Thank you for running an awesome Agile Coach course, which attracted some very talented Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile practitioners from around the world.
Conrad Swinfield-Wells
Course Overview
The Team Agility Coach course is a highly interactive, experiential journey that will help you develop the attitudes and learn the skills of an effective Team Agility Coach. You will learn and practise coaching, mentoring, and teaching skills in the context of Agile ways of working. You will leave the course feeling empowered with skills, models, and styles of working with individuals and teams in order to help them continuously improve.
Topics Covered
The Agile Coaching Context
Agile Coaches draw on a variety of skills and practices. In this part of the course we will put Agile coaching into context and attempt to answer the question: What is Agile coaching and what shifts might we need to adopt?
Professional Coaching Skills & The Coaching Conversation
A coach assumes that team members have an individual and a collective wisdom, and that the task of the coach is to elicit the answers within. The main skills taught are listening actively, asking effective questions and following a coaching process. As this training is particularly experiential, you can expect to learn about your strengths and your own areas for development.
Coaching Alliances and Contracts
Setting the stage for a coaching relationship involves clear contracting and designing of alliances. Here we expand on the typical coaching triangle (coach, team, and organisation) and present a wider stakeholder view. You will learn how to design a coaching alliance and how to contract with all parties.
Key Mentoring Skills & Mentoring Agile Role Transitions
At times an Agile coach needs to impart her Agile expertise and to guide the team by making suggestions, giving feedback, giving advice, instilling practices, and guiding transitions to Agile roles. Along with such changes come fears and “resistances” and so a framework for working with change is presented. Knowing when to coach and when to mentor is a key skill of an Agile coach.
Key Teaching Skills & Teaching Agile
Teaching the basics of Agile is an activity the Agile Coach performs again and again and is conducted both in and out of the classroom. There are different learning styles, and you will practise including these in your teaching methods.
Foundational and Systemic Team Coaching
In this part of the training we focus on the dynamics at play within groups and teams, and in building our observational skills as coaches. This involves looking at the system of all humans involved and the connections between them. It also involves being able to articulate these observations in service of the team.
Team Development & Coaching the Journey Toward High Performance
How can we as Agile coaches help a team to develop as a team, along with developing trust and a healthy team culture? Along with a series of models, much of the learning here will come through reflecting on our lived experience in this and other groups and teams.
Handling Conflict and Dysfunction
In this part of the training we look at our individual attitudes toward conflict and dysfunction, building self awareness in the team, and strategies for surfacing and working with conflict.
Handling Organisational Impediments
Often the forces that impede the team come from other parts of the organisation. In this part of the training we will look at ways that the Agile coach can help the team to surface such impediments and to make decisions on how to work with them.
Tools and Practices You’ll Explore
- The House and Pentagons of Agile Coaching – the why, who and how of Agile Coaching
- The Drama Triangle – how to break out of it and instead move yourself and your team to the Winner’s Triangle
- The TGROW model – following a coaching process that works
- The Question Bank – a powerful game for asking powerful questions
- Action Learning Sets – a team and group coaching model that’s earned its reputation
- Systemic Coaching and Constellations – seeing the invisible in groups and teams
- Agile Culture Mapping – seeing and inquiring into the kinds of cultures we aspire towards
- PLUS tools for building trust, fostering collaboration, dealing with conflict
- And several more…
Certification
Those who participate in the full course will be issued with the Team Agility Coaching certificate issued by Systemic Agility and the ICP-ACC certificate issued by ICAgile.
About the Facilitator
Ryan Behrman
Ryan is an enterprise and team coach, consultant and change facilitator. Over the past decade he has trained hundreds of managers, coaches and facilitators in agile approaches to management, leadership, coaching and facilitation. He is the co-designer of highly acclaimed industry-certified courses in agile coaching, agile facilitation, enterprise agile coaching, and lean change management.
Ryan is a highly experienced agile team coach and enterprise agile coach and has a proven track record of bringing teams and managers together to communicate, collaborate and innovate in large scale programmes and multi-stakeholder environments in almost every industry spanning retail, supply chain, publishing, government, renewable energy, travel, cloud software, education, investment banking, wealth management, risk management, fintech, telco, energy, and data analytics.
Prior to coaching and facilitation Ryan spent a decade in the city of London as an e-commerce software developer and senior project manager in multi-national consulting firms.
He holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Cape Town, an MBA from Warwick Business School and over a dozen certifications including being a trained Professional Coach (ICF), Systemic Constellator (organisational and family), Lego Serious Play facilitator, StrongSuits trainer and Action Learning facilitator.