What is self mastery? The Agile coaching growth wheel describes it as “Self-mastery practices are the need to invest in yourself through reflection, learning, and taking care of your wellbeing. Self-mastery starts with you having your own emotionally intelligent relationship with yourself and others. You understand how Emotional Intelligence supports Relationship Intelligence, Social Intelligence, and the systems that you interact with.” how do you start an emotional intelligent relationship with yourself? Roche Martin describes a key component of that as the self awareness to recognise and understand your own character, moods and emotions and their effect on others.
As part of the self mastery activities I developed for an Agile coach training programme I started with Awareness of self, using Management 3.0’s Niko calendar and tweaking it for the individual to track their emotions.
Then as part of the reflection, grouping the thoughts they had during the day as either good (empowering) or bad (disempowering)
This created the first part of self awareness, being able to recognise your moods and emotions.
The next step was to understand and regulate the moods and emotions.
To help with this, we used the following activities.
Identify your empowering beliefs and come aware of when you have supported this belief in your actions. Create a success file.
Identify your disempowering beliefs and work through changing the negative to positive and finding evidence that supports the positives and negates the negative.
By bringing awareness, creating visibility, you can do something about it. It works with the work in teams and it works with ourselves. Become aware, pick something small to work on, make some changes, see what happened and start again.
Nicole Arthur
23 Jan, 2023
Blog
How are you developing your employees? Are there clear expectations and development pathways? In this era of the great resignation it is more important than ever to be aware of how you are developing and motivating your employees. Daniel Pink’s work on motivation resulted in a theory that we need intrinsic motivation and to achieve that we need to address 3 factors. Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Let’s talk about Mastery. This year I have been working with a company to develop an in house training programme for their internal candidates to become Agile coaches.
They had previously used one of the big companies and had a lot of material to support a training programme but needed a way of putting it all together into a structure that enabled new coaches to proceed through in a self directed manner with some support networks setup. It needed to be practical and have lots of ability for them to practice their skills as they learned.
My programme started off being 12 weeks, mainly because they seemed like a good number 3 months, a quarter, it aligned nicely with their OKR cycle enabling teams to easily set goals and allow capacity for the training.
The success criteria for the programme was:
It used 90% of existing collateral.
Created a development plan on how to progress to the next level.
Could be used ongoing by any member of the coaching chapter.
I utilised the agile coaching growth wheel subjects along with Lyssa Adkins Agile coach competency framework to determine the topics. In addition I reflected on training programmes I had been on and what was covered in each and important to know. I thought about what I have had to do in my role as an Agile coach and pulled that all together to come up with 12 modules and a self mastery / mindset underlying theme. As I developed the modules I discovered that there were some that were much wider and required more time than others. Hence my sizing. I also discovered early on that I wanted my trainees to go through the first 3 modules first as they were generally people who had no prior agile or coaching experience. I wanted them to quickly understand what they were getting in to.
The training is bespoke for this organisation. It pulls in their existing collateral in terms on online training, powerpoints, self learning, buddy system and trainer led sessions. I used the training from the back of the room framework and the 4 C’s.
C1 – Connections. Connect learners to the topic
C2 – Concepts. Introduce the knowledge
C3 – Concrete Practice.
C4 – Conclusions – reflection.
This proved a great way to structure the sessions and link to the learning outcomes. It also provided an engaging self directed process for the learners.
Each module was on it’s own separate Miro board and linked back to a main board where the learner created their toolkit for Agile coaching and engaged with their manager for development and their buddy for support and applying learning in the real world.
So far we have 2 new coaches going through the programme. I have been blown away with their mindset changes and how they are challenging themselves with the activities. It is providing growth not only in their skills at work but also in their home life.
Nicole Arthur
16 Jan, 2023
Blog
I have learnt a lot about ADHD since our daughter was diagnosed. I used to think it meant that people couldn’t sit still. Now I realise it is much more than that. My one-liner description is that is is about dopamine management or energy management..
My daughters brain works differently. For her to be motivated to do something takes a lot more effort than me. She used to feel lazy because we didn’t understand.
Now we know better and our communication has improved drastically as she feels safe to mention things that are hard for her.
We have been learning and experimenting together and our recent win has been the bathroom rubbish bin.
Before the bin used to have a lid on it and the rubbish never ended up inside. then we went away and the place we stayed at had a bin with no lid and throughout our stay the rubbish ended up in the bin.
That one extra step to lift the lid was one step too much. It involved using dopamine she didn’t have to spare.
So when we got home I removed the lid on her bin. Success all round. I’m happy the rubbish is in the bin. She gets the domamine hit from success, having a clean space and my praise.
We are now looking for other ways we can simplify those annoying extra steps that make life a little bit too complicated for her to succeed. Best of all she is excited to get onboard as she finds it making her life easier and she feel better understood.
Our goal is to organise and reset her room so that it takes no longer than 3mins to tidy up from start to finish.
If you would like me to come and see how we can help organise and simplify things for you – get in contact here.
Nicole Arthur
14 Jun, 2022
Blog
How do you track your experiments? How are you tracking on those New year resolutions from 6 months ago, what new goals or reflections have you done? How are you keeping focused? What gets measured, gets your focus, what gets your focus, gets done and what gets done can be improved.
Last year our team went through the Design thinking workshops internally. From the sessions, we had a bunch of experiments we wanted to do to improve our interactions with our customers. These experiments were random “how might we” ideas the team wanted to try out. There was no timeframe for them, no success measures, and no review of the outcome.
In order to track how we were going with our experiments; both the ones to improve the lives of our customers and the ones to improve the team, I introduced the team to the celebration grid from management 3.0 along with experiment cards.
We had two goals.
Create some criteria around the experiments the team had identified and were running from the Design thinking workshops.
To take the learnings and tweak the experiment or celebrate success and embed it into the team’s best practices.
I found that even though the team was comfortable with the idea of experimenting, putting the learnings or success into actions going forward was harder to grasp. We made a few tweaks to the team’s social contract and created new experiments to try (Deloittes has a great facilitated smart meetings template for ways of working on Miro).
From facilitating this session I learned that I pitched experiments at the wrong level for the team. I had assumed the team already had an understanding of what a good experiment would look like, how to write one, define scope, metrics, and timeframe, this meant that the flow of the workshop was impacted and we didn’t get to address creating a cadence for review and reflection to identify learnings from the mistakes column due to time constraints. From pitching at the wrong level, I learned that I would change the approach the next time I run this as follows:
Review of current practices in terms of what is working and what is not.
Brainstorm reflection and review of learnings from mistakes.
Add learnings to our best practices and make note of areas we want to run experiments.
Walk through what a good experiment looks like.
Template, and how to write one.
Review and reflection of current experiments
What have we learned, what worked, does anything need to change,
Is it finished and are we moving to best practice or tweaking the experiment.
Reviewing and deciding on the next priority experiment. Using a decision method like Value vs effort
Updating our visual flow through the celebration grid and celebrating what is working for us.
The team’s aha moment came from acknowledging what was working for them; for example, the appreciation experiment from our last sprint was moved to best practice to ensure it became an ongoing practice. . My next iteration is to explain what a good experiment looks like and use the following experiment template to guide the team. I also want to tweak the celebration grid template to show the pipeline and the experiments we are currently working on in the form of a vertical Kanban board. In progress experiments at the top of the canvas and results of the experiments recorded on the canvas. This will create transparency and visibility in our intentional experiments.
Too often it seems we just try something without really thinking about how we will know if it worked or even what the desired change or outcome is that we are trying to achieve. Instead of just asking and giving it a go, how about we look at what it is we actually want to change, create a timeframe for the change, and also ask why and most importantly why now?
Nicole Arthur
14 Jun, 2022
Blog
The webster dictionary defines guilds as “an association of people with similar interests or pursuits”. I am helping a company rollout OKRs, as only 1 person I don’t have the time or capacity to be across every team. I needed support and set up a champions guild for OKRs and as a way to learn and grow together, to create a standard that could help drive consistency across the organisation. I may be stretching the guild definition a bit, especially when you look at the article from Epic Agile on setting up guilds here. So how do we ensure we learn and grow? How do we share the knowledge and build skills? Harvard Business Review believes it is through our connections with others and that is what we create when we set up our guild of people from various areas in the company.
Before our first group catchup which I facilitated, I met with each person individually to set the context and discuss their interest and level of commitment. We are a small group of people volunteering our time to increase our knowledge and extend that knowledge and capability throughout the organisation. We are contributing to this group in addition to our day job. We needed to be motivated to solve problems and learn.
Agenda for guild initial catchup
Each Person to introduce themselves and their current/previous experience with OKRs.
Review why the company is doing OKRs and why we are here as a group.
Agree on our experiment card and goal for the quarter,
Next quarter our experiment will be different and depending on the outcomes of the experiment will depend on how we tweak or build on these learnings.
Defining what our guiding principles are and gaining agreement across the group. We answered many of the questions mentioned in this article about how to set up a guild here.
Work through creating a destination postcard – where do we want to go and why should people care. It was important that we were tying in the emotion so that when times were tough and the elephant strayed from the path we had something to draw on for the behavioral change. This group was leading change after all.
Drawing all the answers from a modified empathy map, (See, Hear, Feel and Read brainstorming) we came up with some ideas for what our end result should be. There were many that were similar and after a few iterations and consensus dot voting we decided on “We are committed to creating an empowered team, who enjoys working together to achieve amazing results”. How we achieve that is based on working through the learning of the frontrunner teams, creating a safe space where everyone is clear on expectations and effort. Creating transparency or learning and results and bringing the theory to life with learning resources and templates
At present, our sessions are primarily focused on creating a baseline for teams to work from. We are alternating between an education session and a lean coffee session with the group catch-ups.
A great learning point for me was how we shape the initial destination postcard or why of the group. It felt like some people became overwhelmed by the magnitude of where we were heading and we didn’t finish the catchup with the energy and engagement that I was hoping for. Next time I would like to explore facilitating the why of the group using the north star approach as I feel this would tie everything together in a more cascading way that will provide more of an achievable roadmap.
In Conclusion. Sharing learnings and creating a safe space for questions is where we have seen the most benefit, people are engaged and eager to give things a try. The lean coffees have been especially useful in sharing this knowledge and gathering concerns and questions from people and I feel the group is engaged and learning from each other in a way I would not be able to do on my own. Our next step is to work on a way to ensure we continue to develop the skills and capability of all members of the guild by creating a mentoring/ support buddy system within the group. Then we can look to onboard new members and promote our guild by creating an online presence on the intranet site and posting in the weekly comms bulletin. See more information about Guilds from Management 3.0 here.
