Tag: #agile

Coaching Journey Vlog #5

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Coaching Vlog #5 – 1 week of coaching and part way through a coaching course

Good morning, it’s Friday again. And you may have noticed that I’m in a different location today. I am about to start day two of my coaching training at Telstra. So yesterday was lots of learning and a bit of practice, today will be lots of practice. So we’ve learned about Johari windows, about the grow model, about various other coaching techniques such as open ended questions. That’s one of the things I struggle with the most, I think. So it’s been a really good day yesterday, I’m looking forward to today, as a follow up. The last week, I have started coaching the team, and I think I’ve added some value. I will see in the long term I guess, if I actually have, and
it’s been a very fun week.
I think in my I’ve, yeah, I’ve had to really process where I’m at, the nerves of taking on my team. The confidence, you know, am I actually adding value. It was good to get into it, I do feel like, you know, maybe in a small way, I’ve added some value this week. And hopefully over the coming weeks, I’ll be able to add more. We’ve done a team charter, which has been interesting, because not all the team was able to attend the meetings. So we’ve done the team charter in two sessions so far. The first one being the brainstorming session for the various sections of the team charter, the second one, and then we kept that open for a week. The second one was the voting for which of those ideas they wanted to put through to the actual team charter. And again, because of people not able to attend the meeting, we’ve left that open for a week. And the idea being that next Wednesday, we will actually finalize the team charter and get everyone to agree to it. So I’ve actually now moved the time of that meeting so that hopefully more people will be able to attend it. That it’s been interesting. I’ve not done a team charter in three sessions before, but it seems to be working and the people who didn’t attend, were quite happy to have the opportunity and also to do that offline. So that worked out well for us, I think.

Other than that, I am ready for the weekend. But I’m also looking forward to a day of lots of practice of coaching. Where I get to be a coach, a coachee and an observer in apparently three rounds of three, so nine, nine coaching sessions, where I’ll be playing one of those roles. So that should be a fun day. And I should learn a lot and get lots of practice.

I’m also considering doing a formal coaching certification. So I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but I’m going to talk to a couple of people in the team who have done that to find out what my options are. So coaching is really resonating with me. So that’s a good thing. Talk to you next week. Thanks

Coaching Vlog #4 – a bit exhausted!

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Coaching Vlog #4
A bit weary – but had an amazing week.
There are pauses, I think you will cope though 🙂

Transcript to follow

Good morning. It’s been a big week for me.
A lot has happened, lots of good things. It’s been a really awesome week. So as far as coaching goes, I ran my team charter on Wednesday. And that went really well. We actually did it in two parts. So we did the part where people have brainstormed, and on next week will actually go through and vote and come up with the actual final team charter. So that was a great exercise.

And, well, as of today, I’m officially coaching the team, with the support of the person handing over from me, which is really exciting as well, and a little bit scary, but not too scary, because I, I do know what I’m doing.

And on top of that, I have decided to do a mini retro about how the team is feeling about agile, not an agile maturity assessment as the team is only at the end of their second sprint, after all, but making sure that the team is feeling comfortable with all the different ceremonies and things like that. And that also helps me with my coaching backlog, because I’ll know what areas that the team feel least secure about. And I can focus on those as my priority. So I think that should work. Well. I haven’t told the team yet. If they watch this, they’ll find out my thing.

And other than that, I’ve got some things going on. Non coaching related. I’m not sure if I should be sharing these on my video blog? But I am going to be interviewing Moira Were from South Australia. She founded Chooks and is a member of the Order of Australia, she’s pretty amazing woman. I will be putting an invite out for that. Because what I will be doing it as a webinar, which is a first for me. So hopefully that goes really well.
I also spent time at a session yesterday that focused on Human Centered Design for employee … satisfaction, I guess, a lot about their tools. So it’s really great to see Human Centered Design implemented in a different context. So I enjoyed that and met some people that I am going to speak to again because one of the things about attending these sessions is you meet people who have the same passions that you do. And it’s easy to strike up a … connection, which you can then follow up afterwards. So I’m really glad I went to that as well.

I’m not sure what else I have to tell you this week. It has been a huge week. I’m actually a little bit brain… overwhelmed. Does that make sense? So I’m sure I’ve missed stuff but I will be talking to you again next week and so will pick up anything I missed then. Thanks.

My Coaching Journey #2

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My second video blog about my coaching journey

Transcript of video below:

Good morning and welcome to my second video blog. The overall arch of these blogs is going to be about my journey to aligning my passions with my career. But at the moment, the focus is going to be on me becoming an agile or ways of working coach at Telstra, which is, as mentioned my last blog, huge first step towards aligning my passion with my career.

So, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about today. The first being that, since our last, my last blog, I have realized what a privilege it is to be given this opportunity to learn about being a ways of working coach. I didn’t realize at the time how unique it was around the world. And I did know that I was very lucky. But I didn’t realize that I was uniquely lucky. And I’m really pleased that Telstra willing to invest in training 50 of us to become coaches, they selected us for our mindset, and they will teach us the technical items.

It’s been a fabulous journey for the past three or so weeks is our last blog. One of the things is I’ve had to do is unlearn. My role in the past is one of the things I’ve had to unlearn. I’ve had to stop being focused on delivery of actual, you know, projects, I’ve had to stop expecting to be busy for 10 hours a day and not going to my work done. And being under a lot of pressure constantly, it’s a different kind of pressure; that pressure to learn. And it’s retraining my brain to learn so much, there’s been days where I felt a bit lost because I think my brain was full. And I needed to time to process and take the knowledge in before I moved on to learning something new. So that’s all been an adjustment and an unlearning which has been really good for me, I think.

The next thing I’ll talk about was how we are learning. So, to start with, we kicked off with a four day coaching camp, which was very intensive, but really well paced. We came out of the that with a lot of new knowledge and also a learning backlog. So, all the things that we knew, that we didn’t know, that four days is a bit of a roller coaster of ‘’there’s so much I don’t know’’, to, ‘’Oh, I think I’ve got this’’ to ‘’Oh my god, there’s so much I don’t know”, again. So that’s been a really, that was a really interesting four days and very enjoyable.

The way we are being assessed is through a series of badges. So to become coaches, there’s a minimum of five badges we need to earn. And we are on our pathway to do that. So I have my very first badge. And I’m a little bit addicted to badges already. The other badges I need to learn, earn sorry, through facilitating, through coaching and through other aspects of the skills that I need to gain. I love the idea of a way of saying “Yep, we’ve witnessed this person doing this, and we know that they’re okay to go out into the wild’’.

The other way that we’re learning is that we’ve been assigned to mentors, I have three actually, I got very lucky: three for the price of one. And they are fantastic. They have assigned us to agile teams. So, we are witnessing, observing their ceremonies. Over time, we will hopefully be able to take part in facilitating some of those ceremonies, and gain our experience and knowledge that way. Our mentors, they’re really supportive as you’d expect from a mentor. But our mentors, I feel particularly glad that we have who we have. They’ve been really good.

The next part of my journey is to keep learning of course, but also yesterday, we had to nominate the areas, the missions in Telstra that we would most like to work with. No guarantees, of course, but the fact that we got asked about our missions is really cool. So I got to select I had a great time yesterday going through some of the missions in the areas will be moving to and picking my favourites. Very excited to find out which one I get assigned to.

The learning through observing, through training courses, and through my own, you know, research and books, videos, articles, will continue obviously in parallel. And there are other areas are getting involved in as well, such as facilitating training courses, and things like that. So it’s a really exciting time for me, and I will be back in a week also to tell you about what the next steps have been. Thanks