Agile India.

What do we, as agile Coaches, value? What is our value system?

I value:

• Respect and Trust
• Transparency and Open communication
  • This works both ways. As a coach you want to show them that its OK not to know something. You certainly don’t know everything. But you are willing to learn.
• Safe-fail experiments
• Being hands-on and in the groove 
  • Second-hand information and knowledge can only take you so far
• Down-to-earth, humble attitude
  • Being one amongst them.
• Joy of improving things one baby-step at a time
• Motivation and self driven
  • Lead by Example
• Continuous learning and putting ourselves out of our comfort zone
  • I care, I’m here to help make things better and learn in the process. I’m not here only for the money.
• And so on…

As a coach, my goal is to help people evolve their thinking to be more “agile/adaptive”. Building great software is only a part of it. Agile/Lean thinking applies and shows in lots of ways even outside software. And in lots of cases I’ve seen that when people start applying these values in other parts of their daily lives, they get a much broader and deeper understanding of this thinking process.

Few years ago, when I was a consultant at ThoughtWorks, people used to ask me, what was my job like. I would respond saying, “My job is to set up small ‘safe-fail‘ experiments for my team.” Learning from one’s mistake in a controlled, safe environment is the best form of learning according to me till date. It has a much long lasting impact. Almost always, this really helped me evolve my understanding of how agility can manifest itself.

When it comes to Coaching, there are different styles. What style you can use depends on:

• Your strengths and weaknesses. By your personality. 
• The team & individuals you are coaching.
• Whether you are going in as a coach or they (the team) is coming to you for coaching.
• The short-term and long-term needs of the team
• And so on….

Over and above all, to be effective at coaching, one needs to win the trust of the team. Trust is very important. If the team does not feel safe in your presence, then you can’t be effective at coaching. I strongly emphasize on building trust and gaining respect quickly. This in-fact would be my first goal as a coach.

No amount of process can fill-in for lack of trust. IMHO one needs to focus on building trust and creating an environment with low viscosity, process will automatically fall in place.