Coaching Agreements with Agile Teams

Imagine if someone entered your house without knocking and helped themselves to what you had in your fridge. How would you feel if you didn’t know who it was? That’s what it's like to coach without permission. On the other hand, if it was a roommate, family member, or close friend, they would likely have permission to do that.

In any interaction with other people, there are certain expectations about what behaviors are within expected bounds. If you approach a stranger on the street, you can ask for the time or directions, but people don’t expect much beyond that. There are different expectations for peers at work and still different expectations in a manager/direct report relationship. For each of these interactions, there are different levels of permission. So, what do we have permission to do as a coach? The simple answer is… none. That is, none beyond whatever permission you have outside of the coaching relationship. As a coach, we start with whatever permission we would normally have in any other interaction and build up from there.

In this mini-course, we will explore the difference between coaching without permission and coaching with permission. By the end of this mini-course, you will be able to identify several skills needed to coach with permission and apply them to your next coaching session.