Walking Their Talk, Sustainability, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sustainability

I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef

After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.

That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler 

Erich said—

Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.

Sustainability
Short-takes, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sandy’s Take
Sandy’s Take
Short-takes, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
Coaching, ACGW, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building. 

But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—

  • Making + taking the time.

  • Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.

  • Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.

  • Meeting them where they are.

  • Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.

  • Connecting with their language, not yours.

Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships
Personal Thoughts, Short-takes
Robert Galen
Privilege Awareness

I recently replied to a LinkedIn post by David Pereira. It was a wonderful post, and I applaud David’s boldness and courage in sharing it. 

Here’s a post comment from Stefan Wolpers—

While I agree fully with your personal stance regarding professionalism, David Pereira, some people will shy away, given the current economic climate. Some of the previously aggravated people may seek an opportunity to settle scores.

And here’s my comment—

I love the clarity (No BS) here. Clarity for David and clarity for those who want to work with and who don't want to work with him.
That said, David has the unique privilege that allows him to adopt this clarity. Many don't.

This post is not about David per se. Instead, he inspired me to write it.

Privilege Awareness

Leadership Coaching

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Measuring your Impact & Value as a Leadership-level Agile Coach

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Measuring your Impact & Value as a Leadership-level Agile Coach

I recently shared a piece entitled Measuring Leadership Coaches and Their Impact. The perspective in the article was primarily mine. What did I look for in leadership coaches (agile coaches) when they coached me in agile contexts?  

There were a few questions in the LinkedIn responses where folks sought specific metrics. I’m guessing outcome-based, results-based, specific measures I used to evaluate my coaches. The reality was I didn’t have those. Truthfully, I didn’t care about them. I cared about how the coach connected to me as a human and leader rather than some arbitrary metric that I applied to the coach. And to me, any metric was a “system metric” in that it applied to the coach + me and how we impacted the system…together.

I feel like this answer will disappoint those looking to create a leadership coaching metrics dashboard, but so be it.

All that being said, I was inspired to share these indicators of a leadership coach’s performance. They augment what I was trying to say in the first article, and I hope you find them more helpful in guiding you toward measuring your systemic value.

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Measuring Leadership Coaches and their Impact

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Measuring Leadership Coaches and their Impact

Today, there’s a tremendous amount of discussion on measuring the impact of agile coaches and their coaching effectively. 

The coaches referred to in this discussion would include—

  • Leadership coaches

  • Organizational coaches

  • Change Management coaches

  • And, most importantly for this discussion, Enterprise-level Agile coaches

These are people who often coach up to leadership and across the organization. It’s a different sort of coaching that requires different skills, competencies, and experience than other forms of coaching (Scrum Masters, Team-level, RTE, etc.) in agile contexts.

While often the organization and coaches try to tie success downward at the team level towards execution performance and delivery impact, I believe these are red herring measures for these sorts of coaches.

So, the critical question becomes, how should we measure the effectiveness of this sort of coach?

I’m glad you asked!

Announcing - A Coaching Offer You Can't Refuse

Hi everyone,

I'm very pleased to announce that I'm an ORSC trained coach as of February 2020. I can hear you saying...what does that mean, Bob? Well, let me share a bit.

ORSC stands for Organization Relationship and Systems Coaching. It's a coaching program that is sponsored by CRR Global.

I've wanted to sharpen my saw in the pure coaching realm for a number of years. Yes, I'm a knowledgeable and successful agile coach. But that brand of coaching doesn't have a formal/professional system behind it. It's more focused on mentoring, consulting, and teaching than it is on pure coaching. And I wanted to deepen my experience on the pure coaching side of things.

It turns out there are two primary "schools" of coaching. One is Co-Active coaching, which is more focused on individual, one-on-one coaching. The other is ORSC, which focuses on coaching the relationships in systems. Systems, in this case, are small to large groups. They could be a Scrum or Kanban team, a senior leadership team, or a group of Scrum Masters or managers. I've chosen ORSC because of the systems nature of the coaching. It gives me a set of tools and approaches for coaching systems in improving their relationships and their results.

ORSC training is a series of 5 classes, which as of February 2nd, I've successfully completed. Now I'm moving into an 8-month deeper study and practice cohort that will lead to my becoming an ORSC Certified Coach. 

An Offer you Can’t Refuse


As part of that certification, I have to do a lot of ORSC (group-based) coaching. Imagine that. So, I'm looking for anyone in my network for help. If you'd like to explore my coaching—

  • Your Organization (technology, product, customer support, marketing, etc.)

  • You Executive / Leadership teams (either whole or in parts)

  • Your teams (Scrum team, Kanban team, non-profit team, virtually any team)

  • Partner coaching (couples, business partners, collaborators)

as entire groups or in sub-groups, please reach out to me. I'd love to work with you and your partner, team, group, or organization to help your continuous improvement journey.

And, since it's part of my certification journey, the cost will be very low relative to the value you’ll receive. We can either do this in-person or virtually, via Zoom. 

So, if you're interested, please reach out via email - bob@rgalen.com This coaching offer is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.