Damon Poole - Professional Coaching for Agilists: Accelerating Agile Adoption

We are excited to share our Professional Coaching experiences with you. We enjoy practicing Agile and coaching as well as teaching and learning more from others. We are very active in organizing and speaking at Agile meetups and conferences. We incorporate many activities into our teaching because we love to learn by doing.

Over the years, people have often asked us, When will you write a book? Although we had lots of material and activities from our teaching and conference sessions, we werent sure what our unique angle might be.

Then, when we were talking about our Agile Coach course at an Agile Games New England event, we started hearing something interesting. People said they had decided to skip Agile Coach training and go straight to Professional Coaching training. What makes this interesting is that Professional Coaching is its own discipline, separate from Agile. We realized we had found the angle we were looking for: a book with lots of exercises written for people in an Agile environment who want to learn more about Professional Coaching.

To get a better idea of what Professional Coaching is, lets move away from Agile and Agile Coaching altogether for a moment and consider peoples personal and work lives in general. As we go about our daily lives, we make many decisions and find solutions to issues as they arise. When we run into an issue we cant solve immediately or decide to try something new, there are a number of tactics we can employ to identify next steps, such as putting aside time to focus on the matter, looking for ways to stimulate our imagination, and thinking of different perspectives to consider.

If we are still stuck and become frustrated, we may reach out to other people. Other people can provide support in a variety of ways, including the following: partnering with us on the tactics already mentioned, listening and keeping the focus on us, asking questions that lead to insights, or providing new information that is relevant to our issue.

By contrast, there are many behaviors that diminish the value we receive from other people as we search for a way forward. Sometimes, people interrupt the flow of our thinking, judge what we are saying, and provide unsolicited opinions and advice. Refraining from these diminishing behaviors is another way that people can support us.

Usually, we need to interact with more than one person to get the help we need to find solutions to our issues. Who we reach out to depends on the kind of assistance we need. Even after we get new information and perspectives from reaching out to others, we generally need to tailor a solution to our personal perception of our capabilities and situation.

Professional Coaching is an approach for helping people when they are stuck. It is composed of two parts. The first part consists of supportive behaviors such as those described earlier, practiced to a high degree of skill. The second part consists of coaching-specific skills such as asking perspective-shifting questions and setting up accountability systems.