Stephanie BySouth | Director, Authentika

We often expect ourselves to lead people like mythical legends with the mystical abilities to influence others. Expectations and judgements are thrown at leaders without consideration that they are also people. We aren’t afforded the same learning courtesy as Agile teams expect for themselves. That’s OK, because we know; no matter how safe, it’s not nice or easy to fail people. Especially those we are accountable for.

With this level of accountability and the need to support senior management to cross ‘the Agile team to Agile leadership chasm’ with clients, it was time for a leadership agility framework that serves us, the business and our teams simply and sustainably.

I love being around awesome people, who build great products customers desire. 
I love learning from and together with these amazing minds. 
I love creating the right environment for teams to flourish. 
I love change, and learning from new experiences. 
I love working in Agile environments.

How about you? 
I bet there are some elements of this list why you're in Agile, too. And you can probably add even more elements to it.

The Agile Manifesto states amongst others individuals and interactions, customer collaboration and responding to change.

In our everyday life doing Agile we already respect these aspects in many ways. 
But do we practice what we preach as best we can?

I'd like to challenge your current way of thinking about people and processes. 
I'd like to challenge you to focus on you, before you focus on others. 
I'd like to challenge your current way of reflecting. 
I'd like to inspire you to go different ways. 
I'd like to inspire you to inspire others.

In Agile we're already good in improving our processes and creating well performing teams and hence building the right things in the right way. And in the Agile Manifesto's communication and collaboration piece we can even get better.
"You have not yet reached the limit of what you're capable of!" means we can always further improve. And we do follow this idea in our Agile processes, too, through continuous feedback (Retrospectives) and improvement.

And why not take it even further? Why not go "Beyond Agile"?!

Here's where aspects of Life Coaching come in handy: through also understanding and improving ourselves (how do we interact with people due to how we perceive our environment) we will even further improve communication and collaboration.

Life Coaches believe our clients know the answer. And even if Agile Coaching is slightly different than Life Coaching, I see it as very relevant in Agile Coaching, too. If we apply this in Agile, instead of giving our clients (team, colleagues) the answers, asking them powerful questions to help them be more aware of what's happening at the moment, they will find their answer for it and will have a much better commitment to making the change for themselves, their teams and the company. It's not for us to TELL them what to do, but to ASK them what's going on for themselves. Here's where I see a huge chance for improvement.

In my session I give lots of examples on how to link Life Coaching ideas to our Agile work environments. I've given the session at LAST Conference Melbourne and at the Agile Coaching Circles Meetup Melbourne. The audience was engaged and the attendees were very happy about having some new ideas on how to improve their daily work life.

Come along to be inspired by Life Coaching and thus to benefit our Agile Thinking!