Coaching dojo

If you want to improve your agile coaching capabilities, you should be equipped with three important skills. They include questioning, listening, and observing. Any person who wants to improve those skills can take a look at coaching dojo.

The main objective of coaching dojo is to provide opportunities, so that you can practice listening without being impacted by any judgements. On top of that, it will help you to collect information effectively and ask various questions, so that you can figure out the real problem. If you can master these skills, you can become a competent agile coach. As a result, you will be able to use your skills to benefit the organization that you work for.

During a coaching dojo session, few people sit together in a circle and start discussing the challenges that they have to face because of work. They will limit these discussions to a time period of 10 to 15 minutes. During this discussion, each participant will need to pick one out of three roles as mentioned below:

  • Client – Client will be the person who is looking for a solution or an alternative approach
  • Coach – Coach will be the person who offers guidance and help to the clients with achieving their goals
  • Observer – Observers would be the people who observe interactions in between the client and coach

When the roles are distributed, the client would state the problem. The coach would provide coaching and the conversation would proceed. At the end of the time period, the observer will be provided with a couple of minutes to provide details of his observation on the interaction that took place in between the client and coach. At the end of the coaching session, all the participants would share information about the insights they gained and things they learned.

— Slimane Zouggari