Are you ready to go beyond removing impediments and facilitating meetings to inspire a great team? A team aspiring to greatness often needs a coach, and Agile Coaches need to know how to communicate effectively. Learn how to use metaphor to inspire a high performing team and practice asking powerful questions to evoke discovery and action. In addition to developing your coaching skills, this session will add to your Agile toolbox Lyssa Adkins's high performance tree metaphor, a set of powerful questions to use to take your teams to the next level, and the wisdom to know when and how to use them with your teams. We will discuss what characteristics and benefits of a high performing team might be lacking if one of the scrum values is not present. Similarly, a team could pick one of the benefits that might be missing and trace back to the values what they might need to improve. This way people will understand the elements of the metaphor and how a team can use it to talk about their behavior.

1. Beyond Removing Impediments:
Scrum Master as Team Coach
Image by Pictofigo
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2. Welcome to Houston TechFest
Thank you for being a part of the
8th Annual Houston TechFest!
• Please turn off all electronic devices or set them to vibrate.
• If you must take a phone call, please do so in the lobby so as not
to disturb others.
• Thanks to our Diamond Sponsors:
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3. Allison Pollard
Firm believer in continuous
improvement and the power
of teams to affect change
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4. Cherie Silas
Strong desire to help people
arrive at the place they define
as success in both personal
and professional life
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5. Today’s presentation
• What does “Scrum Master as Team Coach” mean?
• What is a high performing team?
• What tools can you use to coach a team to
become high performing?
Image by Pictofigo
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6. The Scrum Master role
• VERY different from being a Project Manager
• Responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and
followed
• Servant leader
The Scrum Master acts as the
Team’s coach!
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Image by Pictofigo

7. Building a high performing team
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• Self-organizing
• Cross-functional
• Accountable as a team
• Striving for AWESOME
The Scrum Master reinforces
the “team” mentality Images by Pictofigo

8. The High Performance Tree
Constructive
disagreement
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Consensus-driven
Get the right
business value

9. Activity:
• Think about your current team
• Add more roots to the values
that are present
• Color in the fruits for the benefits
that are present
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Images by Pictofigo

10. How to use the tree with your team
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• Project kick-offs
– Review the values,
characteristics and
benefits
– Define working
agreements
• Retrospectives
– Have the team evaluate
the strength of the
values, benefits in the
team
Images by Pictofigo

11. Coaching skill: asking questions
• Not about eliciting more information
for the Scrum Master
• Provoke the team to think, feel, or
react differently about the issue
at hand
The Scrum Master’s job is to stay
curious
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Image by Pictofigo

12. What makes a question Powerful?
• Open-ended
• Move the team forward to what it desires rather
than ask for justification
• Not leading to a particular answer
• Reflect active listening
Image by Pictofigo
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13. Activity:
• Find a partner
• One person will talk about his/her team
• During the conversation, the other person asks
powerful questions.
Image by Pictofigo
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14. What did you learn?
Image by Pictofigo
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15. Scrum Master as Team Coach
1. Use metaphors to describe
abstract concepts and feelings
2. Use powerful questions to invite
discovery, clarity, and action
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Image by Pictofigo
Practice these tools with your team
to coach them to high performance

16. Resources
• Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
• Images from Pictofigo, www.pictofigo.com
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17. Contact
allison.pollard@improvingenterprises.com
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@allison_pollard
cherie.silas@improvingenterprises.com
@cheriesilas
Images by Pictofigo

18. Please Leave Feedback During Q&A
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If you leave session
feedback and provide
contact information in
the survey, you will be
qualified for a prize
Scan the QR Code to
the right or go to
http://bit.ly/1p13f3n

19. Thanks to all our Sponsors!
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