Coaching Teams to Adapt Safely

You’ve been appointed the manager, lead, or Scrum Master of a team expected to “go Agile”. Or perhaps you’re guiding a team who needs to adopt a more iterative, incremental approach to their work, whether they know it or not. Motivation problems, focus problems, disagreements about priorities, feelings of overwhelm, disruptions to the flow of value, these are primary risks associated with teams changing the way they work. How do you help them change safely? What would help them to avoid the chaos that usually accompanies being told on Monday that “it’s time to change”?

We combine ideas from the Theory of Constraints, psychology, and organizational dynamics to help leaders feel better prepared to guide teams through this kind of transition.

Audience

Anyone in a leadership position—not only managers—who needs to help teams change. This course focuses on adopting lightweight, incremental and iterative approaches, such as the approaches that we commonly call “agile”. This course is not an introduction to Scrum, Kanban Method, XP, nor any other Agile framework.

Key Topics

• The attitude of continuous improvement, how to check for it and how to cultivate it.
• An introduction to the Theory of Constraints as a framework for identifying improvement projects.
• Some tricks that help turn retrospective working sessions into lasting change, including how to prioritize improvement projects.
• The roles of empathy and compassion in guiding people through change.
• Models of group dynamics focused on understanding people’s resistance to change.
• Dealing with the feelings that “we’re never going to be good enough” and “it’s never going to be better”.

Activities

• Lectures and group discussions about theories of change.
• Individual and small-group working sessions, including mapping value streams to hunt for bottlenecks.
• Role-playing to practise facilitating working sessions, resolving conflict, and guiding decision-making.

Preparation

Participants need the following to attend this course.

• Something to write with, and something to write on. I suggest index cards or sticky notes and a notebook.

Remote Training Preparation

Please do the following at least one day before the course is scheduled to start.

• Upgrade Zoom to the most recent version.
• Check audio, video, and screen sharing on Zoom.

Delivery Options

Live/Remote Private Course

The standard course runs as 4 sessions of 1/2 day each scheduled within a 2-week period. The course is suitable for groups up to 12 people. Larger groups should run the course multiple times.

It is also recommended to add follow-up working sessions to be scheduled 1 month, 3 months, and 6-12 months after the course ends, as a way to support the group as they apply what they’ve learned to their daily work.

Start the booking process for your live/remote course.