Dev Manager to Agile Coach: Through the Agile Coaching Wheel - Agile-Lean Ireland

Join Fred Deichler as he recounts his transformative journey from Development Manager to Agile Coach, guided by a set of crucial competencies. Through the lens of the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel, Fred will demonstrate how these competencies align with common roles in the Agile landscape today. This interactive session will delve into key aspects of the 21 competencies, covering areas like Self Mastery, Foundational Skills, and Mindsets, among others. Learn how to create your own Growth Wheel and chart a focused path for your career development.

Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Transcript

Audio file

Dev 4.mp3

Transcript

So our today guest is Fred. He's a seasonal technology leader with over 2 decades of experience. First journey with ground values and agile principles started long before they become buzzwords in the industry and through his career he has guided multiple teams on the. The path always placing a strong emphasis on the delicate balance between people, processes and tools by continuously striving for growth and improvement and then beyond his professional commitments. Thread life includes A thriving garden and a passion for building with Lego blocks. And as remote professional, he truly appreciates the flexibility of working from home, allowing him to harmoniously manage both his. Personal and professional life and procession will be interactive. Focus on his journey from Dev manager to adult coach and how he can use his experience in our adult journeys and adventures as this year on his. T-shirt, OK. Please welcome Fred and true Agile champion and an advocate for balance in work and life.

Alright, thanks. Thank you. Thank you for the for. The kind introduction and. And UM. Like Claudia said, this will be. There will be some interaction points. A good portion of his. Presentation, but there'll be some interaction points where, you know, asking maybe to pull up another browser or your phone to do something. So let me share my screen. This one.

Alright, there we go.

Excellent. Alright. So yeah, so this is thank you for hosting me, Agilent Ireland, Agilent International, this is. My talk from development manager to Agile Coach 21 competencies to guide your. My name is Fred Dickler senior agile coaching scrum master based on the West Coast United States. In Grants Pass OR it's a very small town. I have some certifications also. I I like speaking. I like speaking lots of different topics but personal growth is definitely. A passion of. As far as helping teams like say that I enable effective and efficient teams by leveraging processes and tools to aid individuals and interact. I do want to say you don't have to worry about taking a tonne of notes today. Near the end I'm going to share with you how you can get a copy of these slides and also you know please connect with me on LinkedIn and since it's being turned into a podcast, I will advise people. If you're listening to this and you're not in the car. Hit pause, pull and go to agilecoachinggrowthwheel.org or pull up something in the description from this podcast to get visuals that are going to help you through our our talk today. Like I said, I like to do some talks. I have a couple coming up, so if you're interested, I'll be speaking at Scrum beers. Halifax, a virtual meet up and also at Agile Scrum. Newcomers and mentors meet up and follow me, and those are a couple that. Have going on. I said interaction, So what? Like to ask you to do? I have a few interactive questions you can pull up another browser, go to menti.com or with your phone, go to this QR code and we'll answer a couple of questions. All right. Yeah. Matthew.com, see some people there. First question. Hopefully do you see the? Mentee survey results on the screen. A little thumbs up or yes. OK, hopefully current role. So we got a coach here, Scrum master and some some others. I did put development manager also in there in case anyone has a development manager because that's what this talk. This is how. I kind of how I kind of started. Food director, right? Uh. Development, right? Maybe. Maybe aspirations have become a agile coach at someday. The second question, have you heard of the Agile coaching growth wheel one? Yes, I've used that. I'd love to connect to see how you've used it only in name. Great and no new to me. Awesome. The. Hopefully this is a great, great thing and for the person who's used it, please connect with me afterwards because I'm part of the the team that's working, that team that works on it. And I think we're looking for like case studies of usage. So I'd be, I would love to connect. And the last question is a fun question, which is was the most popular song of 2023. This will come up later in the talk, so if. You there's a. Song from this year, that kind of stood out. To you type that song into into your. Into your browser and your response. Not too hard. The last two weeks I've had the Beastie Boys Paul Revere stuck in my head, but I know that song is like 30 years old at this point, so. I'll have to look up some of those so this this might be might. Be relevant later. I think that's the last yes. All right, going back over to this. Thank you so. My journey to adopt that started a little bit over a decade ago. I was development manager where I led teams of software engineers, but they're actually more like guilds. That's because they worked in agency and they work on varied projects, and they're really just grouped by discipline. Five years later, I became a scrum master, but Scrum master hopes because where, you know, I dove into the world of agile with this two day Scrum master class and the clothes are because who is? A master after just two days. I replaced a dogmatic scrub master which probably influenced some of my early anti patterns. Then I became. You know, I like simple fledged scrub master in 2020 where I dug deep into the scrum values and agile principles and started to grasp the why behind the processes and refined things that make sense for the organisation. I was looking at. And then this year, I began the agile coach where I lead a LED, a group of talented scrum masters where we would champion empiricism, serve the organisation, and improve the way of work. But as you can see, my journey was not as straightforward as sounded. It was filled with mistakes and backtracks and some winds too. So it follows our 21 competencies that guided me along my journey that I. Hope will guide you too. It started off the year 2012 Gangnam Style was all over the radio. I just moved my family cross country, United States after I've been laid off and I was going into my first job in software development. I previously worked in retail harder repair, but I and the company felt like my skills could transcend. Into this new world. And this brings me our first three competencies, which are kind of for me. The foundation of professionalism. It's self mastery, which is about taking the time to understand yourself, learn new things, and take care of your well-being. It begins. It begins with being emotionally smart and how you relate to others. And now I lost the spot. OK. You know, and so be emotionally smart and, you know, working, working well. With with others. In my first role as develop manager, I was coming into some unknowns. Sure, I've taken a few computer science classes in college and during my first year as a development manager, I did take some online courses and got some tutorials for my team. But software engineering wasn't my passion. You know, I was a manager. No, I was actually kind of a leader. So I decided to focus on 3 competencies I felt were. Key to my. Professional success first is personal transformation. This is about being the change that you want to see. You embrace continuous growth through reflection and learning, leaving transformation. Into your daily life. Next, competency is emotional intelligence. This is actually when I was introduced to. Me by one of my employees. And this is about, you know, cultivating that awareness and regulation of emotions to improve your relationship and leadership. It's about. How your interactions are going to affect others and being able to read the room with how you with with those things and being able to read the room, especially as a scrum master which found the later and how other people are going to respond to things and respond to each other. Now both personal transformation and emotional intelligence are very deep subjects, and I'm probably doing a disservice trying to explain. Emotional intelligence to you. And I could spend a lot more time on them. But the other part of your self mastery that's important is balance. And now this is where you integrate work, play well and well-being recognising and adjusting when you're out of balance. With all these things I got I. Got good I. Got really good at this at this personal transformation, most of the talents and balance and with my group of development managers working with, we actually co-authored A competency framework for developers and create our own management philosophy. But then the thing that. Happens that you never expect. This happens. I got laid off so. You know if you've. Been laid off it in your professional career. You know you can once you put some plus ones in the chat or you can raise your hand to show you have some empathy for these situations where getting laid off is something you never, never ever expect. Thank you Vlad for your courage. I appreciate it. And John. So when I was laid off. I networked a lot. I applied and applied for development manager and engineering manager jobs, but often found I was either never called back or I made it to the final route. Now I attribute a lot of these failures to not getting that job is that I didn't actually come from the software development background. So I did a lot more networking and through a chance encounter at a BBQ restaurant with a coworker who also got. Laid off with. Me, I learned about the titles of Scrum. That was not short of. Expected now this was 2017. Ed Sheeran was all over the radio that chance encounter at the networking lunch changed my life forever. I research list where master was. I got the certificate certification then I became that quote UN quote master. And that led me to my first. Job as a scrum master. Which is where we take that. Self mastery and we had four more competencies to it. Which is the foundation of being a scrum master. Now, initially because I was no master, I had to fake it to make it or as I like to say, learn it to earn it. So I spent a few years working on. This foundation with. Four more competencies. The first one. Is agile, lean frameworks and practise. Very early on, I had to learn. Scrum was. Not the only player. Batch out. It's. It's what I learned. But there was. So much more to it, Scrum couldn't be applied in my current workspace, so I dove into Kanban XP test driven development, feature driven development and Scrum bond trying to pick out pieces that could make my implementation successful. The second piece of of your foundation is for your facilitation skills. Now, early on a Scrum master career, this could be often misunderstood because there's a huge difference between scheduling and meeting and facilitating A valuable event. The third part, serving the team also can be misunderstood and it's often seen as being a servant to the team. But you ask yourself, how is that actually serving the teams? And the 4th part of the foundation of Scrum Master is teaching now. This is probably one of the most important foundational skills in my because teaching is not equal to telling. But it's rooted in the ability to to convey important knowledge to others. And teaching is not something you can really measure than a scrum master. It's like you like, can't measure that stuff. So you'll say it's evidenced by your observations of behaviour and vocabulary change. Now I was feeling really good. I had. A good base for being a scrum. Master that foundation. I wish I could say I had. Mastered it but. I was actually a fraud at that point. I had failed to help the organisation evolve around agility. And once again was laid off. It was only that as I look back through my through that time, in retrospect, I sucked as a stroke master. But you don't. Have to so at times I was the scheduler. Just scheduled a meeting. I was a member of the cargo cult. Of scrum where? I was like whoop, the Scrum Guide says. And that's all I talked about and really I didn't have a good grasp on good retrospectives. I was so many anti patterns. Despite that, I was very engaged into the sky was the. Limit for my agile journey. So now the year. And those are a lot shorter music clips than I thought I put in. The years 2019. And post Malone, sway Lee's sunflowers all. Over the radio. But that wasn't the only thing was all. Over my radio this is. When I really started to engage in consuming. Podcasts and books about agility. I remember driving around to job interviews and Instinctly told myself on. Listening to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. I wanted to be a guest in that one day that was. Going to be my product goal. Now my path was set and there was actually a tonal change in my interviews after the and after a few months I landed my next Scrum master Git. Which brings us to the middle 7. Now during my time I was laid off. I had a lot of opportunity for self reflection and opened my. My mind to the world of agility. It's through the self reflection I found that. Mindset was the next rung in the latter of my agile journey. Now to make the transition from Scrum master to Scrum Master. You know, with quotes too. Ask your master ID to continue. This mindset journey, it was really it was about Shuhari first at midnight. Then I understood. Then I knew. Where I could deviate? So the mindsets that are important are. Agile, lean mindset. We talked about frameworks, but it's really about moving beyond those frameworks. It's moving the manifesto, the actual values, the values beyond words on the page and knowing how you and your teams embody them. There's also a learning mindset. But it's not just about your learning, it's about creating an environment for people around you to learn and to interact with you. Talked about facilitation skills. There's a facilitation mindset component the minds of a facilitator is about being neutral in that in that space. Creating a curious, curious environment and having positivity. These are all hallmarks of your growth as facilitator in the events that you facilitate. Last mindset is a coaching mindset. This is about integrity, ethics, coaching stances. And creating psychological safety. For those around you on the on your coaching journey. And it was as I really embraced those mindsets. I moved from a scrum master to a senior scrum master. Now I know seniors, not an industry term, but really it was a greater recognition to my organisation about my impact on the business. And so I continue to dive in and I I looked into how I. Could guide the organisation. I did that by working on my coaching skills. This is about creating the right environment for, for coaching to happen. It's knowing when to use powerful questions and when not to. And about levels of listening, a concept I'm still working on. Also as a guide and organisation. You want to you got. To practise mentoring now mentoring is not just about the. Mentee, but it's about you too. And as a mentor, how do you connect your experience with the mentees needs? And last part of guiding for me is serving the business now serving the business is one of the accountabilities of Scrum Master. But this is really more advanced like it's how can you understand the customers bring those understanding to the team. Coach, communication strategy and talk about like how do you experiment in a in a safe and healthy way? How do you make? Small bets have you? Moved mindsets of people around you from large business cases and large planning events into let's try something in two weeks, see what we can learn because everything. Is hypothesis until it gets out in front of the customer. And then something magical happened around the end of. 2022 last.

Year, about a year.

Ago I had reflect on my past love. Of public speaking and. Submitted a talk to the Agile online summit it. Was accepted. And after the conference, the organiser of Vasco Duarte reached out to me and I was a guest on this from Actual Box podcast. I had actually reached by protocol. I was riding high and I was promoted to. To agile coach. Where I was leading the transition for agile transformation for my employer and mentoring 3 Scrum Masters. And So what I. Do I updated my LinkedIn profile, say agile coach and? I said yeah, that's. What it's at, that's where, that's where. I I was going to. Finish. But no, I didn't rest. This is where I went even harder. Because is where the fun just really gets started. I think working with the team to working with the organisation, working with the, with the greater agile community is where it's at. I listen to more podcasts, read more books, read more blogs, interacted more on LinkedIn in the past year that I had previously in my career. Which brings me. To where I'm at right now is agile coach. The final seven now it's this year 22, three. I don't know if. Music is popular. You let. Me know in that in that survey earlier, I think I need to look up some of those like forgot them because they're so focused on this because I you know I'm focusing on this personal goal. As an agilist and my growth of. Those around me, like who I can interact. In addition to that and pushing myself, you know this is one of my, I think 10th speaking engagement this year between conferences and meetups. I'm so excited to be sharing my journey and my my experience. But you know enough about me. Let's talk about the last 7 competencies to round out the the 21. And so these are things I've identified on my learning journey and really breaks down into two more slices. The first is leading in order to be an. Agile coach, you'll. Be able to lead an organisation agile journey as a visionary. This is where you Co create a future vision aligned with agile values. You storytelling to connect the organisational thoughts. You got to. Use data and inspire change focus on business agility and customer value. In order to lead also. As a coach, you got a role model. You had to walk the. Talk you got by embodying the agile. Principles every day. Show resilience under pressure sees every every interaction as a learning opportunity. Be the living example of agile excellence. But don't say because the scrum Pat said or constantly agile principles to figure out how you weave those in so they so they create empathy with the person. You're talking to. The last part of leading is leading for growth. This is where you advocate with the organisation how how do you? Create that that culture of. Continuous learning, innovation and coaching. You got to foster trust and show vulnerability, promote diversity and inclusion and long term sustainability. That's how you really help your organisation. And then there's transforming and advising. This is the last last section that we'll go through. Versus the advising mindset. This is where your trusted partner. With executives and leaders, where you foster that environment of feedback. And Co create outcomes and challenge assumptions. That's what a goodwill coach does. And with that mindset, you have to have those skills to do those things where you're listening and understanding your customer clients needs usually utilising. Emotional intelligence. To navigate interpersonal dynamics that might be stepping. In the way. Of moving the organisation forward. The biggest part we usually think about where we think about coaches is adult transformations. And so you gotta get good at at organisational change. Is we use empirical approach to. Introduce and navigate and sustain change. You got to focus on cultural awareness and create a learning environment for continuous improvement. This is affecting large organisation and then organisational design. You know what's it going to take. To make the organisation outcome focus. You be the advocate for people centric policies. And balance organisational goals with personal motivations. So it is. There's 21 competencies to guide you. Divided into these six pieces, these are real, which you focused on for. Your for your growth as from an. Individual contributor to national coach. And you might be asking. Yourself. How did I create these? 20 copies. Well, you know, I kind of alluded to the beginning in the in the intros, like I didn't. I discovered them along my journey and a great tool, the Agile coaching growth wheel. The Agile coaching growth wheel at Agile coaching growthwheel.org. It's inspired by the X wing model that Lisa Adkins and Michael Spade made. And is created by a brilliant. Group of agilists from around the globe. I wouldn't be here without their great work. It's broken into nine separate themes. And those 21 competencies, one of the greatest things that I love is there's reference material if you want to grow in your organisational design. The Agile coaching Growth Wheel website has resources, books, podcasts, logs that will help you expand your mind into those areas. So then you can learn how to apply it. But it's just not about these 21 different competencies. There are actually 5 levels per comp.

And see.

From beginner advanced beginner practitioner. Diet and catalysts that all have their own definitions for what it means to have different skills in different areas. So you can really see how do I move up in a particular area. So what they basically look like on the coast wheels as a beginner, that's what kind of textbook knowledge of the subject. You follow defined rules and plans. We move into. Advanced beginners where you kind of building that practical experience and it's where you can work independently. As a practitioner, you have a working knowledge of the. Subject And you could. Make autonomous self decisions. Moving it to the guide, this is where you have in-depth knowledge. You have to create custom solutions for the competency. And as a catalyst, talk about deep understanding. People writing books on some of these subjects. They're catalysts in the in the business world, creating innovative approaches, and are visionaries for those around them. So that's kind of basics of what? The different levels. Are, but we take a look at agile mindset. It's one of the foundations of the scrum master. What that kind of looks like now. These are a sampling like I've edited down what it looks like just to kind of convey with y'all what? What it what it is to be a beginner through a catalyst. So as a beginner in agile. Mindset. You can describe the Agile manifesto as presence. You're aware of lean thinking as origin. You can explain core values and principles and of at least one framework so beginners for agile mindset moving up into advanced beginner, you can discuss how your behaviours relate to agile principles. Explain how those values and principles of the manifesto. Are present in how your team works. Practitioner this is where you can apply at least three lean principles, adapt them to the giving contest and context, and describe the lasting benefit of adopting these principles to your client. Guides they can describe an experience which has no obvious solution to an impediment. It requires you to leverage that adds only mindset to help the team and the organisation select from many possible solutions. And that catalyst, that's a person who's creating and thinking new and differently out in the out, in the community, really embodying that, that spirit and mindset of agile. And so the agile coaching go through, it's a large thing, but. Put it up into six different segments. And this is how I look at it. With this nice graphic here where everyone needs to have that foundation of self mastery, I have development manager there, but really it's any individual contributor. This works with that self master which is the balance of emotional intelligence. When you get in the scrum master, that's where you tack on that foundation. Senior that mindset and guiding and beyond that coach, that's the entire entire wheel. Now, if I expect you're gonna be a guide or a catalyst in the whole wheel, you got to figure out what what areas that you need to work on in your situation. Oftentimes we're coaching teams. We talk about T shaped developers. You know, but as we go forward is agilist. We can't be T shaped. We need to be pie shaped and pie like the Greek letter Pi we have that we have that a good base for many competencies or many subjects. But pretty deep on at least two. That's great. You now have a guide, but what if there? Was one more thing. Well, I had a dream, a vision for something more than a PDF. And I work with some brilliant people. To get an MVP out. Adam from the company I was. Working at turned my dream into reality. And then you know. Like made things happen. Development stalled after POC. So I shared the workout with the. Greater agile community and another agile. Full of Ness and. Came along, made it a little. Bit more interactive and posted to. GitHub this thing right here this beautiful radar chart. So if you scan this QR. You go to the GitHub repo and download a. Tool to generate your own agile coaching growth wheel. Which I'm gonna show you. Show you all today. Feel free if you are a developer for the repo, submit a pull request, iterate on this idea. Links for this will also be available later. But you can come here just to hear. Hear me talk about all these things. Hopefully it's an interactive, so let's get a little more interactive. So we go down this, this path. This is a beautiful image. That ChatGPT with floor with Dolly. Made me this morning. So make me a path to a brighter. Future if you're not much. If you're not up on AI and chat, you could see I would. I would suggest it because. ChatGPT and generative AI. They're not going to replace our chops. But the person who leverages that tool. Is the one who's gonna replace your chops. So if you're not already doing, I strongly suggest getting out and experimenting with generative AI. So we started this journey off with with self mastery and So what I want is for you all to get like a piece of paper. We're going to go through the three sections of the Agile coaching growth Wheel, self mastery, and you're going to give yourself an. Test that and then you can take that and feed it the tool to make a beautiful graphic. At your home. So let's take a look at emotional intelligence. I took the very they're very detailed definition. For each of these levels. And I kind of paired it out so. But like y'all. Do is just take a look at your at your screen, identify with where do you think you're at on your emotional intelligence journey from beginner catalyst or. Wait about a minute.

Should have something.

Is there music? Hope we all have had time to. Take a look at at that one. Give yourself a rating on emotional intelligence. Let's go to. Hopefully I wasn't covering the screen if it was illogical. Balance. This is the second segment the the Agile coaching. Growth wheel self masteries. Take a look at these. Definitions here this. Is like I said, a summary of each of them. Identify where you're at on that. Scale from beginning to catalyst. I just learned about this zoom feature this morning where you can it has built in music. Alright, hopefully had a chance to do that. It's going too fast for you at. The coaching group field dot. Org you can read the full definitions. Last personal transformation, the third part of of self mastery. All right, so. All right, let's go. Now what we're going to do is I'm going. To show you. The tool. So let me actually I'm gonna pause this music that's distracting to me. If you go to, there's GitHub. The part of the QR code you go to. GitHub and download this is very small branch where it basically does. It generates HTML. You basically go code, downloads it and you can run it locally. I will say that comparative agility website by. Mark Summers and. Bob Galen, they're coming out with a new version of a self-assessment, which does have some similar features to how I envisioned it. Where it does have that that rating scale the to 0 through 5. So they told me it should come out sometime this week maybe. So compared to the guilty gear on there, the new assessment coming out. There's a. But the way this. Tool works is it looks pretty basic. It like I said it was it was an MVP where basically you could select. Your rating of how you are it doesn't say beginner advance or I think this is truly an MVP. And you go through and you select what you are in all of your aspects of that, I'll put you drill wheel and we hit draw wheel. It produces 2. Beautiful graphs. The first one is your self mastery. Which is a bar chart, but the one that's gonna get you all the looks and all the thumbs up on LinkedIn. If you make ways and share it out is this radial graph on the right and this tool so you can take and one of the one things I love about this is that. You could take a snapshot of where you're at today, make that career growth plan for yourself. And then take a snapshot again in the future. And see see. That bro, share that with your with your leader. It looks like he's agile coaching process so. With that, it kind of at the end of of my slide, so we can open it up. But before we do that, I'd like to ask y'all like hopefully you know you learn something. Valuable. Today you felt like this was worth your time and investment, and I'd love to get some feedback from you. So what I have is like a two-minute Max survey because I thrive on feedback. You saw I I started speaking really this year. I love getting feedback so I can improve the way I. Do it. So I'd ask you to please. Click this or scan this QR code or go to talk dot AC slash Greg Dickler enter code Ali and answer just a. Couple of quick questions, we're going.

OK, so I don't see any questions on the chat. So please if you have any questions post them on the chat so I'm not sure mine is exactly a question, but when you're speaking for I was just thinking how we can assess ourselves because there are lots of. Of those, those like 20. And competencies. And then you showed us there is like kind of a guide guide to that, but then you know I was. Thinking about when? I was at the kind of a coaching training and at the end we had an exercise. One was how we see ourselves, but then the other was how the. The part was how orders heads. Ourselves, so we have to kind of find people and send them survey and they just anonymously tell tell. Us what they? Think about us. And I was just thinking because here as well as something maybe I'm. I'm not sure. That's part of that assessment or not. I'm not sure that will be valuable. But you know, let's say I think I'm one. Or maybe I think I'm five in one of the competencies, but they're not being presented. I'm not showing them exactly. Maybe in my work. So for people around me, I may not be fine. I may be, you know, one or maybe I'm lacking so. And you know how how to deal with that because it's. Because you know what? What I think about myself, what others think about myself. Is there any?

Yeah, absolutely. No, you're you're right and. The way I used it this year with with my team is I had. Our masters do self assessments and they submit they they actually did it together and one of the reasons was is English was not their first language. And so the wheel is presented in English. So they worked together to kind of understand the different. Competencies. They're competent in English, but but they to figure out the competencies. So like what it meant to them. So they had a conversation with each other around their where they ranked themselves, but then. When they submit it to me, I provided feedback on this where I both challenged them for areas maybe like they were too high. No one said five in areas because. You know, talked about. A while but.

For areas where.

They where they undervalued their contribution I challenged by hey, I remember seeing you do this this activity with this team that really demonstrated a more advanced facilitation. Feedback page doesn't work, someone said. OK. But yeah, that's how I've used it.

I have a question. Hi, Daniel Cohen. I'm a natural coach. I was. When I was looking at that matrix you put up of the different roles on the left and the different competency areas and the columns, and you had. The dev manager. Yeah. When I think about what an effective dev. Manager is they have a. There's a lot of overlap between what a good coach does and what a good develop, any kind of manager does. You know they need to mentor, they need to coach. They need to advise. They need to listen. They need emotional intelligence. They need to be learning all this stuff and they may not need. You know, domain knowledge and things like that are on the coaching wheel like lean, agile and and. Organisational transformation and org design not at a first level manager anyhow, but there's. A lot of. Overlap. And since you've been a development manager and you are a natural coach, I'm wondering what your thoughts are about that.

Thank you, Daniel. That's a good observation. And this is like. How I. Wanted to how I saw a progression ladder could be analysed. I think you're you're right on about the different skills development manager you need which is a lot of those are you know depending on your team makeup, great facilitation teaching is a huge thing. And so if I was to go back and revisit it, I might put. Some of those things a little bit. A little bit. Down, but I think some if we look at some of the people going who are in agility right now, whether they're a scrum master or a coach, they might not come from that same background. So for those. Not coming from the background, we kind of want to get identify like what is a good progression they could look at because when you first look at the Agile coaching growth wheel, which I. It is overwhelming to look at. It's like where where do I start? Which I think you all kind of identified. Like if I look at it right here, it's. It's great, but it's like where? Where the heck do I start? Do I go everything? If you try to do everything. You're not going to be effective at anything. And so as I put those things, as I as I reorganised in my mind and to my career journey, it's where I felt they kind. Of made sense, but I would bite. Anyone who's? A personal transformation worked with the coach and understand your environment around what's going to be. Most success like what are you missing, which I loved which Claudia had mentioned? Like maybe someone seeing an area you're missing that you could be better at so. As much as. This should be, you know, can be a self-guided journey. Working with partners is great and someone who has that inside information and also you have been successful like you Daniel to like say hey this I think. You might need to, uh to work on. So that was kind of going around and around.

I think there's a question from Audi. There are 21 competencies. How many areas is reasonable to improve in a year time? How do I set up, you know, reasonable strategy?

I'm trying to work on all 21 is probably it's a fool's errand. So like transparently for me like as I when I first in Canada about coaching growth well earlier this year, I identified 2 areas which are rated myself as zero at which is organisational design and organisational change. So I focus on some reading in that area, and while I was doing that, going to meetups, talking to other people some and experiencing the more the world of agility, other areas kind of grew. So my suggestion is just like when I think. About retrospective for. A team you should have at least one action item and no more than two. So I really personally wouldn't focus on more than one comment. Like at least one no more than two. And then really feel out like if I'm going to be that change agent for my organisation or my clients, what do they need? And focus on those areas, hopefully answer that.

Thanks. You're welcome.

Yes, those off the question as an agile code, do we also have to integrate the change management methodologies and principles to carry out their organisational transformation. He's very broad question about a.

Yeah, I mean, change management is a part of anything that can happen organisation, you know with the team, because the biggest thing is you have to is that was that Middle East question. They want to expand it or.

Well, sorry it wasn't mine. I was just raising my hand to just, like, save the spot to answer question. Yeah, sorry about that.

Oh, no, no.

Totally fine if you if you. Want to add more? Clarity to it would be great, but. Change management. A huge part of, like any, any leadership role, and one of the keys I would I would say is like you have to you can't inflict change on people. People need to choose that they want to change and the pain to change has to be less than the pain to stay.

Gotcha. Like I just wanted to. One more. Question if that's OK by the way. Right. So just to start off by the way kind of inspired by how you actually went through your journey and this slide was very engaging and really thankful to actually be here. So it's a pretty specific question. That I'm going to ask and it's going to be dealing with a particular scenario that happened in most organisations. So whenever like a new. I guess it LED project get started. There is usually a myriad of departments that have to be involved in it as stakeholders as. Now this is totally. Out of everyone's control, I understand. However, if a department. Has I guess some? Bad blood with another department. How do you actually go ahead to reconcile whatever differences that they may have in sort of like an agile sense? And I guess on top of that? Is there a particular thing that you would tell me as a beginner that would potentially just I guess? I guess get me to improve in one of the competencies that are linked with this particular issue. I I don't like a bit of.

A long good question for you.

What I'm hearing kind of comes a little bit into facilitation area. I mean it, it touches on many areas and there's lots of overlap. But as you're explaining situation, the first book that came to mind, which I'd recommend if you ever read, is called nonviolent communication because it really specifically deals with, with, with parties that. Different visions of each other. Where they think everyone's out to get each other, and nonviolent communication teaches us how we can get to what the what the, what, the core frustration is and get it kind of out in the open. And so one thing you can do, but after reading that is whenever you get in these situations, this is great. When if you brought into the organisation brought into a project, whatever it is. What's that shared goal? What's that shared vision? You ever like? Your first step should be like everyone, like why the heck are we here? Why does the? Why does this group of people need me, and once you can get everyone in the room to agree to what that North Star is or that vision? Then you can. Then you could start having like candid conversations. Where you know another book like radical candour, where you can identify with people like maybe they're doing something that's counter to what the groups agreed upon. Goal is. And so those are a couple of my my quick tips, the nonviolent communication it's it's an amazing book to read or listen to my.

Yep, like that's going. To be going on my read list right away. Thanks for that.

You're welcome. And so I. Think it's like a 30 year old book, so be sure when. You're looking for it. It's it's kind of an old book.

Oh, OK. I'll be not find it on this all, but I'll try. My luck in your libraries.

And hope we have time because Richard has a hand up. So yeah. Richard, what's your question?

Hey, how you doing? And thanks, William for the talk, Fred, very engaging I. I love the fact that. There's there's some actionable pieces in there as well, and I'm kind of interested in your in your thoughts on kind of certification. So if I'm starting from and I'm a dev manager, by the way, so I'm starting from a place where I don't have any certification at the moment. Really, a lot of overlap as I think it was set. It was saying a lot of overlap between what I'm doing and a lot of things that actually coaches will be doing but. Where do you start? Would you start with with certification? Is that where you'd start to kind of broaden your? Knowledge. Or do you start with the the wheel that you shared there and try and figure out what competencies to drill in on 1st?

So we are. Trying to figure out like where industry certifications might align. To the wheels. On the projects. That we're working on on the wheel. Like I just saw. Certifications are hot button topic right now. That's why the quote the the air quotes around the certified Scrum Master, which I was years ago where that two day course really didn't teach me anything at the practical application of things. I will say there are some certified bodies out there which I potentially look into like. International Coaching Federation ICF is a great one too that has some really good courses and certifications that are recognised globally around whether it's facilitation or or team coaching is one. I would if you really want to go with that and I think thing I love about those is you build. From what I've seen is you build relationships with with people, and it's about that network after the fact where you can take that classroom academic education. And turn it into real world experience. So the short answer is certifications are good. I'd look into ICF identify the needs of your your organisation and whatever you do get into some kind of a peer group coaching relationship, whether it's at work or through a meet up where you could have like candid conversations around challenges you're facing. And you can. Get really good feedback around ideas you might you. Might take forward.

Excellent. OK. Thank you very much.

As if.

Right.

Trying to read ourselves, wrote a big post in. The in the in the chat.

OK.

Ohh we have another hand up.

Ohh, can you hear me?

Yes, yes, yeah.

Well, hello like the real. Example want to ask your opinion. Like I will come like. In the business team, there's. The very stubborn to keep clear and he is a project lead. And uh, he had, uh, kind of like a bad experience using agents from before for his previous project. So Renault for this current project. And the key players, most of them, I mean all of them, in fact, except him to attend this spring events, including daily scrubs. But he never showed up. And when I talked with him, he said, you know, the the reason behind it, you know, because he had a bad experience. He didn't think this I joined. Some stuff is gonna work in the organisation. The manager and product owner has already been aware of this. Still has he. He doesn't want to attend this and because the manager. And well, at the same time, he's also the like PO. You know he's. He kind of like relies on this key player because he's new mean the key player has been on this project for like over two years. I don't know. I mean, have you ever had such? Similar experiments before, yeah. With that.

Yeah, absolutely. You're always. There's a lot of bad agile out there, a lot of bad, agile. I applaud you for starting to have that conversation with the person. To understand their experience because we have value, their experience, because it's what really happened to them, I would, I would want to dive in and have them talk about that. Like what they didn't like about it. Like say, it's so specific things, maybe it's stand ups are too long. That's an anti pattern. Figure out all these things that. That they didn't like. And not not to refute them directly, but to understand and build. Empathy and then also ask them what they did like. And then with regards to like they're not going to things, I would ask them like what impact do? You think this is having on the team? By you not attending these events. And that's where you. Have to really from like a coaching perspective. Embrace the silence after you ask me these. Questions. You gotta shut up. Let them think and they, you know, and. And it's gonna be painful, but then they'll start to get some things out there. They'll start to self self solve. And then when you're kind of ready an activity to get them back into the mix? Which you should. Is a team working agreement where they talk about some of these things like how are they gonna work with each other? What's that level feedback they're gonna give to each other. What's their tolerance full of not missing meetings, being late, et cetera. Development strategy, whatever it might be, but a a written A-Team working agreement will solve so many things and maybe that thing they can that person who's that outlier can they can get everyone to agree. Like, yeah, we're not going to do those bad agile practises, bad scrum practises we we did in the past and everyone on the team does some of those we have this document that we can. Hold each other accountable to. So that's my thoughts on that.

Ohh. OK, thank you. So team agreement is just a short piece of paper like kind of like that.

Yeah, yeah, you can look up like Primero versus has some templates on team working agreements or just do Google search on team working agreement. But basically it's like it's an agreement to clear up assumptions and set expectation. People on a team like how are we going to work together?

OK.

And The thing is, it's a living document, so it needs to be revisited at. Least every six months.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's so good to start. OK good. Yeah.

Good idea. OK, thank you.

You're welcome. Right.

I think our time is up. We used our one hour for today's session and thank you very much, Fred. And we also had a time even for a conversations and chats with about Andy. So I think it's great and lots of good links I see on the chat and people sharing experience. It's always good to see. Yeah. And people just thinking for the for today. So thank you very much and thank you everyone.

Thank you and please connect with me on on LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation.