Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams

TL; DR: Toyota Kata Coaching with Fortune Buchholtz

Business and academic leaders advocate coaching as crucial for growth. In Agile, diverse methods like GROW and OSKAR thrive, yet Toyota Kata Coaching emerges as a standout for its simplicity and effectiveness.

In this Hands-on Agile Meetup of May 7, 2024, Fortune Buchholtz explores its potential as a superior Agile coaching tool. Whether confirming its benefits or broadening your coaching repertoire, the recording offers valuable insights.

📺 Watch the video now: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz — 61. Hands-on Agile.

Abstract: Toyota Kata Coaching

Today, we see a slowly accelerating movement in business management towards coaching. Even the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey now acknowledge — see below — that coaching is the best approach to managing and growing employees.

After decades of Agile, we also strongly understand that coaching is the preferred method of engagement at all organizational levels. There’s a wide variety of coaching options used in Agile today: GROW, OSKAR, ACL, STEPPA, etc.

Let’s add a technique from Toyota, whose attitudes and methods are embedded in our Agile practices in many ways. It’s called Toyota Kata Coaching. And please don’t be fooled by its deceptive simplicity; it’s’ probably the best coaching method for Agile. Watch the Meetup’s recording to learn about Kata and add another coaching tool for your Scrum Master or Agile Coaching collection.

Watch the recording of Fortune Buchholtz’ Toyota Kata Coaching session now:

Questions & Answers

During the Q&A part on Toyota Kata Coaching, Fortune answered the following questions, among others:

Toyota coaching is top-to-bottom; does feedback from the bottom go directly to the top?“Grasp the initial condition”—that is a scientific baseline measurement. Doesn’t this foster biases or “gaming the metric,” aka the measurement at the end of the experiment? (ARNE W.)What recommendations do you have for presenting this Kata to a manager who suggests scrum masters need to be less “coachy” and more “delivery” focused?Do workers in the factory really coach the management? Isn’t that a many-to-few scaling problem? I presume that is not “coaching,” as we usually understand it.Curious about your emphasis on Women in this slide!You said the 5 questions are the Shu-style. What do Ha and Ri look like?I’m curious if you have ways to integrate Agile and Kata so it doesn’t feel like more meetings that are not valuable.How does a company ensure that the bottom people “coaching” the top ones aren’t intimidated?

Connect with Fortune Buchholtz

Fortune Buchholtz on LinkedIn

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