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"It's about coaching the team, not teaching them." - Prabhleen Kaur
Prabhleen shares a powerful lesson about the dangers of being too directive with a forming team. When she joined a new team, her enthusiasm and experience led her to immediately introduce best practices, believing she was setting the team up for success. Instead, the team felt burdened by rules they didn't understand the purpose of. The process became about following instructions rather than solving problems together.
It wasn't until her one-on-one conversations with team members that Prabhleen realized the disconnect. She discovered that the team viewed the practices as mandates rather than tools for their benefit. The turning point came when she brought this observation to the retrospective, and together they unlearned what had been imposed.
Now, when Prabhleen joins a new team, she takes a different approach. She first seeks to understand how the team has been functioning, then presents situations as problems to be solved collectively. By asking "How do you want to take this up?" instead of prescribing solutions, she invites team ownership. This shift from teaching to coaching means the team creates their own working agreements, their own definitions of ready and done, and their own communication norms. When people voice solutions themselves, they follow through because they own the outcome.
In this episode, we refer to working agreements and their importance in team formation.
Self-reflection Question: When you join a new team, do you first seek to understand their current ways of working, or do you immediately start suggesting improvements based on your past experience?
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About Prabhleen Kaur
Prabhleen is a Certified Scrum Master with 7+ years of experience helping teams succeed with SAFe, Scrum and Kanban. Passionate about clean backlogs, powerful metrics, and dashboards that actually mean something. She is also known for making JIRA behave, driving Agile transformations, and helping teams ship value consistently and confidently.
You can link with Prabhleen Kaur on LinkedIn.