A.G.I.L.E – Enabling Continuous Improvement

A Coaching Model By Tee Yin Yong, Business Coach, SINGAPORE

A.G.I.L.E Mindset as a Model

As an Agile practitioner in my professional career, Agile is a word that has brought me great learning and joy. As such, I felt empowered to make use of Agile as a coaching model to support others in their journey of self-reflection and learning.

Agile is a mindset that promotes small valuable actions occurring at a frequent cadence while enabling continuous improvement. Having been through many coaching sessions and lessons, I see the Agile mindset as a model that our clients can incorporate into their coaching journey.

Assess Your Goals:

As a coach, one of our first steps is to support our coachee in understanding their current state and where they wish to go.

We need to help them in reflecting what they wish to achieve out of the coaching arrangement and where they stand in respect to their goals. This will enable them to assess their needs and how the session can support them. Questions at this step may include: “What do you wish to achieve at the end of this session that you do not have right now?”

• The coach needs to ask powerful questions so that the coachee’s goals are assessed as well as aligned for the session.
• The coachee can make use of this step to identify which goals are more important and prioritize them accordingly.
• Lastly, once their goals are assessed, we can move to the next key step of understanding they are why.

Grasp Your Why:

At this step, the coach needs to explore with the coachee on understanding and grasping the why of their goals. This is an important step for the client to reflect deeper about the significance of their goals.

The coach can ask questions such as “What makes this important for you now” which will allow them to reflect on why they wish to achieve the goal they set.

Sometimes, through this step, clients may discover a different goal they wish to work towards. This enables them to seek out their deeper challenges and resolve them at the appropriate time for themselves

• At this step, it is key for the coach to support their coachee in understanding the way of their goals for them to have a deeper exploration.
• The coachee may provide info that would otherwise be missed out or in the blind spot of the coachee in the first step.
• By grasping they’re why the coachee can make progress towards their next step of Invoking ideas and actions.

Invoke Ideas and Actions:

Once the coaches are clear on their What and Why it is time for us to support them in figuring out the How. This can be done through powerful questions to invoke their minds for ideas and actions that may work for their situation.

Questions applicable at this step may include “What is the smallest step you can take towards achieving your goal?” This is similar to how the Agile mindset promotes making small steps towards achieving our goals.

This question will allow our coachee to invoke ideas and actions that will shift them towards their goal. The objective of this is to shift our coachee mindset towards ideas generation and making steps towards their goals.

• The coach needs to be able to invoke ideas or enable the coachee to explore thinking outside of their current mindset.
• The coachee will be guided towards exploration and next steps.
• Invoking ideas and actions from the coachee, enables them to be one step closer to meeting their goals.

Linking Actions to Goals:

By allowing the coachee to have small steps or actions towards their goal, we need to support them in linking their actions to their goals. Questions at this step may include: “How will action A serve you in achieving Goal B?”

This is an important step as coachee may experience shifts in their energy or changes in their non-verbal cues during this phase. By having a better understanding of how their proposed actions or way of thinking will move them towards their goals, the coach enables the coachee to gain a deeper reflection and insight of themselves.

• In this step, the coach serves the coachee by exploring how their next steps support them in meeting their goals.
• The coachee will be able to gain a better linkage of what the next step looks like and where it can bring them to.
• Completing this step allows the coachee to be ready for the next phase where they can empower themselves and grow.

Empower and Grow:

The final step of the A.G.I.L.E model is to support the coachee in feeling empowered to strive towards their desired goals and objectives. Questions in this phase may include: “What is your reflection at the end of this session” and “How would this reflection serves you in your journey forward?”.

Through this process of assessing, grasping, invoking, and linking, they will be able to empower themselves through small steps and grow at their own pace. By completing this 5 step process, we can seek to support our coachee in adopting a continuous improvement mindset.

• The coach seeks to facilitate the coachee’s growth through exploration of their learning and allowing them to empower themselves for the journey ahead.
• The coachee will be able to make progress towards their personal growth through reflection and empowerment.
• The A.G.I.L.E model will support coachees in making progress towards their goals while adopting a growth mindset and continuous improvement.

The goal of the A.G.I.L.E Model

The goal of the A.G.I.L.E model is to adopt it as an iterative approach with our coachee. This means supporting our coachee in understanding that their learnings in one session can empower them to make further changes and gain new learnings in other aspects of their life.

As they face different challenges and situations in their life, the coachee can make use of their growth mindset to make progress towards their goal while improving on their goals as they learn from their actions. The value of the A.G.I.L.E model is to support our coachee in shifting their mindset away from a fixed perspective and towards a growth mindset of continuous improvements.