Coaching for Mastery with Geoff Watts
Channel: Inspect & Adapt Ltd
Date: 2022-08-23

Geoff Watts talked about coaching for mastery at the Scrum Masters of The Universe Meetup in August 2022.
Who would have thought that Geoff Watts had a role model in Ted Lasso?!?! 😲

This is just one of the things that one could have discovered had they joined the meetup of Scrum Masters of the Universe, hosted by Jamie Kriegel & friends.

Geoff started his talk defining himself as a Mastery Coach. The Coaching angle came straight from the definition of International Coaching Federation "partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential". The Mastery bit describes how one learns to take a concept and apply it to the most unfamiliar situation.

This definition of Mastery marries perfectly the nature of a Coach, who, because totally detached from content on the specific know how, should be able to coach basically anyone in any situation.

In that regard Geoff finds that Ted Lasso is a great coach, as he is not afraid to coach a team of a sport of which he doesn't even know the rules of. He's not a fool, just someone who understands the principles of helping people improve.

And a key rule is to let people come to "change" instead of pushing "change" on them. More often than not "change" implies that people are not good enough. Even when that's not the reality, it can often be how the people asked to change feel about themselves.

It's therefore important that a coach offers their support rather than impose it, even when there's a sponsor ready to pay to get some of their employees "fixed". It would just not work from a coaching perspective. I could add that it would be unethical.

What we can do is to take a leaf from the more enlightened approaches to teach cricket to kids and embrace "Player led Coaching". Here the coach is not the one who's responsible for choosing the program that the team will follow but they offer themselves as facilitators. The players in fact decide what they want to focus on and the job of the coach is to create the conditions so that the team can have a chance to get better by chance while they enjoy themselves.

The enjoyment bit is possibly the most critical even more than the possible progress as it ensures that the coachee will voluntarily come back for more collaboration (not to be confused with an attempt to build a trap where the coachee will never be able to leave).

And change takes time.

Time & engagement are at the basis of the new training offers for Scrum Masters and Product Owners that Geoff has started offering and that spans across multiple months precisely to allow the creation of a safe environment where change can happen & it can be sustained over time.

If you are interested in learning more about the different programs have a read here https://agilemasteryinstitute.com