Professional Coaching for Agilists

Coach Individuals, Teams, and Organizations to Greater Success with Agile

As Agilists work to increase an organization's Agility, they will run into major obstacles with mindset shifts, moving to self-organization, and organizational adoption. Over the past decade, more Agilists have been using Professional Coaching to help individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole uncover these obstacles and move forward faster.

In Professional Coaching for Agilists, Damon Poole and Gillian Lee draw on their experience with thousands of Agile coaches and practitioners to show you how to use Professional Coaching to accelerate your Agile adoption. The authors' approach of "learning by doing" teaches by using well-honed exercises, real-life stories, and example coaching conversations.

This guide is framework-independent and has been designed for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and any Agilist involved in Agile adoption. It teaches high-value coaching skills, step by step, from "coaching by objective" to managing mutually successful engagements.

• Leverage coaching to create aha moments that lead to real change
• Learn dozens of coaching techniques and more than a hundred powerful questions
• Help people uncover blind spots and assess their opportunities more clearly
• Offer your expertise while maintaining your coaching mindset
• Help people improve performance by connecting them with their values, goals, and strengths
• Blend professional coaching with group facilitation so both work better
• Become a great coach by making coaching a natural extension of who you are

The coaching exercises and resources in the appendices are available as free downloads. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Damon Poole has coached and trained thousands of people at companies such as EMC, Capital One, Oanda, Ford, and Fidelity. He speaks frequently at Agile Alliance, Agile New England, Kentucky Fried Agile, Atlassian Summit, Agile and Beyond, Agile Toronto, and other major events. As “coach of coaches” at Eliassen, he led an Agile Delivery team which grew to hundreds of Scrum Masters and Agile coaches, created Eliassen's Agile Transformation approach and training content, and led initiatives to help coaches advance in their coaching journeys. In this role, he learned from hundreds of Agile Coaches in a wide variety of client environments. Now an independent coach, he specializes in leading Agile Coach workshops. 
Gillian Lee is an Agile Coach at Nulogy Corp, where she grows software developers, development teams, and organizations through playful facilitation and peer-to-peer learning. She previously led teams at Rangle.io and Oanda, drawing on her background in engineering from MIT. She has presented widely at agile events, co-founded the AgileTO meetup, and was its lead facilitator for two years.

Part I: The Essentials of Professional Coaching for Agilists Part II: Digging Deeper Part III: Making Coaching a Natural Extension of Who You Are Part IV: Applying Coaching to Teams, Groups, and Organizations