Why Training and Coaching are Important?

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Agile training is skill-specific training that is divided into four areas: leadership training, foundational training, mastery, and scaling. In this blog, you will learn about the different pillars of training.

Pillars of Training

Leadership training: after assessment, we do agile leadership training and workshop. The reason for this is to have a buy-in from the top. We need the leadership to understand what we are trying to accomplish and how they can support that. The leadership is the controller of the culture, and as Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Therefore, we need to make sure that we have a leadership that is onboard and supportive of what we are doing. The training and coaching that we do will subsequently require some requite changes in the company's culture.

Having support from leadership on the efforts that we do is crucial, so we start with an Agile leader workshop.

Foundational training: this training is about business agility. We train professionals, scrum masters, product owners, and project managers. So everyone is clear about their role in the organization.

Mastery: This is a specific type of training for agile developers, for agile testing and automation, for agile facilitators, and for agile coaching.

Scaling: this is where we take advantage of understanding leading safe. We do safe practitioner training. If we need to scale and we use safe as our scaling method, then we are going to train our release train engineers and our SAFe program consultants.

We need to make sure that everybody is on the same page and speaking the same language, and we all understand what we are trying to go forward with from a scaling standpoint. So, when the work is large enough to require multiple teams to accomplish, we use scaling to get that work done.

Role-Based Training Plan

Using these four pillars leaves organizations with an actual training plan so that we can map that out and customize it based on the outcomes of the assessment.

Some organizations have some foundations that they have already been trained on, and we will not repeat that. Instead, we customize a role-based training plan to fit every organization.

Training Experience

The training experience becomes fun when everybody is in one room. There are sticky notes on the wall; the teams get a walkthrough of processes, gamification, a lot of team-building exercises. We build relationships while we are educating your organization to be the best possible agile organization that there can be.

Coaching

Our coaches have more than 50 years of coaching experience. They know what works and what doesn't work. They are always trying to learn new things. However, most of you might be thinking about what an agile coach does?

This is important for organizations to understand as an agile coach can be a very important key to an agile transformation. Not only do they teach the teams and help them understand the agile methodology and how to integrate that into the organization, but they also help them develop standards and requirements for the agile process in the organization.

The coaches train the team and coach them to navigate the agile tools, and stakeholders are always encouraged to buy into the whole process. A coach is a mentor, teacher, training, and sometimes even a counselor.

Brandon Call Coaching Experience

"I believe that the overarching trait of being a coach is to help other people become successful."

As a coach, I think about how I can make the individual successful, the team successful, and the organization successful. This is part of the mindset or mentality we have as coaches. Everything we do is to help somebody else be great at what they do.

My favorite experience involves coaching teams to be autonomous and be self-sustaining, whether they are making their own decisions, are doing the right thing, understand the right thing, and are headed in the right direction.

"I had a team come to me, and they said there's a member of our team who's not pulling his weight, he's not in it to win it, and we want to remove him from the team. This seemed like a very negative situation, but it made me feel good that the team felt confident that they knew what they were doing. So I had a chat with this individual, and it turned out that he was focused elsewhere. He was looking for a new job, he wasn't paying much attention, but the team noticed. The team realized what was happening. They worked with him, they tried to get him to where he needed to be, and they couldn't do that. So they said we understand and we realize the impact that's having on the team, and what that told me is that the team was at a level where they were functioning well and high performing and they had noticed that this one individual wasn't pulling his weight anymore and it was bringing the team down and that's what we're all about."

"We want our teams to be able to get great at what they do and become successful, take on the autonomy and the ownership and the accountability for their success, and so this was an interesting experience for me. I thought it was very enlightening, and it made me feel good that the team was at that point where they were ready to make those kinds of decisions."