In this opening keynote for Edinburgh in November 2023, PMO author Bill Dow joined us from Seattle, USA. Bill focused on the key ingredient of world-class PMOs, it's all about the people who work within them. How can we enhance our PMO culture and practices to empower our team members, fostering their growth and development towards achieving world-class PMO status?
The PMO has a unique opportunity to identify coaching and mentoring needs across the PPM workforce. Do we take advantage of that opportunity as much as we could and, in doing so, enable capability development?
In this session, we take a look at Coaching Conversations and how the PMO practitioner can learn some handy techniques and approaches to use in their everyday work. This session was recorded at the PMOLearn! event in London in 2022.
We've talked about this a lot at PMO Flashmob - coaching skills.
Skills we could be using to better support those we work within the delivery organisation - skills we could be using within the PMO itself to increase performance and maturity.
We've talked about the differences between mentoring and coaching - we've also talked about being skilled to coach others.
There is one thing we've agreed on over the years, using different coaching skills is one way for the PMO to really help people deliver projects and programmes more successfully - yet equally, we're perhaps not as qualified to do it as we should be.
You can check out some previous sessions like Coaching in All Directions - Coaching Skills for PMO Professionals and Using a Coaching Model in the PMO.
Over the next few weeks we are going to cover several different frameworks, approaches and techniques that the modern project practitioner can utilise in their day-to-day work that make a difference to people and their performance levels. We also share ten different things your PMO can be thinking about to make a real difference to the performance of your PMO. We're going to look at the following areas:
servant leadership;
facilitation,
coaching and;
conflict management.
In this third article of our PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management series, we take a look at coaching.
It's the eighth (maids a-milking) of our 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas and in this one we picked up on the subject of coaching.
This session was one of the Lightning talks from two of our Standuppers for PMO and also earned a post up on the ah-ha board with this insight "coaching can happen in all organisational directions".
[You can see the other 12 Stand Up for PMO Days Before Christmas here]
Coaching has often been identified as a key skill for PMO professionals. It's long been mentioned in job advertisements as "coaching and mentoring skills" and more recently with the PMO supporting Agile delivery approaches, the term 'coaching' is heard more frequently.
What does that actually mean? Coaching is surrounded in misconceptions and in this session, we're debunking some myths whilst we focus on developing our ability to be a valued partner to the business and to the people our PMO supports.
We wanted to understand what types of coaching approaches and techniques we could potentially use in our everyday work - rather than focusing on whether we could become actually coaches.
The session was led by Bekka Prideaux who, not only is an executive & leadership coach, she's experienced in project management and more importantly, gets PMO (take a look at her profile below)
Bekka took us through the fundamentals starting with;
What is coaching & why that is relevant to a PMO professional.
The spectrum of coaching - what's included, what each is.
Understanding where on the spectrum you need to be depending on where you are in your career, how mature your organisations PMO is and the skills/awareness/experience of the person you are working with when it comes to PMO.
Understanding and access to a variety of coaching skills and tools which can be used by the PMO.
The Presentation
In January's PMO Flashmob we had Susanne Madsen join us for the evening session on Coaching Project Managers. We wanted to explore the idea that the PMO coaches project managers, after all we see it on a number of job specifications as a task that PMO should carry out. We had about 30 PMO Flashmobbers so at the beginning of the evening we needed to find out what the objectives were of the people in attendance. What would they like to get out of the session, what kind of answers were they looking for. These are just a few of them (and believe me, there were loads more!):
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
What is the difference between informal vs formal coaching?
What is a coaching style - is there a method?
What kind of experience and training do you need?
What is the PMO suppose to be coaching the PMs on?
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
