Synopsis

This book provides insights and lessons I’ve learned as a coach of agile coaches, including running a Coach Academy for a 30,000 employee corporate during an agile transformation. I have hired, mentored, developed and coached hundreds of coaches from expert through to raw beginners. So why this book..?

I’ve repeatedly noticed senior agile coaches with 5-8 years experience hitting a point in their career where they repeatedly fail to progress to the next level. It’s at this point that they come to realise the need for fundamental personal change. As I went through trying to hire and develop coaches and observed my industry peers doing the same, two observations and one realisation emerged that led to this book:

Great agile coaching is now predominantly about influencing people’s mindset, not just being a subject expert in agile practices.

To become a great agile coach you need to reinvent your self; challenge your own truths and values, let go of some and experiment with who you are as a person.

Current learning approaches for Agile Coaching are outdated and are failing to meet the needs of the market. Beginners are encouraged to follow linear learning pathways with “advanced” skills being made available later on.

So if current approaches to developing great agile coaches are outdated what does this mean in practical terms. To influence a person’s mindset a coach is required to learn, practice and master a very different set of competencies to what has traditionally been the focus in agile coach development.

The competencies required to be a great coach do not easily “bolt on” to existing ones that beginners are taught, but have to be integrated into the coach’s values and beliefs over a period of time. Hence the need to start integrating these up-front.

What I write in this book comes from observations made as I’ve coached across many companies and also as a freelance leadership coach. But one recent set of experiments I ran really helped solidify my thinking on what beginner coaches need to become great.

Over a 12-month period I took 49 beginner agile coaches through a learning journey; concurrently I was recruiting many expert coaches from the market. This large-scale coaching uplift program exposed a consistent competency gap in expert level coaches. It was then that it dawned on me that beginners need to consider a different set of competencies as they start their careers so as to avoid this gap later on.

Beginners should be more aware of what great coaches do so that they are integrating all the required competencies for greatness from the start of their career as opposed to adding them on once they gain some experience. It is because of this need for a new integrated learning approach for agile coaching that I’ve written this book.

Sales arguments

• I recently posted the topic "what great looks like for an agile coach" on a LinkedIn post. It generated 123 comments from a global audience and over 14,000 page views in a 48 hour period. This topic is real for the target market.
• "Why Agile is Eating the World" and "The 12 Stages of the Agile Transformation", both from Steve Denning in Forbes.com indicate this way of working is fast becoming the new norm for organisations globally. Agile Coaching is the key to success but the coaches are not equipped with the right skills. Hence this book.
• www.stateofagile.com has its 13th report this year. It reports that 97% of respondents (major global companies) are implementing agile in their organisation. The future coaches in training now are critical to successful implementations of agile but are not currently being equipped with the right competencies in development approaches.

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• Presence-Based Coaching: Cultivating Self-Generative Leaders Through Mind, Body, and Heart 1st Edition by Doug Silsbee (Author)
• Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives Paperback – 23 Aug 2018 by Henry Kimsey-House (Author), Karen Kimsey-House (Author), Phillip Sandahl (Author), Laura Whitworth (Author)

Audience

Aspiring, beginner or intermediate Agile Coaches