What is a Coach Retreat?
- a format designed by Yves and Oana. I can reuse the format, the slide-decks and other documents from all previous Coach Retreats world-wide. Thank you!
- a combination of the concepts Coach dojo and Coding Retreat.
- Practicing coaching for a day, by repeating a particular scenario, with different coaching techniques, again and again and again.
- practicing in groups, switching roles of coach, coachee and observer.
- a safe place to practice: making mistakes is fine, there is no learning without mistakes. Moreover, we believe everybody is doing the best they can.
Setup
On the day itself there are 19 attendees plus Peter, Inge and me. A nice group size.
Check-in
I practice aikido, in a dojo. With aikido, we start by sitting in seiza and focus on our posture and breathing. That short moment is also meant to focus on aikido: park all other things that occupy your mind. One way of doing that, is by focusing on your breathing. Another is acknowledging those things explicitly, by naming them.The latter is translated to the Coach Retreat by saying, to the group, what you are feeling, and about what. To make it easy, a short list of rhyming emotions is given: mad (boos), glad (blij), sad (bedroefd), anxious (bang). Pretty much everybody is glad to be at the Coach Retreat, a few people are sad that they cannot be with their family right now. Two people are curious (benieuwd), which also rhymes in Dutch :) I'm glad, too, that my new laptop has arrived, and anxious that I won't be able to install all software on it before I fly to Riyadh the next day. I'm typing (part of) this blogpost on my new laptop in the plane, but it is far from working properly and completely.
Two walls
As part of the format, there is an Aha! wall, where people can put post-its with aha-moments of the day. In addition, Inge came up with an Inspiration wall, where people can put up post-its with their inspiration to become coach.Selecting the Scenario
There are six scenarios, each with a "situation". Most are in an Agile Software context. We used dot-voting. The same scenario as last year is chosen, with double the votes of the second contender.Splitting in groups
Throughout the day, the participants will work with the same group. In consecutive exercises, the participants should swap roles: coach, coachee and observer. Typically, there will be one coach, one coachee and a couple of observers; scenario 6 easily supports two coachees; groups are free to try things like pair-coaching, and there was one group that had at one point in time three coachees (and made a quick "phone call" to the fourth). During an exercise, roles can be changed, but we suggest to only do that when things get stuck.Exercise 1 — Click, Rewind
The first exercise! At any point during the coaching, any of the group members can say "Click"; the coaching stops, and the person can tell the reason. The coach can ask for coaching suggestions, an observer can ask whether coach and coachee whether they are aware of the effects of what they are saying/doing. The coachee can do the same, though that is less common; Moreover, if the coach asks for directions, it would be even better if the coachee temporarily stops listening. When the issue has been discussed, "Unclick" continues where the coaching stopped.In addition, there is "Rewind". If the coaching situation did not go as intended, the coach can rewind to a previous point and try again. The coachee should try to act as if everything after did not happen. It is allowed to "Rewind" multiple times to the same point, to try different techniques; also when things do go as intended. It is allowed to "Rewind" to the very beginning of the session.
Some observations: observers should "Click" when they observe something interesting; especially during this exercise! No need to only share observations after the exercise.When I use this technique for real, I usually say "Timeout". Some participants thought that "Rewind" could also be useful in real situations, even though forgetting what happened does not work then.
This technique can (should!) be used during the following exercises, as well.Exercise 2 — Yes, and...
This exercise is literally that, as coach you should respond with "Yes, and..." to what the coachee says. Sounds easy, is not easy. You can use other words, but what is specifically not allowed is "No", and "Yes, but..."Feedback indicated that the purpose of this exercise was not so clear. Perhaps this is more an exercise to experience. For me, again deriving from aikido, the hard part is not saying "Yes", but meaning "Yes". The philosophy of aikido is to convince an attacker that attacking is useless, senseless. For that, there are many physical moves that you practice that will let an attack fail. To be truly able to defend, and convince that attacking is pointless, you have to accept the attacker and the attack as they are.
You should only say "Yes" as coach, when you really accept what your coachee says and does. If you do not accept your coachee as is, you cannot coach him/her!Exercise 3 — Appreciative Inquiry
This exercise is meant to let the coach reflect back to the coachee what the coachee says, so the coachee understands him/herself better; with a focus on the positive things in the current situation.Feedback indicated that this exercise was not so clear. If you google Appreciative Inquiry, you will find a 4-step approach, of which this exercise is really only meant as the first step: understanding the positive things of the current situation to build upon; the next exercise is step number 2, dreaming.
It may be useful to have an example dialog handy for the presenters, to roleplay on front of the attendees what this exercise is meant to do. It should contain specific hooks where coachee mentions something negative and the coach turns the conversation back into the positive. It should contain hooks where the coachee wanders away from here and now (probably into the past, when everything was better) and the coach turns the conversation back to the current situation.Exercise 4 — Solution Focused
Already the last exercise. Wave your magic wand! What would your day look like, if you come to work, and all problems have been solved? What would your work be, if -as if by magic- no problems exist anymore?We gave it a little twist: we asked the coachees to leave when we explained the exercise, so they did not know what was coming. That seemed fun (and it grabbed attention).
Typically, it takes effort of the coach to get the coachee from "not like the bad things of today" to "the good things of tomorrow". Coachees who are more of a leader may switch more easily.In one of our groups, the coach made the dreaming almost literal: "close your eyes", and took the coachee into a new world. The coachee dreamed wonderful dreams, despite going into the exercise with an intent to give the coach a hard time.
Circle of questions
Closure of the day. Everybody asks a person a question. The person who answers, asks the next question to a person who has not answered any, yet. Like in the check-in, questions can cover any topic, related to the coach retreat or not.Followed by saying thank you to everybody, that concludes the day! It was a wonderful day, with a lot of energy from the participants, I think everybody learned a lot — I certainly did! Thank you!