What’s next after CSM? In this article, we share our ideas and suggestions for the next stage in your personal and professional development.
Team Coaching
Firstly, if you are interested in learning more about coaching ,we recommend attending our Agile Team Coach course. This 3-day course is highly-interactive, PowerPoint free and facilitated by experienced, professional, real-world coaches, actively practising what they teach with clients onsite. You will learn professional coaching skills that will help you to bring the best out of the agile teams you work with. This course is certified by ICAgile (the leading accreditation body for Agile Coaching). By attending this course you will learn:
- Professional coaching skills and techniques like powerful questions
- The difference between coaching and mentoring
- How to help teams and individuals overcome challenges and conflict
- An introduction to neuroscience and why it’s important as coaches we understand how the brain reacts when we’re under stress
- How to create a psychologically safe environment for your teams by looking at how to set up the team environment and help the team to know themselves and create a shared culture and vision
- How to conduct the coaching conversation including techniques to improve the way you listen, brainstorm and help your client be effective with actions
- Why it’s important to design a coaching contract with your team and stakeholders
- Plus much more
See the course page for a full description and agenda.
We would also recommend researching a professional coaching qualification that is accredited by the International Coach Federation.
Team Facilitation
Secondly, having a toolbox of facilitation skills is an important asset for any team lead, manager, scrum master or coach. These skills will help you keep your meetings and trainings engaging, well attended, and on the right track. Our Agile Team Facilitator course is certified by ICAgile for their ICAgile Certified Agile Team Facilitation certification. It’s 100% PowerPoint free, highly interactive and impactful. View the Agile Team Facilitator page for details, dates and locations.
TRAIN-the-TRAINER
Thirdly, if you would like to create training workshops and meetings that have a lasting impact we suggest attending our Training from the BACK of the Room class. This 2 day training will teach you accelerated learning techniques that will give you the knowledge to create engaging training to make learning stick. The learnings from this class can be applied to workshops, meetings and ceremonies. For more information about how this class can help you as both a coach and a trainer read this article.
AGILE FOUNDATIONS & MINDSET
Next, depending on your experience working in an agile way or in agile environments. There are a couple of options available to broaden as well as deepen your skills and knowledge in agile and the agile mindset:
1. Agile Team Foundations
This is an ICAgile-certified course that covers agile ways of working, beyond Scrum. During this course, you will learn about key concepts such as adaptive planning, value-driven development, team collaboration and frequent feedback for continuous improvement as well as:
- Apply the values and principles of the Agile model for product development
- Compare and contrast the most popular Agile approaches, including Scrum and Kanban
- Recognise the cultural and mindset challenges of being fully successful with Agile
- Create a strong focus on the delivery of customer value
- Grow self-organising teams that frequently deliver valuable, high-quality products
This certification is also the gateway cert for the expert track that ICAgile offers for all their certification tracks. – If you are interested in learning more about the ICAgile Expert Track and what exactly this is please contact us and we can send you more details.
2. Enterprise Agility – Discover how to co-create meaningful change that sticks using advanced enterprise coaching techniques on our double ICAgile certified enterprise agile coach bootcamp.
COMMUNITY for CSMs
We are very fortunate, since the agile community is incredibly active, helpful and knowledgeable. AWA run a meetup group here in London. If you’re not already a member then join us here. Our meetups are typically focused on enterprise change and leadership. We record most of our meetups and share them on our youtube channel.
There are also many other meetups groups in London focussed on different areas, check out the meetup site to find your local group. We also recommend attending or even volunteering to help facilitate the Scrum Master clinics – as these special events will give you real-world experience and create meaningful connections.
Getting involved with the agile community in which ever way you can will be extremely beneficial for your continuous personal and professional development.
5 BOOKS EVERY NEW SCRUM MASTER SHOULD READ
We have compiled a list of 5 of the recommended books we think every Scrum Master should read. Check out the list here.
Finally, take your learning even further. AWA are the only ICAgile Certified Provider accredited to run expert-level training from Team to Enterprise coach level, globally.