Systemic Agility Team Coach/Facilitator (London, March 2023)

The Systemic Agility Team Facilitator course will help you develop the attitudes and learn the skills of an effective Agile Team facilitator.  You will learn and practice techniques and behaviours from the world of professional facilitation and creative problem solving, in the context of typical Agile-related meetings such as Standup Meetings, Planning Meetings, Retrospectives, and Design Thinking workshops. Participants will leave the course feeling empowered with skills, models and styles of facilitating in an Agile environment.

In this course you will learn about:

The Agile Team Facilitator Role and Mindset

Agile Team Facilitators facilitate Agile practices, foster collaboration amongst team members, and generally support teams. Here we introduce you to the attitudes and behaviours that make a good (even great) facilitator.  You will have the chance to reflect on your own personality characteristics and when certain characteristics are useful (or not).

Development Path for Agile Coaching

Additional skills are required as one advances along the Agile Coaching development path. These include not only facilitation skills but also professional coaching, mentoring, teaching, and consulting skills. In this part of the course, you will learn when to seek the help of more advanced Agile Coaches.

Designing and Setting Up Meetings

A lot of the work around facilitation is thinking work in advance of a meeting or workshop. In this part of the course, you will encounter tools and techniques for use before, during, and after meetings and workshops.

Facilitating a Meeting

As this training is particularly experiential, you will have the opportunity to facilitate parts of meetings and to receive feedback from peers, using the facilitation tools and skills learned.

Facilitating Collaboration

Maintaining awareness of our own style of working, and of other styles, allows us to facilitate more meaningful and inclusive intra-team dialogues. Here you will learn about your own working styles, and consider what changes you might want to make to your working style profile.

Facilitating the Agile Practices

In this part of the course, you will be presented with approaches to facilitating such practices such as standup meetings, planning meetings, retrospectives, and design sprints. You will experience witnessing and facilitating these activities.

Skilful Facilitation Techniques

This part of the course offers approaches for working with different stages of team maturity and team development, and working with team dysfunctions.

The Systemic Agility Team Coach course is a highly interactive, experiential journey that will help you develop the attitudes and learn the skills of an effective Agile Team Coach. You will learn and practise coaching, mentoring, and teaching skills in the context of complex, changing environments that call for an Agile approach to work. You will leave the course feeling empowered with skills, models, and styles of working with individuals and teams in order to help them transform and continuously improve.

In this course you will learn about:

The Agile Coaching Context & Mindset

Agile Coaches draw on a variety of skills and practices. In this part of the course we will put Agile coaching into context and attempt to answer the question: What is Agile coaching and what mindset shifts might we need to adopt?

Professional Coaching Skills & The Coaching Conversation

A coach assumes that team members have an individual and a collective wisdom, and that her job is to elicit the answers within. The main skills taught are listening actively, asking effective questions and following a coaching process. As this training is particularly experiential, you can expect to learn about your strengths and your own areas for development.

Coaching Alliances and Contracts

Setting the stage for a coaching relationship involves clear contracting and designing of alliances. Here we expand on the typical coaching triangle (coach, team, and organisation) and present a wider stakeholder view. You will learn how to design a coaching alliance and how to contract with all parties.

Key Mentoring Skills & Mentoring Agile Role Transitions

At times an Agile coach needs to impart her Agile expertise and to guide the team by making suggestions, giving feedback, giving advice, instilling practices, and guiding transitions to Agile roles. Along with such changes come fears and resistances and so a framework for working with change is presented. Knowing when to coach and when to mentor is a key skill of an Agile coach.

Key Teaching Skills & Teaching Agile

Teaching the basics and mindsets of Agile is an activity the Agile Coach performs again and again and is conducted both in and out of the classroom. There are different learning styles, and you will practise including these in your teaching methods.

Foundational and Systemic Team Coaching 

In this part of the training we focus on the dynamics at play within groups and teams, and in building our observational skills as coaches. This involves looking at the system of all humans involved, and the connections between them. It also involves being able to articulate these observations in service of the team.

Team Development & Coaching the Journey Toward High Performance

How can we as Agile coaches help a team to develop as a team, along with developing trust and a healthy team culture? Along with a series of models, much of the learning here will come through reflecting on our lived experience in this and other groups and teams.

Handling Conflict and Dysfunction

In this part of the training we look at our individual attitudes toward conflict and dysfunction, building self awareness in the team, and strategies for surfacing and working with conflict.

Handling Organisational Impediments

Often the forces that impede the team come from other parts of the organisation. In this part of the training we will look at ways that the Agile coach can help the team to surface such impediments and to make decisions on how to work with them.

Is certification included in the cost?

Yes, all participants who attend and participate in the full course will be issued with the knowledge-based certificate ICP-ATF or ICP-ACC (or both) issued by ICAgile.

Any further questions?

Please email us at [email protected] or call +44 (0) 203 6096538

Ryan Behrman

Ryan’s work involves facilitating, coaching, mentoring, and training teams, managers and leaders to work more effectively together, to deliver more value for their organisations, businesses, and customers, while generating engagement and enjoyment as a priority.

With a background in project and programme management in the e-commerce sector, Ryan turned to Agile coaching, consulting, and training to unleash the barriers and limitations imposed on human systems in large organisations. He’s influenced senior stakeholders to adopt Agile ways of working in industries spanning retail, supply chain, publishing, government services, software consultancy, travel, cloud software, education, investment banking, wealth management, risk management, FinTech, and Telco. He’s introduced and instilled widespread process change and helped to align and coordinate teams in multi-team environments through the design and facilitation of Lean and Agile ways of working within and across teams.

Ryan is the owner of StrongSuits, a team and organisational development tool. Through the innovation of this tool he has come to value Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Product Innovation, and continues to develop himself in these areas.

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