Written by: Rayanne Morriss
Business, especially small business, can lag under overwhelming projects and a lack of leadership. While traditional coaching has its role, there are a number of businesses that can succeed and thrive with agile coaching.
The main focus of agile coaching is that it moves you forward quickly. It compares to making a 30-minute gourmet meal to spending six hours in the kitchen to prepare a seven-course dinner. The methodologies of the agile movement is a complete turn-around from traditional business practices and coaching.
Learning About Agile Coaching
So what is agile coaching? Agile coaching is a combination of ideas and practices beyond speeding up tasks and projects. An agile coach also facilitates changes, teaches those involved, and provides mentoring so your business’ full potential is realized.
One unique feature of an agile coach is that they have the goal to eliminate their job. As you move forward, an agile coach wants to reduce your dependency on them. Traditional coaches tend to increase dependency by introducing new methods over a long period of time.
The Servant-Leader Concept
Agile coaches have several principals, but one surfaces to the top of their teaching creed. They strive to be servant leaders. That may seem like a paradox, but it is a style first implemented in ancient times. It is a mix of confidence, determination, and humility.
In traditional coaching and leadership standards, the leader is above those he or she serves and they set out to obey them. With agile coaching, leaders make a great investment of energy, resources, and time in helping those who work for them to develop. They maintain their vision of how the business should be, but delegate decisions to others.
The business eventually becomes one that has enabled and empowered workers who also lead throughout the company on all levels.
Understanding Agile Coaching
The key to the agile movement is to create innovation that helps to continuously adapt and thrive. In business, being able to flow in a different direction when necessary is vitally important in order to avoid mistakes and keep up with opportunities.
Creating a way to maintain agile methodologies helps increase response and delivery at certain stages that reduce your time to get your product or service into the marketplace.
Following up on coaching, agile software could be key to maintain success in the “new normal” marketplace. This type of innovation should be implemented in all your processes, vision, and in the minds of your employees to ensure it is successful over a long period of time.
Agile Coaching Results
Those who want agile coaching to help boost the new mindset in the workplace will find that results can be immediate. The primary differences are in how projects are developed and completed. Work tasks and projects are divided to be done in shorter time periods, also known as sprints. This can be a much more satisfying system for employees than traditional methods that require feasibility studies and analysis before starting.
Agile methods function with constant responses and improvement based on those responses. So, your business is constantly evolving to meet the growth and changes in the marketplace and from your customers. Constant improvement means ongoing customer satisfaction. It also allows for new products to be introduced as quickly as needs emerge and that is an advantage in the marketplace.
This short-goal process not only keeps employees motivated but also focuses on a person or team’s capabilities that can be carried over into other projects. This is more important than looking for short-term, immediate results.
One of the reasons things can be done more quickly with this style of coaching is that those who are closest to the project are also involved in understanding and implementing the strategic process. That gives leaders more insight into the project and helps workers closest to it become invested in its success.
Implementing an agile coaching strategy can be a big change, but the right coach will make the change fairly seamless. Once the dust settles and people understand the reasons for going with an agile coach, everyone will discover that they are more productive and happier in their jobs and with the company overall. You will find that your business’ dreams can be realized without the strain of excessive planning or strategies.
