off balance when conflict arises with your team because you’ve had plenty of time to integrate your coaching and facilitation skills in a rigorous, feedback-rich environment.

There will be no more winging it or playing safe hoping no one will notice.

Skills and growth will be mirrored back to students in real time. No more simulations or just theory. All of the feedback you receive is based on your work with your real teams.

Strategic Changes in Leadership

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 intention.

True Mastery in Agile Coaching!

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.

The Coaching Agility from Within™ 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

Over the course of the program, cohort members come to see facilitation and coaching as a craft to be developed, as well as an essential leadership skill. In addition to expanding their understanding of the traditional model of leading from the front, members learn what it means to lead from the back and how to lead by partnering.

Along the way, the program facilitates tough conversations that emerge for the cohort about the tensions created in the process of growing their leadership range, and it supports their awareness of how they, as leaders, can best support a team’s ability to perform more effectively. 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.

When we move to the right hand side of the competency wheel we let go of our subject matter knowledge in order to serve our clients best. The aim of agile coaching is to develop the natural wisdom of those we coach, not to make them dependent on us. As they grow in their agility we need to grow their confidence in their ability to solve their own problems, which means we step away from solving their problems for them and allow their own wisdom to come forward.

Facilitation

Facilitation is the art of leading people through a series of activities to achieve predetermined outcomes in such a way that everyone participates and buys in. A lot of people think that facilitation means running a meeting, throwing in your own ideas while you are at it, but a true facilitator stays neutral, fades into the background when conversations flow, skillfully encourages exploration of all options, manages dysfunction, to name but a few skills. Good facilitation is essential for good collaboration.

Professional Coaching

Our clients are generally able to solve their own problems, if we support and believe in them. In professional coaching we believe we are there to stimulate our client’s thinking and reflection in a creative way. We bring our neutrality and care, they bring their problem, and together we create the right conditions to explore the options. We do that through listening intently, reflecting what we hear and see, through asking thought-provoking questions, and a multitude of other coaching tools and techniques. We want our clients to fulfill their personal and professional potential, at their pace, reaching the goals they set for themselves. We make sure that they come up with an action that moves them in the direction of their goals, and we hold them responsible and accountable.

Coaching someone means that we stick to their agenda, their pace of change, their solutions to the problems they bring. It therefore means we let go of our own agendas, opinions, judgements and solutions about what actions they should take.

Professional Team Coaching

Professional Team Coaching utilizes the same mindset, has the same objectives and a similar approach to Professional Coaching, but it adds an additional dimension : maximizing team performance. It makes use of the team’s collective intelligence, and it brings in a systems view to reveal to the team what is happening in their system, rather than for every member individually. A team coach needs to know how to access the team’s collective intelligence, including creating the conditions for all voices to be heard. The coach holds the team responsible and accountable, and importantly, teaches the team to coach themselves.

It must be clear to you by now that Agile Coaching borrows heavily from a number of professions, and we have a lot to learn from these professionals. You can choose to study each of these disciplines separately, or you can attend one of our certified workshops to start your journey!

Top 5 Reasons to Join an Agile Team Coaching Cohort

There are many ways to learn and deepen your knowledge and skills. Finding the format that works best for you is key to being able to develop mastery of a craft.

For Agile Team Coaches there are plenty of learning opportunities available from a variety of organizations. At TeamCatapult we made a choice many years ago to be one of the first Member Training Organizations with the International Consortium of Agile (ICAgile). The choice included the offer of a facilitation course, and a few years later, an agile team coaching course to help those who wanted to coach and lead teams who were pursuing the art of agility.

One of the primary reasons we aligned so well with ICAgile was their approach to framework agnostic in learning agility. It aligned well with how we wanted to talk about facilitation and coaching skills in the context of the values and principles of agility – creating a space to focus on deepened knowledge of human systems dynamics and how teams and groups develop.

A secondary reason we aligned well with ICAgile was the emphasis placed on learning journeys.

Learning Agile Facilitation and Coaching

For those unfamiliar, ICAgile has two levels of certifications:

Certified Professional – means that you have acquired knowledge and skills
Certified Expert – means that you have demonstrated competency

In the ICAgile Agile Coaching track there are two Professional certifications:

Certified Professional: Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)
Certified Professional: Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)

…which culminates in a final Expert certification:

Certified Expert: Agile Coaching (ICE-AC)

The learning objectives for the professional certifications are often covered in 2-3 days of classes. These certifications lay down the basic level of knowledge for agile team coaches.

Then comes application, experience and practice.

How Do You Learn Best?

We all have different styles and ways of learning.

There are some, perhaps you, that are social learners, meaning you prefer to learn in groups or with other people. Joining a cohort is a great way to accomplish your next goal of becoming a masterful Agile team coach!

What is an Agile Team Coaching Cohort?

The dictionary defines a cohort as “a group of people banded together or treated as a group.” An agile team coaching cohort is a group of agile team coaches who learn and upskill together.

So why would you want to join a cohort?

We’ve put together the Top 5 reasons to join a cohort, and for good measure, we’ve added one bonus reason.

Here are The Top 5 Reasons to Join an Agile Team Coaching Cohort

1) Meet Like-Minded Colleagues

We learn so much from our peers. Belonging to a cohort for 7 months will allow you to connect with fellow cohort members on a deep level in many aspects including social and professional, coupled with a mutual understanding of Agile leadership. Cohorts, in a way act like mastermind groups, but with clear leadership and an end goal.

2) People Learn Better In Groups

The traditional models of learning where an instructor does all the knowledge sharing and talking is not effective. Research shows that community plays an important role in our learning. Cohorts provide rich opportunities to learn from experiences and stories; ours and the others in the cohort. Plus, feedback can be just as valuable, if not more.

The experiences of others will be different than yours. Sometimes the difference will help you to clarify and try things that you haven’t, possibly because they are not in your practice model…yet. And then others will share things that inspire you, invite you to step outside your comfort zone and current range.

3) Get Support

A supportive environment enhances the overall learning experience. Working through a problem or issue alongside someone often shapes the overall outcome to a positive experience.

“Taking on a challenge of any kind is easier to accomplish if you have a support system—people you can go to for answers to your questions, for advice, as a shoulder to cry on, or encouragement.”

4) Develop Your Skills

Enhancing current skills or developing new skills certainly is the main focus of joining a cohort. However, a secondary and equally important reason to develop new skills as an adult, includes life satisfaction as well as improving and maintaining your mental well-being. What better way to do that than with like-minded, enthusiastic peers who will share this 7-month journey with you?

5) Learn to Work With Live Group Dynamics

In a cohort, you will be in community and relationship with the other members of the group, including your co-leaders. As you learn together you will also be developing relationships that transcend the material. Group dynamics naturally emerge and we will work with what shows up as a way to model the skills you will be using to coach relationships and team dynamics in your work.

Bonus TIP: Continued Support Long After the Program Ends

Because the format of learning relies on you building relationships with other cohort participants, you will likely build lifelong relationships that will endure beyond the end of the program. This will become a supportive network of colleagues who “have your back” when you need it.

Learn More About Coaching Agility From Within and Apply to Join!

We invite you to our in-depth, 7-month program.

It is rigorous, placing an emphasis on practice and feedback opportunities through skill drills, peer coaching, team coaching, ongoing group work, professional one-on-one coaching and one-on-one supervision of actual Agile coaching sessions.

You will have ample opportunity to learn from your peers and bring real-world scenarios to the group for feedback and guidance.

Apply now!