 Welcome to Applied Coaching Practices by Peter Maricin. So I'm glad that you all could join us today here. Well, hello everybody, it's a pleasure to meet you all. Okay, so Applied Coaching Practices. So this should be an interesting little talk. I hope we're going to run through some of the things that I've learned in my own professional coaching journey and how I've applied some of those to my role, which is as a transformation consultant and coach. So I'm one of these people that goes into organizations and helps them work out how to change, how to adopt new practices, new ways of working, new ways of thinking about how to work together to produce greater and better outcomes. Predominantly, I've been working in the technology sector, mostly in finance and strangely, loyalty marketing, the two areas I've spent most of my career in. And yeah, so without further ado, let's get into some of the topics that we'd like to go through today. So the agenda is going to break down roughly like this. What is, we're going to go over what is coaching and what it isn't, run through what are good questions, the different types of questions that we could ask in coaching, how that works and what the importance of questions are. We're going to talk through the different tools as well, some of the things that we can bring to the table and there are a lot of tools, but I'm going to talk through two of the most common ones that I found very useful from coaching that I use daily with the clients that I work with. And then we're going to wrap it up with a brief overview of aspects and they'll be available to answer any questions anybody has. So let's start with what is coaching and the first thing that I'm going to ask here is if people would like to provide some viewpoints as to what they think is coaching. And I put together a quick little survey here on Menti if you'd like to go there and start entering some information and see what feedback we get. And I have a couple of these in the course of the slides and seeing if this works in the context. Guiding others, find them own way. Nice thing about Menti, you get the live feedback. Getting the cricket team mild up, that's definitely what coaching is about. Okay, so let's go back to our presentation here. The ICF, the International Coach Federation which is one of the largest professional coaching bodies that describes coaching like this. Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. So if this is the case, how does this compare to other service roles that there are out there? So, and we have coaching, but then what about the other roles that we have out there? So for example, consulting. Well, the difference between coaching which focuses on setting goals and trading the outcomes and consulting is the consulting uses the consultant's expertise. We're focusing on achieving a certain result. Consultants come in and they provide recommendations and implement solutions. And whereas coaching is focusing on getting the outcomes that are related personally to the person, to the things that the person is capable of doing. Versus mentoring. Mentoring very much uses the mentors knowledge and the mentor is providing advice and guidance and using the mentor's experience and expertise to help guide the mentee. Compared to training. Well, training is the transferring of knowledge. And whereas we can use coaching type practices within our training, really training is just how do I get knowledge from one person to somebody else? And there's an automatic assumption here of I know more than you do and which is why I'm surviving this. Counseling therapy. So coaching isn't counseling either. I mean, coaching very much is focused on the positive outcomes, helping somebody grow, helping somebody find their inner strengths and ways of developing. Whereas counseling is much more of the act of healing and dealing with dysfunction and other problems. And facilitation. Well, facilitation works with the desired outcomes that you're trying to create from a group. So it's about creating an environment in which others can effectively produce those desired outcomes by the ways that they can actually create the kinds of outcomes you're looking for from those groups. When we look at the role of an agile coach, we see that professional coaching is indeed one of the capabilities that we have in an agile coach. And there are lots and lots of the other things that the coach is supposed to do, many of which are the other professional services. But really the focus here is on this professional coaching piece where we're talking about how we use the professional coaching skills in helping. I realized you can tell my camera. The professional coaching skills to help with agile transformation, dev ops transformation and helping organizations improve. So if you look at the flow of solutions focused coaching, which is a form of professional coaching, it runs roughly like this. We start from this concept of coach position. And coach position is this idea that as a coach, you are not directly involved emotionally in the outcomes that are being looked at being achieved. It's almost in some ways a meditative state. And when coaching you, you look to try and distance yourself from the questions and look at things purely from listening and working out, how do I move things forward? How do I help the client? Next part is establishing rapport. And this is where we use things like softeners and backtracking and recapping and methods in order to ensure that we're on the same page. And this is absolutely critical. It's why we have to do this early to make sure that the person that we're working with is willing to open up and listen and share their experiences and thoughts. And very often we find that if you slip out of coach position and start to provide advice and guidance, and then you can very often break that rapport. And by breaking that rapport, it's much harder to achieve the kinds of outcomes we're looking to through coaching. The next very critical part is this idea of initiating the contract. And the contract is something that's always stated in the positive. It's something that's gonna be within the client's control and it's going to be something that they are, is ecological to them, something that they can understand within their surroundings. It's when we establish the contract that we lay out what we intend to get out of the coaching session. And if we're running coaching in just even a short conversation with somebody to help them overcome or to dig deeper into a particular problem, this contract is absolutely critical because it sets the groundwork for will we know whether we're successful or not. And this is one of the interesting parts we see here is that a lot of these practices and behaviors are very similar to the ones that we use in Agile coaching. We borrow these into the Agile coaching world and we use them to help people learn these new practices and ways of thinking. The next part is this concept of ensuring that you're working from the outcome frame. And the outcome frame is this idea that the contract that we've created is phrased in a positive manner in way that we can, both you and the client and the other group that you're working with can understand how this, how success will be achieved. And we've defined this in a solid way to understand what that looks like. And we're confirming the contract at this point. We're saying, is this what you want? If at the end of these 30 minutes that we're talking, if we achieve a couple of ways of moving you along in your Agile journey, is that a good thing? Is that what you want out of this session? At creating an experience, this is the part that comes next. And as we go through some of the questions later on and some of the pieces around different tools that we can use and the types of questions, this is, we use those both in when we're initiating the contract, but also, and especially in this creating the experience. And creating the experience is where we start to dig into what is the problem? What is the actual thing that we're looking to solve for you? If we want to get to that outcome, we need to create an experience. And to create that experience, we need to bring a set of tools and capabilities and conversations to the table in order to be able to make that happen. And after we've created the experience, we can now start to identifying action steps that the client or the group might need. And this is where we break it down and say, what are those action steps? What are the things that we need to do in order to achieve these outcomes that we're looking for? And most importantly, at this point, we ask, well, how might you commit to this? How are you going to hold yourself accountable to actually achieving these outcomes? If you want to improve how you understand the running your sprint, how might you commit to this? How might you hold yourself accountable to making that happen? And then to wrap the session up, we ask questions around how is this a value to you? What do you understand now that is different from before? How has your experience changed? And finally, we celebrate the client. And these last two pieces, it's very similar to what we do from a retrospective. When we do retrospectives in an agile manner where we ask the value we ask, and what would you do better next time? And celebrating the client saying, we appreciate you for showing up. This is another critical part of it, showing that we really appreciate you contributing to the conversation. So as we go through exploring and identifying contracts and looking at what things we need to do to help people, we ask questions. And coaches are very much known for asking questions more than making directive statements. And so when we look at this, there are different types of questions, this concept of open and closed questions. And these make a huge difference the way that we engage in conversation and the way that we interact with people. And open questions typically start with your how, where, who, when statements like tell me about or explain more of that to me. Whereas a closed question is one that elicits either a yes or a no or just closes the coachee down. So if we take an example of this, we say something like, are you going to complete the task this week? This is a closed question. The answer is yes or no. And it's not really going to help us understand whether there are anything, anything's which holding them back from being able to do this. It's not giving any opportunity to explore deeper. So better coaching question would be, well, what will it take to achieve this task this week? Which is an open-ended question that starts to open up this idea of how might we learn about this? How might we learn a bit more about what it's going to take to achieve this? So another example, is this something you'd be willing to do? Is it yes or no? If somebody's committing, they're making a promise, you're putting them on the spot to do this. Whereas if we ask, how committed are you to getting this done? We're much more, being much more exploratory, we're asking and seeing how is somebody engaged? Are they engaged in this? Are they thinking about what it might take to do this? And there are graduations of open questions too. And some questions will elicit a dead end, even though that they have a how or a what at the beginning of it. For example, if you ask your kids, how was school today? It's not uncommon to get the answer of, well, it was okay. Whereas if you ask a question like, what was the best part of school for you today? This is a much more open, open question. This is a question that is going to elicit a deep answer. It will create thought. You can't just say it was okay, you're gonna have to think about, well, what was the best part? You're gonna have to reflect. And this is a key part of what we're looking to do when we ask questions like this. There are lots of questions out there. And one area that's quite interesting coming out of psychology is this concept of clean language. Mike Burroughs uses this very well in his agenda shift methodology for helping strategy and transformation. And the clean language is based out of these nine questions that you see here. And this set of questions can be used to elicit deeper inquiry into what's happening. And it uses the client's own language and plays it back to them in the form of questions so that you can say, and then what happens? So if we ask when we're looking to release a product and then what happens? If we're looking to create a new service for a customer and what kind of service is that for the customer? So this clean language is a very, very powerful way of asking questions that will help you explore and learn more about what a client is looking for. So I recommend meeting up about this and using this in your conversations with your clients or your staff. And in terms of powerful questions, so coaching is about questions but it's not solely about questions. And in fact, if you look at the criticality of the aspects of what we do in professional coaching, questions aren't even the first thing that we need to concern ourselves with. The first thing we need to concern ourselves with is that building of rapport. If we don't have rapport with the coachee, if we don't have that interaction with them, that they are willing to open up, that they're willing to listen to us saying, without that rapport and the maintaining of that rapport, it'll be very, very difficult to get them to start to think differently, to start to change the way that they behave, to start to think about the kinds of questions that we're asking them. Asking the wrong questions at the wrong time can very easily help somebody to, we'll start to shut down and not respond in the way that you expect them to. The second most critical part is listening. So as coaches, we have to listen not just to the words that are being said but to the tone they are being set in, to the silences between the words. It's a hesitation, does the person sigh or do they seem agitated? Are they, and there are different levels of listening. We talk about three levels of listening. And the first level is the superficial level that we generally do in sort of everyday conversation. Second level of listening goes a little deeper when we start to pick up on these nuances. And the third level of listening we're really deeply listening, we're really listening for what is going on with the client. What is it going on with the person that I'm talking to? What is causing them to respond in the way that they are? And then questions are indeed very important but rapport and listening are actually far more important in the coaching conversation. So moving on to talk about some common tools that we use. So the first kind of common tool that I'm gonna talk about and is as if shifts. And these are things that you can use in lots and lots of different ways throughout all of the conversations that you have. And I'm gonna run through eight of them and there are many more. And some of these you are almost certainly using even if you've not even realizing you're using but by talking through it you can start to realize that I can use these consciously to elicit the types of responses to inquire about things in certain ways. So the first one is time. So an as if shift in time is for example imagine it's six months from now. We've rolled out the product, everything is incredible. The clients are really, really happy. We've delivered everything on time. Now looking back from six months from now what are the key things you did to get there? What obstacles did you run into? How did you overcome them? And so time gives you a wonderful opportunity to look at and explore what will it take to get there? We talked about values. And if we ask about the client's values we can say for example if the client is talking about the energy and the creativity could ask a question like well assume that energy and creativity continues to build momentum and grow how does that benefit you and your colleagues? We're asking the client to shift perspectives to think about things in a different way. Point of view shift. And this one is very common especially in FODM because this is simply the just suppose you were to take on the perspective of one of your potential customers. Look through their eyes, what would they ask of you? Put yourself in the other person's shoes. Next one is a system shift. And this one is interesting especially doing a lot of work in the DevOps space. It's and thinking about systems thinking. So just suppose that you look at a whole company some areas are faster, some areas are slower some areas are really excelling. And how does the overall system need to shift to move forward? What would you change? Where would you change it? So systems shift is taking a step back looking at the entire system and they're starting to think about what could change in that system. Next one is information. Now information is great for people who are stuck in analysis paralysis where they're struggling to move forward where they're having difficulty taking that next step and what's holding them back is, well, if I just had that another piece of information if you hear somebody saying, well, I just got to do a bit more research or I'm not sure about that. Then you can ask them simply, what if the research is done? What would your next steps be then? And sometimes that can just asking that question can help somebody move past that road by move past the analysis to realize, well, actually the next steps, I can do those right now. I don't need to go do any more research. I have all of the information that I need. I just needed to start to think about what I actually need to do next. Next one is amplifying the solution. Now this one is around suppose you get the project off the ground and you're accelerating. How worthwhile is that project now? What do you see? What's different? What can you do now that you've got so much more than you have before? Contract creation and this is the contract similar to the coaching I was talking about earlier. This is if you were to make an agreement to do this project, what would you be doing differently? And this is talking about your intrinsically talking to somebody's, they've made a promise. You're asking them to, if you made a promise to do this, what would that change about the way that you would approach this? What would you do differently? And then last but not least out of these eight, one of my favorites is the doorway button. So imagine that there was an easy button on your desk and you're having a different day, trying to work it right forward. You press that easy button. What would you be doing differently? What would happen? Another form of this is imagine you had a magic wand and you could wave that magic wand and one thing would happen. What would that thing be? We use this question frequently in consulting. It's one of the questions we always ask at the end where we go through, we did, we learn, as we do assessments, we understand about how organizations are operating. It's important to ask this question at the end to say, well, what would you change if you could? And that really helps bring out the thought process, helps to get people to think about what they might be able to do differently in their environments. I would say that the time, the magic wand question and the point of view are probably the ones that I end up using the most. And then the information one for when we run into those people who are struggling with that information paralysis. So another critical tool that we use is one called logical levels. And this is a great tool to help people uncover a deeper level, to start to connect into what's really underlying the problem. And where they've got a problem where they're looking at things from a superficial level and we're trying to get them to look underneath that, to look at the deeper problem, the getting to the why and what it really truly glows. And it runs like this. So we start with this idea of asking a question about where and when. So where might you go to get the information that you need in order to complete this? When do you think you'll get it done? And this is very much about the environment. This is about what's going on around you. Do I have the information I need to be able to have this conversation? And it is really about that. The next question is around what? So what are you gonna do? What might be the right solution to this? And we're asking a question about behaviors. Well, we're talking about moving up from the environment that is around us and up to the behaviors that we're gonna take in that environment. Next question, how? How are you gonna get that done? And this is about capabilities, like looking at skills and ways of doing things. And as you see, as we move up the pyramid, these questions are getting deeper into and more complex in what possibly are the answers. However, most conversations really occur below this squiggly line here. Most conversations occur at this reasonably safe level where we're comfortable with this. We're comfortable asking each other questions about where and when things might happen, about what it is we might do and how we're gonna go about doing it. The problem is that if we only stay at this level, we're never gonna truly get to what's actually underlying the way that we interact with each other. Why are we doing these things? In fact, that's the next question. And specifically, the question of why is that important? Why is this important to you? And this is a key question that we always ask at the start of a coaching conversation is why is this important? And it's the only why question we really ask because why is very much an aggressive word? It can be seen as being aggressive in the sense of why did you do that? So it's not, it doesn't come across as nicely, but the question that we ask here is why is that important to you? And this elicits the values that may underlie why somebody is doing a particular action. So if we've discovered like, so how are they gonna do it? When we're why, what they're doing and where they're gonna do it, we can now ask like, well, why is it important to you that you do it that way? Why is it important to you that you have all of the code upfront? Why is it important to you that design is done this way? And this allows you to look in and dig underneath as to what are the values that are driving that? Why is this person wanting to do things in this particular way? Next up from values, we can start to ask questions like who? And the typical coaching question out of a more of a life coaching space would be who do you become? However, and this is related to identity and identity is critical because this is where we're starting to now tie back into who are you when you behave in this manner? And once people can open up to that level, you can really truly start to understand more about how these things relate to each other. However, if you ask your typical person in a company or off the street, like who do you become? They're probably gonna look at you blindly with absolutely no idea what you're talking about. So another question that you can ask in the identity space would be something more along the lines of what role do you play in creating this? And for example, if we're building products or creating value for a customer, it's like what role would you play in creating this for a customer? And I find that role question tends to land much better than the who do you become question, which can be difficult for people who aren't coaches or don't have a coaching background to come in and actually really even approach. But once we move beyond even that, we can now start to ask the question around, well, if you play that role in creating this for the customer, who else benefits? What else happens when you do that? Where could we then take this? And when we start to ask questions like this, we're starting to ask questions which are very much more related to what is the vision? What is the vision that we wanna undertake? Where is it that we wanna be able to go with this and what do we wanna be able to do with all of these things that we've learned? The interesting thing about logical levels is that once you've worked your way up here and you've uncovered that vision, you've uncovered the identities and the values and the critical parts, which what is actually underlying the decisions and the behaviors that we're taking? We can now work our way back down through this. And the interesting part here too is that as we work our way back down, we can continue to use the as-if shifts to explore more deeply. So what role would you play in creating for this customer? Could turn into six months from now, if the customer had this, what would they have? How would you have got that? What role would you have played in creating that for them? And so this allows us to explore even more deeply into looking at what sort of things we need to ask in order to be able to help people dig more into what is really causing these behaviors? Why are we behaving this way? And this is especially critical in doing transformation because in order for us to help people think in a different way, we need to start to ask these kind of questions to understand what is causing us to behave in this manner so that we can start to think about what manner do we want to behave in? How do I wanna be known? What role do I wanna play in this? Are we aligned? And so these are very, very critical parts. And as we work our way back down the pyramid, we can then start to use this to generate the action items we need to do. So if we start from this idea that the value that we've created for the customer and we work our way through the roles that we've played for that, why it's important to us to having done that, the skills that we brought to the table to make it happen, what we did with those skills to create that value and where we did it and when we delivered it to them, we can now tie that value that we created for them, the vision that we have of this directly to those actions that we're taking. And this allows us to now start to think about if I take this action, if I start to perform this task in this particular manner, what does that particularly do for me? What does that create? So that's logical levels and logical levels, I find to be one of the key pieces that I use in a lot of conversations, even just being able to understand the differentiation as you move both the line into deeper questions about how people are paving, this can help people stop and think about why certain actions are being taken, why certain behaviors are occurring. So I have another quick question for everybody here that having been through all the different things I've just presented is another quick mentee. And this one is on what words describe coaching for you now. So if you have to, now that we've gone through all of the information, all of these questions, what words would you use to describe coaching? As it differed now or as it changed from being about the cricket team, is coaching something different for you now than it was before? People a chance to grab the word cloud off that whereas I like that. Yes, building working relationships. That's very much a key part of what coaching can really, really help with. Awesome. I do like these word clouds and they build up. So I'm gonna leave that building and you can continue to put words in. It's fun that practical came out as the most world. And I wonder what that does for people perhaps we can discuss afterwards. So going back to, so for me, when I talk about coaching and wrapping this up, I think of it in terms of this Socrates quote about, I can't teach anybody anything. I can only make them think. It might be a few thousand years old but I think it's a very good point that he's making here that we use coaching to help people open up their minds, to think about things differently, to start to try and understand the problems that are facing them in a different way. And sometimes we can really help people move forward. Nearly always people already have ways of going about solving these ways of moving forward, understanding even if that is looking at what other resources might be available to them. So hopefully the questions and the different tools and the pieces that I've been showing you today will help you think a little differently about how do you use coaching? And I hope these can be directly applicable to the way that you interact with others. So I'll leave you with one more question as a coach which is how will you help somebody today? How will you take these bits of information and help somebody today? So with that I'm gonna wrap up as a quick feedback survey because there's, and I think that's actually left over from previous times of these presentations and my contact information is here. I'm always happy to connect with people and chat. And thank you very much. I think we're at the end of our 45 minutes. Hi. Hi, so if you have any questions for Peter you can put it in the Q&A section. You can ask him over there which is you can put it over there in the discussion bar, discuss button which is there on your right-hand side of the screen. Don't think we have any questions. I was so informative that everybody's... We'll wait for a minute and see if there are any questions. And if anybody wants to talk about this I think they'll be hanging out and we'll be waiting for that afterwards. Yes, sure. So there is one question for you, Peter. Okay, so in a large Agile transformation how would you get the support you need for coaching in the first place? So there's a couple of different ways. Approaching it from an Agile transformation so typically within Agile transformation coaching is a key aspect of that change already because coaches are often brought in to the Agile transformation. It's the value of coaching is often sold in as the ability to help people change the ability to help people through change. So there's a lot of discussion around that side of it. So depending on how it's being introduced to the organization will depend on the right way to go about engaging with it. I've seen it brought in from a organizational change management perspective which often comes in more through like the HR side of the house. Within Agile transformations they typically have started within the technology part of the organization and the value of coaching there is very much tends to be brought in with the transformation agents with the coaches who are doing that transformation. I hope that answered, I can dig more into that. It's a bit of a broad question around transformation because in all of the transformations I've done coaching has been front and center as a part of what's being brought in to make it happen. In a corporate setting seeking coaching especially with colleagues is taboo and perceived as weakness. So this is an interesting concept and it might be cultural in its nature but there's this idea that everybody needs coaching in order to advance and grow and coaching is a great way to start to explore things at a deeper level even from a leadership perspective. Leaders are providing coaching into other parts of the organization to help them help their staff grow and to develop new skills and start to learn how to behave in different ways. Every coach I know including myself has coaches themselves because it helps to... You can't coach yourself, you're looking in a mirror and trying to ask yourself deep questions is very difficult. So you need somebody who's gonna be able to mirror things back to you. I think we could point at a ton of material and online and in books and in other places that shows the value of coaching and how it helps people move forward and move past particular barriers. So there is a... Especially in technology I've seen there'd be a bit of a taboo around coaching in that it's this idea that well, coaching is like life coaching and coaching is this more spiritual in nature sometimes versus the more practical style of solutions focused coaching which is what I've been presenting here today. So there is this other way which can help break that taboo I think which is that coaching is not just this form of coaching over here, coaching is also this other styles of coaching which are very much geared at organizational change and at being solutions focused and at helping people solve problems and framing it in that way to say that we're using coaching to help people solve problems and to help overcome difficult situations. I think there's a very good way to do that. And how can we measure the transformation matrix which we can use? Well, there's lots of different ways of going at the same time. There's lots of different ways of going about that. In terms of from a coaching perspective, how do we measure whether the coaching was effective which I think may be what you mean in this case. And again, this is being totally out of coach position because but I suspect this might mean what you mean Kili and that the to measure the transformation from a coaching perspective we can look at the effectiveness of the changes that we're getting into the organization or past the organization moving faster. Do we, if we start to look at the behaviors and the actions that are being taken, are we seeing the right behaviors and actions being taken, have behaviors changed? And we can measure that in a number of different ways. An interesting place to go look for that is out of something like, well, Kirk Patrick comes out of training, but his Kirk Patrick's has these four levels of training evaluation. But what he's talking about after that is a lot of pieces you're evaluating coaching programs. So if you want to look for a book that's quite good on that and that will give you methods and themes to measure the outcomes of transformation that would be one place to look. I also, I mean, I tend to look at like what metrics are we measuring and what metrics are we creating to those metrics aligned to what the organization is looking for. If we start from a outcomes focus, we look at what outcomes we're looking to generate, what obstacles are going to prevent us getting there, what outcomes can we need to create along that way and what indicators can we use to tell whether or not we're hitting those outcomes. So once we start to look at those indicators, we can use those indicators to measure our progress and coming out of, I mean, it really depends on then on what type of transformation, which part of the organization in technology and development of technology, looking at things like door metrics are very good ways of doing that. And I'm happy to have a deeper conversation about the different ways of doing that and the different resources I could point you at. So by all means reach out and I'll let you know the kind of process we go through to define that. Hope that answers your question. Okay, I think we're wrapped up here now. Yeah, so thank you so much Peter for this session and sharing your experience with us today.