Stances for an Agile Coach

IMHO with a decade agile coach experience, S/He exhibit 2 crucial styles as directive and reflective depends on various stances of a coach while working with a person or group across organization;

Directive: A directive style is a role modelling, telling, sharing information, providing answers, advising, teaching, mentoring, giving examples, influencing with transfer of knowledge;

Reflective: A reflective style is asking powerful questions, active listening, facilitation, observation, creation of safe space, sharing learning resources or references, helping with goal definition, reflection-in-action;

Agile coaching helps people who work in rapidly evolving situations become more effective and successful. Agile coaches plays a critical role for successful agile transformations/adoptions;

Agile coaching is an evolving profession, it requires more than just agile process/technical knowledge. Agile coach stances to adapt the needs of the person, team and organization. Each stance is tailored to specific coaching needs and challenges, coaches can switch between stances congruence to achieve desired outcome;

Agile Coach Stances

Agile coach stances are critical in facilitating successful agile transformations, adoptions within an organization. Agile coaches must have a deep intuition on different stances and how to apply them in various coaching scenarios.?The stances i have been experienced with various clients adheres to achieve their desired outcomes.

1. Observer Stance

The Observer stance is all about observing the behaviour, interactions and provides constructive feedback to improve the communication and collaboration and celebrate person/teams successes. coach typically attends sessions, engages in discussions, notes interactions, responses, mood, or underlying emotions, views and shares their viewpoint with assessment on whatever S/He observed. This should ideally be conducted without judgment, depending on the nature of the event and its core.

2. Facilitator Stance

The Facilitator stance is about guiding and supporting a group to achieve their goals. this stance is particularly useful when coaching teams that are struggling to communicate effectively or make decisions efficiently, The coach ensures that all team members are heard and that decisions are made collaboratively.

An Agile team coach in the Facilitator's stance will apply their knowledge in conceptualisation, structure, facilitation, moderation, dispute resolution, navigating scenarios, group dynamics evaluation and training.

In essence, facilitation helps individual sessions achieve specified goals or develop new ways to improve current meetings and events. When an agreement is difficult to achieve and compromise is required, these facilitation abilities are sometimes employed to assist a group in concluding.

3. Trainer Stance

The Trainer stance congruence to discover a knowledge disparity or evaluate concepts and practices that need to be reinforced. The training may take numerous forms, from information sharing via lectures and classroom-style activities to participatory learning via group projects and assignments. A competent trainer knows how to convey and reinforce knowledge in various settings, including conventional classrooms and impromptu exercises. Essentially focusing on skills development through formal instruction.

4. Coach Stance

The Coach stance should assists businesses in becoming more adaptable, collaborative and productive. They accomplish this by using Agile methods and supporting a cultural transformation. An Agile coach you will majorly influence your teams or organization and aids getting acquainted with agile practices.

Agile coaches coach the people in all areas to improve value and flow continuously. This is something we often see as a subject of misunderstanding and fear to many traditional leaders where they previously in their line manager role might have managed both strategy, people and technology. This does not mean they will lose their job, or become less valuable, it just means they can focus more, become better leaders who are less stressed, enabling the organization to be more innovative and people-friendly. Agile Leadership teams often consist of 3-4 people working together to enable their people.

5. Mentor Stance

The Mentor stance influence the relationship involves exchanging information between 2 individuals, one of whom serves as the mentor (the one who imparts knowledge) and the other as the mentee. The Agile coach typically adopts a mentoring approach when a deeper grasp of a subject or underlying concepts is required. This may be accomplished in various ways, including talks, anecdotes, experiences, guidance, and examples.

6. Agile Expert

The Agile Expert stance unique to Agile coaches. This position requires a thorough grasp of the mentality, methods, concepts, and hands-on expertise with various methodologies under the "Agile" umbrella.

This role entails deep understanding of the mindset, practices and theory, as well as experience working with a number of frameworks under the “Agile” umbrella, but are not limited to Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean, LeSS, SAFe, Crystal, XP, Spotify model, Nexus, SoS and DevOps, etc.

7. Change Catalyst Stance

The Agile Change Catalyst stance is real crux of the coaching domain and developing formal paths for change and assisting in agile organisational design.

An Agile coach collects information, attends sessions and monitors interactions, they unavoidably generate assumptions about organizational strengths and weaknesses.

When the coach participates in Agile Transformation efforts, this perspective controls most of their activities. The Agile coach points out the areas that need to be altered for the organization to transition and assists people in implementing these changes effectively.

8. Partner Stance

The Partner stance undertakes and determines the organizational goals, leads to achieve long-term results or desired outcome. They develop awareness, boost their authority, interact with internal partners important for a successful Agile journey and accelerate business outcomes by employing all other stances and interacting with diverse people.

The purpose is to establish long-term connections with key people and organizations to assist them with various duties and objectives.

9. Lean Agile Leader Stance

The Lean Agile Leadership stance developing people through promoting life-long learning. Lean-Agile leaders must do more than simply support the transformation they must actively lead the change, participating and guiding the activities necessary to understand and continuously optimise the flow of value cut across the enterprise. The Lean?Agile Leader is an agile coach must have deep knowledge of lean and agile with exhibiting character as leading by example, mindset and practices and leading the change across organization.

Thanks in advance for reading the article and giving your honest feedback. Kindly reach me for any coaching support, i am happy to partner with you and help you out to achieve your personal, leadership and business goals.