 Hi there and welcome to my talk on coaching for continuous improvement. Now this talk is primarily focused at people who are coaching others for change, whether that be coaching a team or coaching leadership within an organisation or coaching individuals for change, and trying to instill a sense of intrinsic motivation for continual change so it continues past that initial bout of enthusiasm. But a lot of what I'm talking about here will be useful and relevant for oneself when trying to encourage yourself to keep going with change. I'm going to cover a few main topics. First of all I'm going to try and get a baseline for what I understand coaching to be and that's not as easy as it might seem to begin with because there's a bit of debate about what coaching is. I'm going to then try and link that to agile teams and how professional coaching as I'm going to describe it is relevant in an agile context. I'm going to introduce you to my views of coaching teams or in this case squads, what I mean by that. I'll introduce you to a few typical challenges that coaches face when coaching agile teams and some tools that you might be able to use to help those teams get past some of those challenges and help you get past some of those challenges before ending with a little bit of a challenge for you. So let's start with well what is coaching? Now there are many definitions of coaching you could go out and search on the internet and find multiple different definitions of coaching even within a definition of coaching within a professional body's definition of coaching there are different ways that people interpret that different styles of coaching, different types of coach that you can find so it's not necessarily about me providing you with the right or wrong view but I'm going to give you my particular view I encourage everybody to go out and find their own and what resonates with them I happen to be a member of the International Coaching Federation and this is the ICF's definition of coaching I think it's quite interesting in a number of different ways so as you can read here it says partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional development so the first thing that jumps out for me here is the co-creation side of things so partnership, coaching isn't something that's being done to somebody I'm not coaching you to achieve something that I want you to achieve or I think you should achieve but equally it's not necessarily just accepting everything that comes from the person being coached there's a partnership, there's a sharing of ideas and a mutual agreement to be worked towards the second thing that jumps out for me is the term creative process now again this is just me but when I think of creative process I think of art and when I think of art I think of something that's completely subjective one person's view of what good art is can be completely different to another person's perception of what good art is so the creative output which is what we're talking about here from a coaching perspective is subjective, there's no definition of what success is at a universal level and the third thing that jumps out for me here is this balance of personal and professional it's impossible to separate out one's life from one's work it's about the mixture and so trying to maximize our success both as an individual and as a professional I think it's a really interesting perspective to be taken here it's not just about becoming more effective at work and it's not just about becoming more satisfied or happy as an individual it's a combination of the two and I'm going to throw on top of that professional definition if you like a couple of different analogies or metaphors that work with me through my coaching and the first one is that of holding the mirror up as a coach you are in a privileged position to be able to see somebody from a different perspective than they're able to see themselves and your job, my job as a coach is to reflect that back as objectively as possible think of the mirror as a very flat surface not one of those circus mirrors that's distorting things through our perception and our interpretation but really trying to play about what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're noticing as objectively as possible so that the person we're coaching has the opportunity to use that information as pure as they possibly can and the other metaphor that I bring in here is that of almost like a fitness coach if you like but I use the term compassionately ruthless because as a coach I'm ruthless in that I really want success for the person that I'm coaching once we've agreed on something that they want to get out of coaching I'm really bought into helping them achieve that and I'm aware that over the course of any kind of change there will be a natural dip in motivation in energy and enthusiasm levels a time when we think is this really worth carrying on, why did I even start this success is so far away and it's at that point in time when people will often quite want to give up on the coaching goals that they've set themselves but as a coach I know that's going to happen and I'm not going to let them give up on themselves that easily because I know once they're over that hump they will be able to rekindle that energy, rekindle that enthusiasm but I'm compassionate as well in that I know that this is going to happen I know how frustrating this can feel I know how pointless this can feel how tempting it is to just stop and channel our energy somewhere else so I can empathize with that position but I'm not going to give up on them and I'm not going to allow themselves to give up on themselves that easily so that's sort of my fundamental understanding from almost a professional body perspective so it's a member of a professional coaching body plus my own sort of natural spin on things but as well as a professional coach I've also got a background in sports coaching now this unlike professional coaching wasn't something that I deliberately set out to add to my skill set if you like it was something that I stumbled across almost accidentally as a parent I have kids who are very interested in sport and over the years have been involved at various levels with various teams and as a parent, as someone who likes sports and also wants to see their kids do well and support them I've been along to many training sessions and matches, practice matches and all sorts and for one of my child's particular sporting engagements with one of his teams, his cricket team in fact, out of school I was... to put it nicely encouraged and invited to join in quite actively as a parent volunteer shall we say I was roped into facilitating training sessions I was roped into officiating matches standing in for the coach when they were away that kind of thing and I was more than happy to do so but I was just making it up as I went along if you like and credit to the club they put their money where their mouth was they said well if you're going to... if you're going to get involved if you're going to put your time and energy into this then we're willing to support you and pay for you to take national level accreditation training so I went on the ECB, the England and Wales Cricket Board official coaching badge courses to learn how to be a coach rather than just muddle along as a parent volunteer that was interesting but on day one, the first day of being there my mind was absolutely blown by this philosophy that they were teaching us of player led coaching and someone who has... who was coached and trained in cricket as a youngster not to any great level I might add but I'd experienced cricket coaching from teachers and sports and club coaches this was a completely different way of looking at it so the first thing that they asked us effectively as a group of newbies in the classroom was what we thought the number one objective of a cricket training session was and I've been to training sessions as a child I've been to training sessions as a parent and so I thought about it and other people in the class thought about it and just given you a second to think about it as well before I contaminate your answer but we effectively came back with we thought the number one priority was for our children to get better why bother going to practice if you're not going to improve that was our number one objective and the response from the trainers was well we can see where you're coming from there and yes it is good to improve but that's not what we want you to have as your number one objective as a coach what we want you to have as your number one objective is to prioritise the kids wanting to come back next week I thought well on one hand I can really see the logic in that but on the other hand I thought well so that means theoretically children could get worse from one training session to a next and training would still be considered a success so we had a bit of a discussion about it but obviously that's not the aim the aim isn't for children to get worse but by focusing on the children wanting to come back then any sort of degradation of their ability if you like any reduction of skill level could be fixed we still have the potential to help them improve over the long run if they keep coming back whereas we could get them to improve in one training session but if they don't want to come back anymore then we've lost them over the long term I thought it was a really interesting way of looking at it but that wasn't the only way my mind was blown with this philosophy of player-led coaching the second bombshell that they dropped on me was who designs the training sessions now as you can probably guess this isn't going to be a straightforward answer my instinctive response well as a professional coach as someone who's been taught how to teach others as someone who has a set of exercises set of training sessions that we can pull out and run and we're expected parents of paying for us to run these sessions then I would expect us as coaches to be the one that designs those training sessions and again the response was well yeah I can see where you're going with that Jeff there's a logic to it but that's not what we're really wanting you to think about we want you to consider the players to design the training sessions or at least decide what they want to get better at so player-led coaching is built on this premise that the children want to get better given the choice they would prefer to be better at cricket next week than they were last week and given the ones that they are they're the ones that are actually playing in the matches they're the ones that have seen the results of their efforts they're possibly best placed to know what they want to get better at and if the number one objective is for them to want to come back then having training sessions that they want to take part in is probably going to be a big part of that and again it took me a while I let it settle in and I thought well okay as a coach I can probably see some things that I would suggest they could improve but what they want to get better at is probably more motivating than what I want them or think they should get better at and it's probably more likely to lead to them wanting to come back and if they have more inspiration for getting better at whatever it is that's probably going to lead to greater success than encouraging or forcing them down an improvement path that I've identified and mapped out for them so that was the second thing but they weren't done messing with my mind the third absolute mind-blowing bomb that they had dropped on me with regards to this player led coaching was they told me don't coach talent out of people and I thought well what does that even mean coaching talent out of people they went on to explain that over the years England have taken very much a textbook approach to training people they take the best practices and the good practices from the past and they try and pass them on to the new generation this is how you play a particular shot this is how you bowl this is how you feel follow this technique and you will do well and while there's a lot to be said for that one unintended consequence is that they actually lost a lot of talented people from the game because they weren't conforming to the textbook techniques of good and best practice from the past now that might not have been that noticeable if other countries had not taken a different approach but other countries had taken a different approach and led to some very unorthodox style cricketers not just surviving in the game but actually taking the game by storm and taking their countries to a new level because that had never been done before and so England had missed out here and this idea of player led coaching of I'm not going to teach you how to do something we're going to work out what you want to achieve why you want to achieve it create an exercise that allows you to work out how well you're doing at achieving that goal and then work out whether if you tweak something you can get better at it and let your natural way of achieving it get you to that outcome rather than trying to conform to a textbook best practice and this was just absolutely mind blowing for me but fantastic when you think about 10-11 year olds taking ownership of not just what they want to get better at but how they're going to get better at it absolutely brilliant and you could see the benefits you could see the results in the training sessions from week to week but that's enough about cricket for now I'm from England and I love cricket not everybody from England loves cricket certainly many people from around the world won't have even heard or understood cricket so I'm going to put that to one side for a minute but I'm going to try and relate that back to agile teams now agile teams find themselves more and more these days in what the Kinevin framework would label a complex space and in a complex space there are so many unknown unknowns there are so many variables at play that it's very difficult to determine cause and effect now all that might not be the case with cricket the effects of that are we can't rely on good and best practice anymore because things are not predictable anymore there's a very good chance that if we do the same thing in an unpredictable and highly volatile environment we'll get different results and sometimes we can do different things and get the same results so in a situation like that we need to experiment we need to innovate, we need to try multiple things we need to let go of the rigidity and standardisation that is being successful in less complex environments and embrace the complexity that we find ourselves in now and from a cricket perspective player-led coaching was predominantly around motivation around engagement, around getting that sense of I want to come back, that sense of autonomy yes there was an element of making sure that we didn't coach talent out of people but predominantly around engagement and wanting people to stay with the process and own the process as much as possible and what this did was effectively elevate the needs and the objectives and the ideas of the players above that of the coaches the coaches who were picking the team who were deciding who was in and who was out and maintaining order their ideas and objectives and needs were secondary to that of those of the players which is an interesting dynamic and when we look at leadership in a complex space it's a very similar thing now traditionally in a simpler environment leaders were the experts and it was much more efficient for the leaders to tell everybody the right way to do things but when that's not an option anymore we don't have the time to escalate things up to an expert and back down again and cascade it then we need to enable greater autonomy and that not only makes us more agile but also more resilient and increases our level of motivation so the two are very very closely linked and in a complex space the focus of leadership does very much move away from standardizing and correcting more to mentoring, coaching, enabling, engaging creating an environment where new experiences can be created and we can sense that what works and what doesn't work so that we can do more of what does and less of what doesn't but that's within our control not just from a motivation perspective but from a speed perspective so what do I mean by coaching a squad? well there's a big difference between coaching a bunch of 10, 11 year old cricketers and coaching a professional leadership team and coaching an agile squad or an agile team and one of the big differences around ownership of the agenda now we've talked about the shift in player-led coaching from the coach driving the agenda to the players driving the agenda and in professional coaching that's very explicit in that the person being coached owns the agenda the coach will follow the client's agenda but in an agile context that might not be the case as an agile coach you may have explicit or implicit responsibilities you may be expected to uphold a process uphold a framework keep teams within certain boundaries there may be an expectation upon you from other people outside the team about what you're expected to do as an agile coach and if the team want to do something that may go past their level of autonomy so we need to work out what that is we need to effectively craft an agreement so that we still have permission to coach now children coming along to an out of school training session they're explicitly giving that coach permission the parents are giving that coach permission by signing the child up and dropping them off professional coaching we're entering into an explicit agreement thereby giving the coach permission to coach now an agile coach might not have that explicit level of permission that a professional coach does so it's important to have that conversation well what do you expect from me as a coach by expecting myself as a coach perhaps we just need to agree the goal but maybe we can't do that just between the team and the agile coach maybe there are other people who have an opinion in professional coaching we would typically have a triad meeting the person being coached the coach and the person either sponsoring or paying for the coaching or the manager of that person being coached so that the needs of the organisation and the needs of the individual team are met holistically rather than just focusing on one or the other so perhaps we need some kind of triad like agreement in order to effectively coach a squad and get that level of permission so that we avoid doing what a good friend of mine Esther Derby calls going around and inflicting our help as a coach that doesn't get us anywhere maybe our goal is to become an agile team however we define that but maybe it's more basic than that maybe it's just to become a better team however we define better and hopefully that we want to maintain this sense of team we want to come back next week I've been lucky enough to work with indirectly and directly hundreds of teams agile and not agile and while all of those teams are absolutely completely unique in many ways they do tend to have when looking back at a number of common threads around their greatness certainly the great teams do and one of those things that great teams tend to have in common in my experience is that all of those great teams have effectively defined what great means to them they've defined what kind of team they want to be and want to work towards being and there's an element of common sense to that going back to our idea of player led coaching this idea of intrinsic motivation what great means to me is always going to be more engaging more powerful, more motivating more enthusing than anybody else's definition of what greatness could be for me so if I can define what that is I'm much more brought in to achieving it I want to continually improve towards it rather than continually improving towards somebody else's expectations of me as I said hundreds of teams have all defined what great means to them of what a great team is and in many cases it's not about finding a definition of greatness the key really is to help that team define what great means to them whatever that is and then get better and look to redefine it as they mature but what I have had the luxury of being able to do is identify some significant common overlaps which can be a good place for a team to start if they don't know where to start these common threads just happen to luckily form an acronym, squad so this is what I mean by coaching squads but of course these are just my experiences they are not the right ones they are certainly not the only ones but in my experience all the great teams that I've seen have had this intrinsic motivation towards self-improvement they've wanted to become a better team all things being equal, given the choice rather next week be a better team than they were last week and so they have that intrinsic motivation to improve they also care strongly about the quality of what they are doing good enough isn't good enough for the great teams, they take pride in doing things to a level of high quality so that's a common factor and a motivator in continuous improvement for a lot of the great teams that I've been part of they are all united as well what they stand for what their common values are what they expect of one another and their sense of camaraderie of belonging of looking out for one another that's a common thread in a lot of the great teams that I've been part of and also a factor towards motivation for continuous improvement they tend to be audacious as well they like to push the boundaries of what's possible both within their environment and their overall delivery or capability as a team they set audacious goals they challenge the status quo they are prepared to take risks that's another factor and another motivating factor for continuous improvement as a team or a squad and finally all of the great teams that I've been part of take pride in delivery they love getting stuff done giving something of value to people who recognize it and appreciate it however the team define great for them that's a cliche but it is a journey and it's a never ending journey but on that journey they will have a number of achievements now what's really important for me when I'm working with teams is to help them identify those achievements because it's very easy to just miss them not notice them or shrug them off as incidental but taking the time out to say do you know what this happened to us today we did this we are a better team than we were let's celebrate that let's internalize that let's recognize that we've achieved a milestone in our team growth now again every team will identify their own milestones because it's their own definition of greatness but I've been lucky enough to see a number of common milestones that tend to indicate we've made some progress towards our definition of greatness and these milestones could be something that we notice retrospectively by taking a step back and thinking how have we grown what significant stories can we now tell about our ability as a team or they could be proactively worked towards we could pick a milestone in a particular part of our definition of greatness and consciously work towards it for a period of time either way we are continuously improving and that sense of intrinsic motivation is built in through this gamification element almost if you like of achieving these milestones these team achievements this is an example of a sort of Kanban board that one team was using electronically using my milestone cards so you can see that some they haven't started yet, some that are being thought about, being talked about perhaps up for consideration when they next have the opportunity to build some time into their next improvement cycle there are things that are ongoing right now milestones that are actively working towards right now and some that they've achieved they've celebrated and they're done but there's also a column further to the right which is past done if you like because they've revisited them now I said done doesn't mean done forever when it comes to continuous improvement this team have noticed some items that they've actually managed to come back to they've motivated themselves to almost set new bests for themselves so yes they've created their identity once they've achieved that, that had been in the done column but something had changed perhaps a new member joined the team perhaps the team had evolved their values or their working agreements so they've revisited that identity and they've done it again so this sense of continuous improvement even when they've achieved greatness in some aspect they're willing to redefine that level of greatness for themselves so if self-improvement is an intrinsic motivator like I've spent the last 20 minutes or so telling you that it is if we are innately wired to get better at something all things being equal then surely coaching a team must be an absolute walk in the park but in reality nothing's as simple as that and there are going to be a number of challenges that you may face as a coach when trying to help a team work towards continuous improvement I'm just going to pick a couple here that I think are particularly important and particularly likely for you to experience the first one is that as an agile coach coaching is going to be just one part of your job now as a professional coach that might be less of an issue because you've been engaged specifically for that but as an agile coach there may be other aspects to your role there may be times when you're expected to teach there may be times when you're expected to mentor there may be times when you're expected to mitigate, facilitate, conflict for example equally when I'm a cricket coach there may be times when I need to step out of my coaching persona if you like so yes I could be working on this philosophy of player led coaching and whatever technique works for you I'm not going to coach your talent out of you but if I notice something that could be putting your health and safety or the health and safety of other children in the class at risk I may need to step in and say that way taking a much more directive firm non coaching stance now ok as an agile coach you might not be worried too much about health and safety but there may be other aspects to your role that mean you're not coaching all the time so that makes it a little bit more difficult but what we can do, we can have a conversation about that, we can talk about when are we coaching, when aren't we coaching are there signals that we can give each other when we're stepping in and out of certain roles the second aspect that could prove a challenge for you is one of my favourite phrases actually unconditional positive regard what do I mean by that unconditional positive regard effectively means we choose to believe that everyone is acting with positive intent we choose to believe that they're not there to sabotage us, themselves other people that all of their behaviours have a positive intent behind them now I'm not naive, I'm aware that there will be times when you see behaviours that scream at you this is destructive, this can't possibly have a positive intent behind it my response to you when you experience those situations is to choose to believe that that is a cry for help it is a signal that there is an unmet need somewhere and if we can find out what that unmet need is work out how to meet it then positive intent will flow again and the third challenge that I'm going to put out to you today that you may find or experience as a coach is yourself knowledge of yourself and the ability to use oneself in your coaching engagements now what do I mean by that well effectively what I mean is we're all human we all have our own beliefs our own values our own baggage our own history, our own biases our own triggers and they will affect our ability to coach they will affect our ability to coach more if we're unaware of them and if we're unable to cope with them or manage them effectively and what we're going to look at now is some techniques that you can use to help manage some of those triggers some of these triggers could be for example perfectionism so as a coach if I'm if I have a perfectionist leaning it may be very difficult for me to be patient with my teams it may be very difficult for me to give them space to grow and to think my desire to jump in and help push them towards a faster rate of growth could undermine the team's autonomy and in times like that it could be worth reminding myself of some useful affirmations now an affirmation is a statement it's a statement of belief that we believe is true and in this case we're going to look at positive affirmations because as human beings we do tend to focus on the negatives we tend to focus on the negative messages that other people give us and the negative messages that we give ourselves more than we focus on the positives and well noticing those negative messages is really useful because we can improve its valuable feedback it can lead to a certain doubting of ourselves a certain lack of self-confidence but consciously focusing on some more positive affirmations just evens that balance out and can help us be more effective as a result so one example of a positive affirmation that could help us as a coach is challenging this assumption that maybe we have unconsciously that if we're not talking we're not adding value now I also know if I read this affirmation here that I add value even when I'm silent as a coach and sometimes even more so when I read that logically rationally I think yeah, that may sense there are many times when I've said nothing as a coach and the person that I'm coaching has filled that silence either with thoughts of their own or words of their own and reminding myself that that's a positive thing could make it easier for me to avoid stepping in when I didn't actually want to now I can flip that card and I can find some coping mechanisms or some practices or some exercises or techniques and I can add even more with this affirmation rather than just repeating it to myself on a regular basis perhaps a little acronym could help wait, why am I talking perhaps I'll have that on a post-it note stick it on my monitor or on my notepad so that whenever I'm coaching I remind myself why am I talking and perhaps I remind myself of one of my favourite quotes of all time this is from one of my hero coaches Nancy Klein and she famously said I was certain that what I'm about to say is more important than what they're about to think and if I can't be certain that what I'm about to say is going to add more value than what they're about to think I'm going to choose to stay silent and let them think scary concept for many people myself included if I'm insecure about what value I'm adding but these affirmations can make me more comfortable, more secure in being silent another trigger that could affect our ability to coach if we're unaware of this about ourselves is imposter syndrome this idea that we're a fraud that we're not as good as everybody thinks we are that we are inferior to other people especially the people that we're coaching that can make it very difficult for us to challenge, to be that roofless, compassionately roofless coach perhaps we might even avoid being someone or a team's coach because we don't feel equipped or qualified or skilled or experienced enough to do it so a technique that we can use to help us tackle that level of imposter syndrome is a career timeline reflection so just literally thinking back over your career and choosing to pick out some significant periods or points of achievement over your career maybe asking other people to help you because other people perhaps are kinder in your career achievements than you are to yourself but acknowledging them, internalizing them not unnaturally bigging yourself up but giving yourself the credit that you're due to give yourself the confidence that you need to be an effective coach for the people you're coaching and another trigger that could affect our ability to coach unless we become more aware of it and begin to manage it people pleasing now people pleasing is a good thing we want people to like us we want to please people but it can limit our ability to be effective because for example we might not be willing we might be scared to raise the mirror up to our coaches to show them what we're seeing to tell them what we're hearing to give them the messages that they can't see or hear themselves we may overly worry about the consequences of doing so and therefore avoid it fair setting will encourage us to think through each of the specific consequences that we're imagining could happen and work out a plan for reducing the chances of them happening repairing the situation if they do happen and reframing them into a more positive or helpful interpretation now as a coach if we can use these techniques ourselves we can become much more effective at coaching others for change but of course these techniques could also be useful for the coaching as well so I have a challenge for you I want you to think back to a team that you were part of in recent memory that you would consider to be really good if not great this could be a work team it could be a sports team it could be a voluntary community team any team effort that you think that was a really good experience I really enjoyed being part of that that was a success and the important part is to pull out and put into some really short story format why you felt compelled to continue to improve even though things were going well within that team pull out a couple of reasons why even though things were going well even though you were doing a good job even though you were almost at the top of your game you still felt and your colleagues still felt compelled to improve and once you've done that I've got three levels of extended challenge for you so if you're part of a team your bronze medal challenge is to share what you've just written there your story, your experience from that great team and why you were compelled to improve to share that with your colleagues your teammates and hear their stories as well and look for some overlap potentially that you could use to strengthen your sense of continuous improvement as a team your silver medal challenge is to see if you could collectively define your initial draft version of greatness as a team to aspire to so to take all of those characteristics all of those factors that led to you being not just a great team but a great team that was committed and compelled to continuously improve and draft that initial definition of greatness as a team together that's your silver medal challenge but your gold medal challenge that's your silver medal challenge but your gold medal challenge is to experiment challenging some of the boundaries some of the constraints some of the dependencies that are undermining your natural intrinsic motivation to get better so we're working on the assumption that all else being equal we would choose to become a better team what's stopping that from happening naturally identify those things and experiment with challenging them breaking them down making this a more conducive environment to intrinsically motivating improving so to summarise coaching for change it's intrinsic we can't force people to change we don't need to force people to change they want to improve so work out what's stopping that get yourself some permission to coach by defining what they want to achieve and helping them work out how they want to achieve it be their facilitator not their director it's not easy as a coach it's not easy if you've got other aspects to your role other than coach but this is where great things happen