Agile People Coach

Agile People Coach

Agile People Certification 

As an Agile People Coach, you will gain an understanding of how to create a more engaging work environment, where people perform at their best because they want to, not because they are told to, and where fast learning is key.

Available in-person and online

Timeframe: 3-day workshop in person, or 15 online sessions

Learning Outcomes

Agile People Principles – The platform for decision-making in a complex environment where the only competitive advantage is learning faster than competitors.

The importance of Psychological Safety – How we can work actively to create a working environment that is characterized by a common view of how we can unlock everyone’s potential by making it ok to experiment and make mistakes and learn from them. 

How to balance an agile culture with agile structures – Supporting an emerging strategy where people are involved in goal setting and creating a common direction (via OKRs or other types of relative goals instead of fixed budgets and performance goals)

How to work on behavioral changes in social systems to achieve an agile mindset and agile culture – Changing limiting structures (for example: annual budgets linked to fixed performance goals and rewards).

To develop a Learning Organization –  Enabling collaboration between Functional silos.

How HR and management can support an agile organizational transformation – How to assess the current organizational structure and design a new structure that enables business agility, maximizes communication and collaboration within and among teams, and enables the flow of value. 

Agile People Coaching – Learn methods for coaching and how the Agile People Coach role differs from agile coaching. 

Self-assessment – understand your own capabilities and how to improve these.

Self-leadership – develop an understanding of what motivates you and how to communicate with other people to understand their motifs. 

Conflict Coaching – learn how to create a balance between harmony and conflict in teams and organizations.

Target Audience

Agile coaches, consultants, HR managers, HR Business Partners, HR professionals, line managers, operational & business managers and consulting managers in both the private and public sectors.

ICAgile Certified

This training is certified by International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile), a certification and accreditation body. ICAgile works with course providers to accredit new or existing courses against comprehensive and proven Learning Outcomes. ICAgile collaborate with worldwide agile thought leaders to develop learning programs that lead people to agile mastery. Learn more about ICAgile.

Agile People is an ICAgile Member Organization and this is an ICAgile Accredited Course.

For this training, you will take part in a 3-day in-person workshop or 16 online sessions. 

Day 1: Session F1-5 Agile People Fundamentals

ization as Strategy and the future role of HR and managers

Session F1: Introduction to Agile People and Important Principles/Tools

The foundation of Agile Peoples' mindset is about the principles, values, methods, and tools that we need to start using to release competence and innovation – and what we stop doing. We discuss your challenges and go through the certification assignment. This session is an introduction to the agile way of working and thinking.

Session F2: Psychological Safety as a Foundation for a Learning Organization

The importance of an approach permeated by security and confidence to increase profitability and innovation is emphasized in this session – we need psychological safety to boost creativity through a culture where it is ok to fail fast and try again. We play "The Psychological Safety Game" to facilitate the dialogue about complex topics.

Session F3: Emerging Strategies, Structures, and Goals

Instead of long-term planning, emerging strategies are new ways of working with strategy, budgets, goals, performance processes, and rewards. Using value stream mapping to optimize flows in a system instead of working with resource optimization and sub-optimizing departments becomes crucial. Mindset Slider exercise. WoWs to be used: Beyond Budgeting, OKRs, Impact Mapping, VSM, etc.

Session F4: Building Conditions for an Agile Culture

In this session, we explore how you can create conditions for a fantastic culture where people can perform at their optimal level with a sense of being supported and secure. We discuss the gap between structures and culture/values in the Structure–Culture Misfit Role Play. The importance of country culture for an Agile transformation.

Session F5: Creating conditions for Change

In today's fast-moving environments and complex environments, we are challenged as people and as organizations to be much more responsive and adaptable, to have the capacity to navigate in complexity. How can we make sense of things when things keep changing? How can we make decisions and act when we don't have all the information we need?

In this module, we explore VUCA. We try out a sense-making and decision enabling framework for leaders (CYNEFIN). We explore what enables our organizations to become genuine learning organizations.

Day 2: Sessions C1-5 Deep dive into Agile People Coaching

Session C1: Agile Coaching and the Four Roles of a Coach

Mentoring, teaching, facilitating, and coaching are the stances of an Agile Coach – they need to master all of them to be successful and pick the proper perspective depending on the organization, situation, and the people. But what is the difference between an Agile Coach and an Agile People Coach?

Session C2: The Agile People Coach – a new Role for HR and Managers

In this session, we examine the nine roles of the Agile People Coach and a selfassessment – how skilled are you in the different roles and where do you need to improve. What are the skills that you need to add as a regular Agile Coach, Leader, or HR-person if you want to increase your agile & people skills and to be able to call yourself an Agile People Coach? We look at scenarios for practicing when to take what role.

Session C3: Professional Coaching

To understand the Agile Coach and the Agile People Coach's roles, you need to also have some knowledge in Professional Coaching and knowing how to formulate and ask relevant questions to guide and lead a person to understand what needs to be done in any situation.

Session C4: My Motivation Profile as a base for Self-leadership

Who you are and what makes you do what you do is very personal and different from others' why. Communicating with people who are different from yourself and knowing how to understand what makes other people do what they do and how they are different/similar to you is crucial competence in agile environments. We develop My washing instructions and discuss how your needs affect your life and work.

Session C5: Conflict Coaching

Exploring conflict theory and finding the right balance between harmony and creative conflict in a team or organization is crucial when moving towards highperforming teams. In this session, you learn different models for dealing with conflict, understanding conflict escalation and various types of disputes, and handling conflict in a group.

Choose between specialization in Agile Leadership or Agile HR:

Agile HR -option 1

Session H1: How HR's role is Changing when we need to Increase Business Agility

Design the talent/people elements needed to help support an Agile transition in an organization and explain how different contexts can influence the approach. Job titles, competency profiles, titles, career, succession – how do we do it in an agile organization? User stories for HR and a T-shaped HR-person. Employee Journey mapping – pain points. Examples and cases.

Session H2: How HR can use Tools and Practices from Agile

Using Scrum, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, and OKRs for HR is not so different from software development. What are examples, and how can you design talent/people processes using the agile ways of working? User stories for HR – what do they look like? Examples and cases of Agile HR in reality.

Session H3: Goals and Performance Management and Compensation and Benefits

Appraise current performance management practices and identify ways of bringing Agile thinking to enhance performance, accountability, and growth. We perform the 95/5 Exercise. Describe and contrast traditional incentive structures with Agile-friendly structures, discuss the pros and cons of each approach, andexplain how you could apply them to your environment.

Session H4: Talent Acquisition and Onboarding

Design a sourcing strategy that you can use to find and acquire the "right" people to support the organization's strategic growth taking values, culture, diversity, and collaboration into the hiring decision. Design an onboarding experience that enables new employees to become a part of the organization rapidly and smoothly.

Session H5: Learning and Development and Employee Engagement

Suggest ways to enable and support a learning mindset in a team, supporting the shift from a focus on deficiencies to focusing on the development of new skills and capabilities. Recommend different motivational tools to be applied in a context and describe how the traditional employee engagement survey is changing.

Day 3 (alternative) session L1-5 Agile People Leadership

Agile Leadership - option 2

Session L1: The Why & What of Leading with Agility

In this session, we explore the changing environment & dynamics that call for a different leading and following approach. We look into the misalignment between what managers think drives their people and what people – knowledge workers – expect from the people managing and leading them. Finally, we explore our understanding and expectations. What are some of the attitudes, expectations, and concrete behaviors we expect to see from people who lead with agility?

Session L2: Behaviors that Enable Agility

When you wish to make a radical change or transformation, understanding three things enables you to make the shift. Where are we coming from, where are we now, and where are we heading toward. In this session, we explore the evolution of leadership theories and which leadership styles and approaches they have given birth to. We determine what is still relevant. And what needs to change. A big part of that shift comes from understanding the nature of Power & Influence, and how we gain power might be changing. Finally, we look into

specific qualities & competencies we can cultivate and develop to increase our agility.

Session L3: Knowing & Connecting with Yourself

If we cannot understand and embrace ourselves, we have little hope for fully understanding and accepting others. Understanding why we react to things in specific ways gives us the insights and ability to choose our responses better and change how we show up in our interactions. Leading others starts with developing our self-leadership. In this session, we explore ways to map and become more aware of our own experiences. We dive into heuristics – cognitive biases – to understand how they work and influence our thinking, how we can become more aware of them, and most importantly, how we can counter them. Finally, we explore specific leadership mind-traps and how we can unlock those mind-traps to show up in better ways as leaders.

Session L4: Developing & Leading Ourselves

Having gained some insights into how we can know and connect with ourselves to choose how we respond to situations and show up in our interactions with others, it's now time to put that into practice. We familiarise ourselves with the Clear Leadership model developed by Gervase Bushe and create the leader's four selves. The Aware Self, the Descriptive Self, the Curious Self, and the Appreciative Self. We explore several different contexts where we can put these into practice. To better check-in with people, give and receive effective feedback, step into coaching leadership, and defusing conflicts through creating interpersonal clarity.

Session L5: Skillful Communication

Communicating effectively, relating to others, creating and maintaining healthy interactions, having productive conversations, and ultimately influencing others requires both practice and an understanding of the dynamics of effective communication. In this session, we work on the dynamics of effective communication through the lenses of several mental models, the dynamics of productive conversations, and the power of compelling storytelling to move and influence others. We explore three types of stories we can learn to identify and narrative patterns that help you tell compelling stories as a leader.

Online Delivery

If you attend a course that is delivered online. Then we will work with Zoom for presentations and team exercises, Mural as a digital canvas, Trello for keeping track of the agenda items and exercises, and Slack for communication between the sessions. You will receive links to all of the tools used in the training including the Learning Management System that will provide you will all the documents and videos in between every session.

There will be some work to be done after every session, so add about 5 hours more every week. Course literature and material will be sent to your location and distributed digitally. The certification assignment will be accomplished in the time between the sessions so that you will be ready on the day of the last session.