“Attending this workshop produced an immediate improvement in how I approach coaching!! Practical application started the next day with the first team member I met with, and I now have stronger goals around practicing and improving specific coaching skills.” David Kiersznowski

ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching Workshop

Every provider of ICAgile certification has completely different content. That's because ICAgile provides accreditation, but not content. Each member organization needs to create their own offering to meet the learning objectives from scratch. The intense interactive experience in this workshop was hand crafted by Damon Poole and Gillian Lee, co-authors of the upcoming book “Professional Coaching for Agilists” by Pearson. They have been co-designing Agile Coach workshops for nearly a decade, more than most other offerings on the market. In 2019 alone, they delivered a combined total of 24 Agile Coach workshops while continuously updating the material with experience from their ongoing Agile Coaching work. In addition, this workshop has been designed to utilize the knowledge of the participants in order for participants and instructors to learn from each other.

Information regarding certification, audience, pre-requisites, schedule and other logistics follow the course description.

Course Description

This workshop is more like a curated collection of 21 interactive conference sessions than a typical certification course cramming you full of slides. It provides an opportunity to discover where you are in your Agile Coach journey and to learn new skills and techniques to progress further and faster in that journey. Two thirds of the workshop is spent in fun, hands-on group activities and games with 2-5 people depending on the activity. Most of the activities are available as free downloads, professionally created boxed kits or both. Materials on hand include colored markers, Legos, pipe-cleaners, and more. At the completion of the workshop you will have dozens of games, activities, and techniques for use with your teams and organization.

The focus of the workshop is applying the skills of Professional Coaching within an Agile environment. What you will learn is framework agnostic; applicable for coaching in any Agile-oriented environment whether people are using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, or any other Agile-oriented set of practices.

What is Agile Coaching? – the role of the Agile Coach is often misunderstood as “Agile Expert.” While Agile expertise is necessary and allows a Coach to work in the modes of mentor and teacher, the modes of facilitator and coach are just as important. Introduces the formal concept of professional coaching and shows how it is different from mentoring, teaching and facilitating with examples, games, and live demonstrations.

Coaching Practice – there will be many opportunities to practice and apply what you are learning in real coaching sessions with other participants using a series of specially designed exercises. These exercises include: “Flash Card Coaching”, “Choose Your Own Coaching Adventure”, “Coaching in Slow Motion”, and “Reverse Coaching.”

Stop and Go Coaching - a session where you are the coach and in which you receive feedback from an instructor on how you are applying what you have learned to the coaching session. This is first-come-first-served. Additional opportunities will be provided online.

Emotional Intelligence - learning about the four skills of emotional intelligence and practicing them to enhance your ability to navigate the muddy waters of human interaction.

Active Listening - going beyond the typical "levels of listening"; learning about and practicing multi-spectrum awareness that utilizes presence, emotional intelligence, and the texture and context of a conversation to form a deep rapport with the coachee(s).

Live Demonstrations – the instructor will do live demos of techniques throughout the workshop using real-world examples provided by participants.

Coaching Triggers – an introduction to our unique “Coaching Triggers” approach which helps you determine next steps while maintaining neutrality and staying fully present. Includes an introduction to the coaching triggers that represent the essence of professional coaching: rapport building, determining session purpose, prioritization, goal setting, exploration, and planning.

Powerful Questions – you will learn how to craft powerful questions across a wide variety of coaching situations that will get people thinking in new ways about their circumstances, the problem at hand, themselves, or a combination of all of the above. Powerful questions are open-ended, neutral, and can help people prioritize, explore, set goals, spur the imagination, find motivation, and foster commitment to action.

Presence – our minds can distract us from what is happening in the moment, causing us to miss opportunities to be the best coach we can be. We’ll do exercises to demonstrate just how difficult it can be to remain present, then learn techniques to remain present and practice them throughout the workshop.

Feedback and Advice – giving and receiving feedback and advice can be daunting. We’ll explore feedback methods including: COIN, awards, and Non-Violent Communication. We’ll also learn about the three levels of advice and mentoring conversations and play an advice game.

Your Agile Coaching Journey - get a sense of where you currently are and potential areas of improvement across 11 different areas from coaching to emotional intelligence using a unique opt-in 360 feedback system.

Coaching Agility – so often we and those we coach have a specific methodology in mind as we coach. In the extreme, we worry that people are not standing up in the standup. We will explore ways to define "Agility" such that we can focus on coaching towards higher levels of Agility and mindset change rather than focusing on standups, retrospectives, program increments, velocity, and other Agile mechanics.

Finding and facilitating change – techniques for finding impediments and opportunities to affect change through observation, facilitation, and group activities. Leverages ADKAR, a change management model based on individual change, and an understanding of blindspots (yours and theirs).

Shared vision – there are many things in an Agile ecosystem that work best when working towards a shared vision such as what it means to be Agile, product vision, team working agreement, and iteration goals. We will explore this concept with a unique activity that can be run with whatever materials participants are comfortable with incorporating.

Building great teams – great teams live and breathe the Agile principles and values, trust each other, have high morale, are self-organizing, and have the support of the organization to succeed. Learn new tools, techniques, and activities for how to instill these values and capabilities into individuals and teams and help to increase the organizational support for Agile teams. One of the activities we will run is the game “Heroes of Agility” (an alternative activity is also available) which demonstrates everything in the Agile Manifesto and Scrum in under 30 minutes.

Teaching as an Agile Coach - much of the job of an Agile Coach is actually teaching. We will look at when to teach vs use another mode as well as how to incorporate a coaching mindset in our teaching.

Coaching at multiple levels - see how everything you learn about coaching that is oriented to either the individual, team, or organizational level can actually be applied at all of those levels.

Coaching Agreements - working with the organization, teams, and individuals to set, manage, and document expectations between the coach and others in both directions.

Conflict management – learn about different conflict management approaches including the Thomas-Kilman conflict mode instrument, and how to pro-actively reduce disagreements.

Testimonials from Attendees

“I've worked as a change leader and team coach for a long time in the Agile space but had never taken formal training specifically for coaching before attending Damon's course. A key epiphany for me was understanding the difference between coaching modes and recognizing the best time in a person's change journey to apply them. I came away with a very helpful framework for coaching which I am applying now.” Rob Scebold

"Damon is a seasoned Agilist and very experienced coach’s coach. His class is informative, provocative, and delivered with a wry sense of humor. I am sure you will enjoy the class and come away learning a lot." Shyam Kumar, President of Agile New England

“I got transformed mentally and professionally by Damon Poole’s ICP-ACC workshop. It was a defining moment in my Agile coaching career. The knowledge, potential unleashed and the impactful connections I made have been speaking to me louder than I envisaged.” Ajibade Momolosho

Audience & Prerequisites

While the workshop has obvious appeal for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Agile Coaches, other roles that can benefit from the workshop include: tech leads, project managers, managers, and product owners. All of the skills in the workshop are useful for anyone looking to increase their organization’s level of Agility or to become even more effective when working within an Agile environment. A working knowledge of Agile and at least one Agile methodology is required. Recent experience on an Agile team is highly recommended.

Logistics

Main Workshop - 2 days in-person

8:30am doors open
9:00am Class Begins
noon Lunch
5:00pm Class Ends

On the first day, there will be a social hour directly after the class.

Live virtual sessions - there are six 1-hour sessions offered with a variety of daytime and evening options before and after the in-person event.

Certification

After attending all 21 hours of the workshop (15 in person and 6 online), each participant will receive the ICAgile ICP-ACC, Certified Professional: Agile Coaching. It is one of the steps towards becoming an ICAgile certified expert in Agile Coaching (ICE-AC). There is no exam other than showing the instructor that you are engaged and contributing to the overall experience in support of your fellow participants.