Coaching – It’s more than just asking questions

A common belief is that the difference between coaching and managing is simply asking questions rather than giving orders. Understanding what effective coaching actually requires becomes especially important in the context of the broader agile coaching business landscape, where the market increasingly separates practitioners who coach from those who merely facilitate. Building that distinction requires the kind of psychological safety that lets teams take chances and learn from failure.  I used to believe this.  Instead of making decisions for my teams and telling them what to do I would ask them questions and get them to derive their own solutions.  I thought that meant I was coaching.  But the more I got into coaching the more I really wanted to make sure I was doing it right and being effective.  So, over the past two years, I have invested in myself and in my craft.  I have learned everything I can about professional coaching and gotten mentoring by master coaches.

What I learned through the experience is that coaching is A LOT more than just asking questions.  In fact, through this experience, I learned that professional coaching skills (and a ton of techniques and coaching models — combined with data tools like CFD and cycle time metrics) can mean the difference between being adequate or being excellent for a scrum master, agile coach, or agile manager who also understands Monte Carlo forecasting and probabilistic planning. If you are exploring how professional coaching fits within the broader landscape, it helps to understand the differences between coaching specialties and where agile and executive coaching sit within the profession. The idea that asking powerful questions alone does not make a coach is explored directly in the talk on why there are no inherently powerful questions — only the competencies that give questions their power. Those same competencies shape how agile leaders approach hiring in virtual environments.

Now, I’m on a mission and a journey to mentor scrum masters in learning coaching skills — including the ICF core competencies that underpin professional-grade coaching — and show them how to apply them in real-world scenarios with agile teams. That mission is grounded in the same spirit as the agile manifesto—it is about the free flow of interactions and human-driven development, not just process compliance.  As an agile coach, I have the unique opportunity to develop scrum masters in a way that I have never seen done before — equipping them with strategies for action and accountability that go beyond methodology and I’m excited and humbled to get this opportunity to invest in the careers of a great group of people through person-centered coaching that goes beyond solutions.

If you are interested in upping your coaching game then read what it takes to become an ICF accredited coach and join one of our professional coaching cohorts. Looking forward to seeing you soon!