Tim Schraepen's Blog Yet another developer blog.

Coach Retreat

Yesterday I went to the Coach Retreat in Leuven, hosted by Cegeka. Here’s a little report on my personal view of the event.

My expectations

Based on the title, I was thinking something in the likes of a playground for coaches, where you’re free to practice some confrontational talks in a safe environment.

I did not think it would have anything to do with Agile Coaching in particular and that it was going to be a more general view on coaching.

At the end of the day, I expected to have learned a couple new things about coaching in general, but no “game-changing” revelations.

Format

The Coach Retreat concept was brought to life, among others, by Yves Hanoulle (@YvesHanoulle) and Oana Juncu (@ojuncu), inspired by Corey Haines (@coreyhaines) and Rachel C. Davies (@rachelcdavies).

Both Inge Gorgon and Yves Hanoulle, the two facilitators for the day, I consider skillful coaches. They helped keep the groups focused on the exercise at hand and gave a lot of insight based on their own experiences in the real world. This stuff alone is worth it in my humble opinion.

We were welcomed to have a croissant and start reading the scenario’s that were hung up on big papers all over the wall. They described some very recognizable real-life work situations. But most of them described your job/role as an Agile Coach and questioned how you would solve the problem(s) at hand. We ended up voting for one scenario that we would use throughout the day for nearly all the exercises. It was about a head of IT, Patrick, who was having trouble with the “business”. They were ignoring the bureaucratic process and wouldn’t make time to tell the IT department what they wanted. He read that applying Scrum might help, but wasn’t really sure how. You were brought in to coach Patrick through his ordeals and get IT and business to work together to build stuff that actually brings value.

After everyone arrived, we “checked in” by standing in a circle and one by one introducing ourselves and expressing our feelings using 4 basic emotions: Happy, Sad, Afraid and Angry.

Participants were generally Happy that they had the opportunity to be there, Afraid that they weren’t going to be able to last the day without dozing off, Sad about the weather or having to leave their family at the start of the vacation and noone was Angry.

Then we got an explanation on what a Coach Retreat was all about.

A Coach Retreat really works just like the format of a Code Retreat. You practice coaching over and over again, in a safe environment, for the purpose of practicing (and improving this way). All the while getting feedback from your “pair”, in this case, that “pair” was in fact your entire group, consisting of usually 3 spectators, a coach and a coachee.

Having so many eyes and ears on your conversation generates a LOT of feedback. Feedback which you can immediately use to improve your coaching by applying the first technique we learned: Click, Rewind.

Techniques

Click, Rewind

This is a really simple and effective way to tune your style/technique during a coaching conversation. Whenever you want you say “Click” and you can pause the conversation this way to talk to your spectators and ask for help on what to say next. You could also say Click and then ask to Rewind, which proved very useful whenever you noticed yourself saying something silly that would direct the conversation in a wrong direction.

It’s not something that can only be used during these practice sessions, but also in real 1-on-1’s. Yves told us about a couple that effectively uses this whenever they have a fight and say things they didn’t mean.

As this was our first exercise, everybody was still getting the ropes and opening up slowly. And because the technique is very clear and simple, I think it’s an ideal one to start off the retreat with.

After the explanation everybody made groups of 5 and spread out over the meeting rooms of the Cegeka offices. I went off with our little group of 5, we chose our coach, coachee (“Patrick”), and observers. Then we started talking about the context that our conversation would be taking place in.

After about 50 minutes talking and clicking and rewinding, we were told to do a little retrospective of the exercise and make a summary that we would present to everybody. Then everybody came back to the main meeting room and shared their experiences. We would repeat this structure for every exercise, including the next one: “Yes, and…”.

Yes, and…

Another “simple” exercise where instead of saying “Yes, but…” you say “Yes, and…”, thereby giving a more positive tone to your remarks. Eventhough it sounds really simple it is, in fact, not simple at all. It’s so easy to say “yes, but …”. I got to play the coachee in this exercise, and decided to be a real PITA. You see, my secretary hired the coach and I was under the impression that he was going to do my work for me.

I noticed something very curious and interesting during this exercise. Eventhough I was trying my hardest to be “evil”, I felt like I was being disarmed by my coach because he kept a positive and calm attitude towards me. According to our observers, this was also noticable by my posture that changed after the “Click, Rewind” we did after we noticed the coach wasn’t going in the right direction.

This really proved to me that this tactic just works. You could say it was an “AHA-moment” I experienced. Speaking of which, everybody was invited to write down their AHA moments on post-its and stick ‘em on the AHA-wall in the common meeting room. Another fun and effective device that increases sharing the learning experiences.

Another thing I noted was that you shouldn’t just look to replace “Yes, but…”, you can also just use “Yes, and…” whenever to further amplify your positive message.

Those fifty minutes flew by and soon it was time for the next technique that continues along the “optimistic things” path: “Appreciative Inquiry”.

Appreciative Inquiry

In the “Appreciative Inquiry”, the idea is to get your coachee get a positive thing out of a negative situation. You can do this by moving your coachee through different phases: “Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny”, by asking “Powerful Questions”. I jotted down “What? leads to Discovery”, “What if? leads to Dream”, “How? leads to Design”, “What? When? leads to Destiny”.

During this exercise I was one of the observers and figured it would annoy me after receiving 4 or more questions in a row. So you can’t tirelessly keep asking these questions. They can be exhausting, and can get you to lose your coachee. Give them some breathing room, talk/think along with them, until you can ask them the next question.

Another important thing was to summarize/repeat at some intervals when a solution requires a lot of smaller steps.

I also noted that our coach in the exercise asked “What would have happened if …?”, this is a different style of “What if?” that leads to a retrospective view of a situation that can give your coachee yet another perspective on their sticky situation. In our case this is what led our coachee to a breakthrough.

So whereas “What would have happend if …?” leads to a historical perspective, “What if … ?” gives you a look into a possible future. The next technique we would learn after pizza would further explore this concept.

The Magic/Miracle Question

“Imagine you go to sleep, and the next morning when you enter work, all of your problems are gone. What does your office look like? How do you feel?”

Asking this question brings your coachee into a hypothetical situation. Maybe it’s a utopia, but it’s a situation you can explore safely, where some things might not seem so unfeasible at all. The hardest thing about this technique is staying with your coachee inside this mental picture. It’s so easy to guide them to a solution that you know by being very suggestive. Of course, this isn’t ideal in many cases and it’s an easy pitfall.

I was coach in this situation and there were many times where I Clicked and Rewound. Another thing worth mentioning was that my coachee knew so much about Agile that he already was explaining an entire solution, leaving nothing for me to guide him at first. We clicked soon enough and restarted the context. Props to my counterpart in this exercise though. It’s really difficult to both picture your character and what he would say, and then also “dream up” a situation from that characters perspective. Saying this out loud made us all think of the move Inception. :)

During this exercise I got some real good feedback on my coaching style in general, aside from the exercise that is. I let my coachee know that I have a solution in my head, and what that might do is get my coachee to keep on asking for the answer. A tip I got from one of the observers was to just remain silent in that case. Or try to not show I have an answer in my head in the first place.

You might recognize this concept from a retrospective game we sometimes use, such as the “Remember the future” gathering insight.

Once again, those 50 minutes flew by and it was already time again to gather in the common meeting room to share our experiences and notes.

A pro-tip that I think came from the audience was that you can use this technique to get people that only complain, out of their comfort zone and into improvement.

Crucial Confrontation

Our final technique we learned was more about a confrontational perspective than from a coaching one. We learned that there might be three phases when having to deal with a confrontation.

The first is about content. Your son came home from hanging out 30 minutes late.

The second is about a pattern. This is the third time that your son came home 30 minutes late after you told him that this bothers you the first time.

Lastly, the third is about a relation. Your son is still coming home 30 minutes late after repetitive exclamations of your worrying about his safety. He is choosing to abuse your parent-child relationship for his own benefit.

Especially in this last one, preparing yourself for this confrontation contributes a big deal to the success.

My Take-Aways

Spectating and participating in these exercises as a group really gets the knowledge-sharing going instantly. It once again amazes me how much stuff you learn by talking to people that have similar, yet different experiences.

Sometimes just don’t say anything.

Try to apply “Yes, and …” more often because it’s really powerful.

Try out Click, Rewind a couple of times in real situations.

Conclusion

Eventhough it was only one day, I felt like I learned three days worth of training. I’m comparing with another coach training I had before this one. Then again, I’m not sure if I would have gotten so much out of it if I didn’t do that previous coach training before doing this Coach Retreat.

I also got to know a couple of colleagues better which is always nice. And I think the clients that also came to this retreat left with a good impression of the skills of Cegeka employees.

Thanks again to Inge Gorgon and Yves Hanoulle for facilitating and organizing this retreat. It was extremely useful and I hope Cegeka will be able to host more of these in the future.

Hope you readers got something out of this post as well.