THE FIELDWORK ANTHROPOLOGIST

If agile is also about continuously learning through continuous feedback: Agile coach or Scrum Master?

Listen! Listen! Just listen! At what level are you listening? Are you building on what you listen to help the speaker to express more, uncover the unspoken, reveal heavy secrets, free their minds while they are talking to you? Are you staying far from reacting and judging? If not, who are we to judge? Who is perfect, everywhere, every time, with everyone, at anything? Agile coach or Scrum Master? Let’s learn more!

To increase awareness about the different levels of active listening, I would share briefly my empiric learnings and thoughts about listening.

Levels of Listening

If while I am listening to someone I am thinking about how does this affects me, and I do react to it. Most likely, I would miss the chance to learn what the speaker wanted to say. This is because I was actively listening at Level 1 of active listening: Internal Listening.

If While I am listening to a speaker I am freed from the personal lens. I do respond in a moment with questions and silences to dig deeper in order to understand more and more. Then I know that I am actively listening at Level 2: Focused Listening.

If While I am listening to a speaker I am freed from the personal lens. I do respond in a moment with questions and silences while noticing and adapting to the emotional state of the speaker: Tone of voice, Face expressions, Body language, environment temperatures, etc. Then I know that I am committed to helping the speaker move through whatever they are expressing. In this case, I am aware that I am actively listening at level 3: Global Listening.

My question now again comes: At what level are you listening usually?

The anthropologist side of an Agile coach or Scrum Master:

As an agile coach, I am amazed by the idea of being a fieldwork anthropologist. I aim to create environments happier for people that make them excel in their work. I enjoy tuning the best configurations of human interactions and helping individuals and groups to adopt systemic daily life at work that reflects on their well-being, on their capacity to solve complex problems, and take better and quicker decisions.

Through my Agile coaching journey: I have seen coaches, including myself in the past, having fun and passion while taking teams and individuals where they believe those ones should be as if they were holding the universal truth about how to do great and be the best.

Are you holding the universal truth?

Another important question here to ask: Are you holding a universal truth about how to do great and be the best? Maybe for you, however, I guess not for all kinds of human beings. So listening and connecting to people context and analyzing their relations with it, is a must for any coach that wants to do ethically his job.

Last few years, at any coaching mission I do accept as a challenge, I do start with interviews 1:1 (and sometimes 1:N) that generate the hope to people to achieve what they would love to reach their working journeys and therefore to extend to self-satisfaction.

As a result of caring about the people and their aspirations (through those interviews and globally listening to them), a great commitment is usually generated at the workplaces…The first seed is planted to help performant teams emerge to do a great job.

Now, you only need to help those teams among their hopes to walk step by step toward where their heart leads them: building up synergies, mutual understandings, harmonies around them, and great agile practices that help them…

Till they trust themselves to run smoothly, efficiently, and responsively while steadily adding value to their contexts.

Making the coaches independents

And then as great coaches do and aspire to do, you can disappear slowly, to make them independent from you… Cheers to you and to your great altruist and empathic being.

If you want to talk about it in detail with our experts, contact us!

MORE YOU KNOW, MORE YOU GROW :

Do you want to know more ? Check out other interesting topics !