Agile - CoachME: The perfect pair.

At CoachME we believe that your way of being as a leader (of self, others, things…), equates to over half of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. They are resonant with the focus of the CoachME Model facets of results, transition, reflection, and action (or practice). These elements help to ensure psychological safety is co-created, bravery is present, effective communication is present, and all team players lean into their team system. The model supports awareness of the field the organisation is in, such a tech, financial sector, health, or education, and captures learning as an ongoing element. By working this way, with a systemic focus, listening to the needs of the stakeholders, the CoachME Model principles of Belief, Momentum and Celebration, provide coaches, leaders, teams, organisations (and beyond…) with essential foundations to consciously shape healthy relationships that foster honesty, compassion, courage, collaboration, and team level development. 

Increasingly teams that have constant movement in terms of team members, dispersed teams, diverse teams, and project teams, with skill sets of people chosen specifically, who are commissioned to deliver from the get-go. As our world continues to be more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, requiring iterative practices as the landscape shifts and the horizon becomes closer, we are asked to work with less resources and time, at an increasingly high quality. 

What issues do teams face?

·      Teams experience conflict.

·      Their purpose may not be clear.

·      Their clients may not be heard, and requests may not be acted upon in the desired speed.

·      Teams may function as groups.

·      They may work as silos.

·      Team leaders may ‘suck up’ power.

·      Various working styles and cultural backgrounds may clash.

·      Objectives may not be aligned to strategy.

·      Impact and value may not be present when a team is ‘doing’ yet not evolving to needs.

These are just some of the areas that CoachME Team Coaching enables you as a team leader, team coach, L&D or OD professional, to practice, arming you with confidence to work as individual team coaches, or in co-delivery with other team coaches as you partner with the team on their journey to high performance, impact and continuous improvement. 

Our Lead Faculty are Scrum Masters, Certified Agile Coaches and Agile Project Managers, and so we have been increasingly introducing agile in our ICF and AC Accredited and Approved Coach Training Programmes (ACCT, ACTP, ACSTH). This shift has attracted an increasing number of agile practitioners increasingly following our work, using the CoachME Model, and sharing their experiences in our community sessions that provide coaching SUPERvision and a safe space to spar with peers as professional sounding boards, up skill and resource, restore energy, recalibrate and benchmark.

Reflection is a large part of CoachME Coaching. This deep work on areas such as ‘self’, process, and project, allows you to create your signature presence, sharing your authority, including your experience. What is your signature presence as a team coach? What ways to you work with compassion for all the stakeholders? What is your growth edge in partnering with the team? This focus enables you to work with teams holding them naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, uncovering the intelligence in their team system.

We provide coaches with Mentor Coaching on Core Competencies and Team Coaching Competencies as well as SUPERvision to discover the ways parallel processes play out in nested systems, and how transference impacts our work. We provide real case studies and enable you to work with leaders and teams to practice the skills and knowledge you gain. We enable you to consider various perspectives, to develop wide angle compassion, and to work future-back and outside-in. Teams are naturally intelligent and yet that knowledge may need you as a coach to ‘mine’ with the team to discover the ‘gems’. Working the agile way, you can dance in the moment with the team, take a meta view, holding a mirror to the team to help them deepen understanding, share leadership and accountability, and forward action. This awareness, in time, enables the team to be proactive, hear beyond words, use powerful questioning, and self-correct, calling each other forth.

The CoachME Model and the TAP360 ‘Team Advance Profile’ our team level diagnostic, enables coaches, project managers, leaders, teams, enterprises to practice the Agile Manifesto principles. The model has been shared to be a powerful process for facilitating retrospectives a tool used by agile teams to constantly review and adapt to drive constant improvement. Our programmes also fills your ‘toolbox’ with experiential, contextually based activities that you can use with teams live online and face-to-face in person to grow psychological safety, clarity purpose, map stakeholders, increase synergy, identify strengths, understand perspectives, and so forth. Such activities as systemic constellations, appreciative enquiry, or sculpting, tap into everyone’s ‘voice’, even through silence.

CoachME Coaching promotes the coach as a partner with the client system; it is not that of the team leader, trainer, or the executive sponsor. In this way, we ensure you ‘live’ this acronym – ABCDEFT – always be contracting and deliberatively fostering ethics. By creating clarity during the commissioning phase, and keeping three, four or even five way contracting alive throughout, and by co-creating SMART accountability measures for the project and each session, you will set up they right conditions for success. This supports effective interaction with the team, and beyond.

In agile, the goal is not only high performance. Agile is about continuous improvement through an empirical process, as well as celebration of iterations, supporting the system, and the impact it creates for its purpose. Continuous improvement results in ongoing, measurable deliverables, and reflection ‘on’ and ‘in’ performance. One agile team measure is the results on how much better they became together as a team, in flow with the system they function. 

CoachME coaches coach the whole teams as well as individual members including the team leader. We also advocate team level profiling to measure return on investment, and to diagnose, 360, the team’s strengths and development areas in terms of impact, performance, processes, behaviours, and so forth.

“A good Scrum Master helps every member of the team grow. A great Scrum Master fosters the team’s growth.” (Watts, 2014)

What makes the CoachME Model unique is it blends of focus on results, with transition planning – coping with setbacks and dependencies. We support teams to co-create team level objectives, valuing individuals, whilst acknowledging their impact on the team’s results.

CoachME’s systemic lens empowers teams to think in terms of WE-Q where the whole is so much more than the parts. This model is proven to be effective for agile coaches working with teams as they embrace change, develop together, stay resilient and check-in on individual plus team level motivation, and clarify the most effective place to focus at various times.

We have been delivering face-to-face in person and live on-line coaching for over 10 years across sectors globally, internally and as public programmes at various levels. We also deliver team-leader-as-coach programmes. Reach out if you want to positively transform yourself and partner with individuals, teams, groups, boards, and whole organisations to enable their potential too.

Dr Clare Beckett-McInroy, ICF MCC, EMCC ESIA & MP, EdD, MAEd, Certified Agile Coach, Agile PM

Sameera Baba, ICF PCC, Certified Professional Scrum Master II, Professional Scrum Product Owner