What is agile coaching?

What is Agile Coaching

A brief description of what coaching is presented by Gary Bamberger from the Prague Global Scrum Gathering in November, 2015.

What is coaching?

What is coaching? So the International Coaching Federation says that it’s really a partnership where our goal is to inquire and work with a “client” in order to figure out how do we motivate this person. How do we get them to realize their potential? It's a big thing around focusing on an area where the client is stuck. Maybe it's a problem that the client is having.

And what our goal is, as coaches, is to help that client this move forward. Whether it's through action items or whether it's through some sort of inquiry that they need to sit with for some period of time. Our goal is to help them to move forward. Forward motion.

Coaching focus

So differentiation of coaching from psychology, psychology and all of that tends to look at past things. We are very focused on moving forward. Your baggage is your baggage. We'll deal with it if we need to. Our focus is really on how do you move forward.

And so our priority is to focus on the client. What kind of vision do they have? What are their priorities? What are their values? And it's really important to get in touch with people's values. What is it that they value as a person? And does that actually align with what the team values? Does that actually align with. what the organization values?

So coaching is really around us, as coaches, we are supporting people in finding their own answers. We don't have to solve their problems for them. We believe, as coaches, that people are naturally resourceful, creative and whole. They're not broken. We are there just to help expand their thinking. Maybe look at different perspectives, things like that, in order for them to solve their own problems. And so our focus isn't on fixing their problems for them. Our focus is really solely on how do we help them to figure out their own solution.

Coaching vs. Mentoring

So one other thing I'll talk about is coaching versus mentoring. So in mentoring there is usually a relationship. What kind of relationship would that be? Well you have a protege, or mentee, and then you have a mentor. Somebody who's been there done that. And I can help you in advancing. So there's there's a lot of advice that might be given there. There's a lot of input from the mentor to the mentee.

That's not what we're doing in coaching. We are not there to give the advice, per se. We are there to enable them to figure out their own solutions.

Anybody here ever been in and you just wanted to vent to somebody, and the other person starts fixing your problem for you? Anybody have that? This is a lot about allowing the person to vent. And then helping them to move forward. Asking them questions. And giving them structures with which they can move forward, and move out of the stuck position where you're venting, and actually move into an action of more positive and a more proactive type of mindset.

So there's a lot of different coaching models that exist out there. This is the one that I went through. There are no right or wrong answers with regards to the coaching models. This is the one that I know the best, so that's the one I'm pulling from. There's a lot of overlap between the different coaching models. You just need to know that there's more than one way to do this.