What is agile coaching, and why is it needed?

Agile coaching is essential knowledge for every knowledge worker, including management and teams. It is the opposite of believing that agile coaching is for change agents because everyone is responsible for the change. So everyone needs to learn the art of agile coaching. I divide agile coaching into three broad categories.

Awareness about agile change management

It is to prepare yourself to operate differently, contributing to developing strategies and owning the transformation. Having in-depth knowledge of business agility, designing an agile transformation roadmap, and leading change make someone more relevant in the ever-changing business world.

The new way to communicate in an agile organization to support self-management

An individual's likes or dislikes to self-management doesn’t matter anymore as every organization is looking towards a new way of working so better to ourselves in different gears. Coaching conversation and having mentoring skills become essential skills for management to support self-organization. These are new areas for many managers as they lack coaching skills and have to learn to initiate conversation differently.

Need for balancing mentoring and delegation to enable safety at work

Often we hear that leaders should allow teams to do this or that or give control to the team. These type of statements make management looks terrible, although it might not be the intention. We need a system thinking approach while deciding to understand the consequences of what you say. Delegation and mentoring go side-by-side. It is essential to mentor management on the expected role during the change to make them feel safe.

Looking at the need based on my years of experience in agile coaching, I decided to teach below in my ICAgile — Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) training class.

• What makes you a better agile-lean practitioner?
• How to initiate an agile way of working?
• What skills needed for a manager to be a teacher?
• How to facilitate change within teams and organizations?
• Designing various types of the mentoring program to support role transition
• Developing a skill of transformative coaching to enable critical thinking
• Way to assess agile-based practices within the organization

Who is the right candidate for this program?

Change agents are an obvious candidate for this program, but I would like to invite management people. Senior and middle-level management are the people who own the transformation, whereas change agents are just catalysts. Management must understand their role during change and how to support it. Lack of management support will lead to a half-hearted agile transition leading to many dysfunctions at the organization and team levels.

Next is team members because self-management needs little more than what, how, and who to coach each other. Agile coaching is a skill to help teams to move from self-organized to self-managed.