Flight Levels Coaching
"Please don't help," Jürgen Hargens recommended 20 years ago. "It's hard enough as it is. " When he wrote his bestseller of the same name, Hargens of course could not have known how much harder helping would become over the next two decades. Neither did he suspect that today we face a veritable proliferation of support services, nor that coaching is now offered for almost every situation in life. From health, partnership or career, to professional collaboration, project management or leadership, to strategy and agility, it seems that everything can be coached these days.
The question is, of course, why should you now need special flight level coaching - and even your own skills training? Isn't this just a new edition of old wine in new bottles? Don't we already have enough tools to make the best out of the Flight Levels thought model due to the boom in relevant consulting training? Aren't agile coaches predestined for this?
The ambivalent answer is: Yes and No. On the one hand, many agilists have profound know-how. On the other hand, however, their experience is in many cases limited to individual methods (such as Scrum or Kanban), role holders (e.g. ScrumMaster or Product Owner) and teams (especially in the IT sector). However, for companies to really take off with Flight Levels, end-to-end business processes and therefore potentially the entire organization must be supported. A well-trained ground staff is just as important for this as a well-rehearsed crew, or a tower that guarantees reliable overall control.
The task of the Flight Levels Coach is to deliver all the training, consulting and facilitation services required for this. This requires a wide variety of skills. Flight Levels Coaches should be able to:
quickly get a good picture of the current work situation,
clarify the customer's specific improvement project,
show how this can be supported by the Flight Levels,
gain a strong sponsor as well as alliance partners for the change,
convey knowledge as compactly and catchily as possible,
guide the design of flight level systems and architectures,
take-off and operation of these systems in a targeted manner,
moderate the entire change process in an agile manner,
deal constructively with the emotions that accompany such a process.
The Flight Levels Coach is therefore in demand as an all-rounder who can work with a wide range of experts, groups and hierarchical levels and use suitable formats for this. Of course, teamwork still plays a role in this. As an agile business developer, however, the Flight Levels Coach has to deal with cross-silo collaboration, with large groups and with senior managers who must not be neglected. This requires a lot of specialist knowledge, but also solid interaction skills and a fair amount of emotional intelligence. After all, calling yourself a coach is not difficult, but being helpful is!
In our own operations, we experience daily how challenging Flight Levels Coaching is. We experience that you are never done learning and that you are always wiser in retrospect anyway. And we experience that it is just as easy to underestimate the demands of a complex change process as it is to overestimate one's own competencies. After all, there are many areas of tension to be mastered:
How do I get profound information and build trust at the same time?
What tools should I have at the ready and how do I make sure I use them with the right attitude?
How do I combine selected questioning techniques with clear core messages on the flight levels?
How do I clarify the way forward in terms of business agility and create explicit agreements about who contributes to it and in what form?
How do I ensure clear mandates and attract the right people to act as co-creative designers?
The ambivalent answer is: Yes and No. On the one hand, many agilists have profound know-how. On the other hand, however, in many cases their experience is limited to individual methods (such as Scrum or Kanban), role holders (e.g., ScrumMaster or Product Owner) and teams (especially in the IT sector). However, for companies to really take off with Flight Levels, end-to-end business processes and therefore the entire organization must be supported. A well-trained ground staff is just as important for this as a well-rehearsed crew, or a tower that guarantees reliable overall control.