What NOT to do as an Agile Coach

Agile coaches need to pay particular attention to the words they use. Read about the one thing you should avoid as much as possible as an agile coach.

Earlier this year I provided some good agile coach tips in my post, What makes an Agile Coach Effective. I talked about how agile coaches won’t succeed if people aren’t ready or able to take in the coaching and how coaches fail when they tell people what they should do.

I wrote it out of my own shortcomings as an Agile coach and my recognition that I am still very much a work in progress.

I continue to practice and hopefully evolve as a coach. I make mistakes and I try to learn from them. One of the key things that I am reminded about is to pay close attention to the words I use and the things that I say.

Mind Your Words as an Agile Coach

Inappropriate humor has been the bane of my professional experience. Geez, you’d think I would have learned it back in 1989 when I cracked an ill-conceived joke about my then officemate and her head nearly exploded.

And as recently as this year in an offhand comment to one of the Scrum Masters I was coaching. My comment, which sounded like a joke, caused him…