10 coaching habits to try
10 Compact Habits from Jeff Burstein to Help Teams Flow
If you spend your days helping teams get unstuck, you already know the truth: change isn’t won by ceremonies, templates, or the newest tool. Change is built one practice at a time. Below are ten coaching habits I use with teams in the L‑EAF Lab and classrooms using LearningFLOW. Each tip is short, practical, and designed so you can try one small thing this week that will make work move more smoothly.
1. Coach the practice, not the ritual
Focus on the skill beneath the ceremony. Don’t grade the meeting; notice the behavior the meeting should produce.
• Quick prompt: “What outcome will tell us we’re heading the right way?”
2. Teach teams to make work pullable
Break big, fuzzy goals into the smallest testable slice that still teaches you something.
• Quick prompt: “How small can this be while still proving the idea?”
3. Use risk as signal, not shame
Stalled cards are evidence of a process issue, not an indictment or people. Make stuck work visible and design cheap experiments to learn why.
• Quick prompt: “Which assumption, if false, would stop this from working?”
4. Prioritize demonstration over perfection
Demos are learning tools. Getting feedback early beats polishing in private.
• Quick prompt: “What’s the single thing we can show now that will provoke useful feedback?”
5. Make collaboration a continuous habit
Replace long handoffs with brief, deliberate joint work sessions that create momentum and shared ownership.
• Quick prompt: “Who needs to be in the room for the next 20 minutes to unblock this?”
6. Teach the six practices across every scale
Planning, Refinement, Collaboration, Risk Management, Demonstration, Retrospection—use the same language at Macro, Meso, and Micro. Only cadence and scope change.
• Quick prompt: “Which cycle (Macro/Meso/Micro) owns this decision and what do they need from you?”
7. Make the board your shared language
Consistent card templates and cycle tags remove translation friction between teachers, stakeholders, and delivery teams.
• Quick prompt: “Show me the card’s lineage—where did this come from and where should it go next?”
8. Turn retros into experiments
End every retrospective with a single, measurable experiment. Small, visible changes compound.
• Quick prompt: “What one change will we try next, and how will we know it helped?”
9. Coach with curiosity and constraints
Good coaching surfaces tradeoffs. Help teams decide what not to do as deliberately as what to do.
• Quick prompt: “Given our constraints, what are we explicitly not doing right now?”
10. Model directional planning, not prediction
Help teams plan for direction and learning, not false certainty. The plan is a hypothesis to test.
• Quick prompt: “What’s the smallest next step that will either move us closer or show us we should pivot?”
One small thing to try this week
Pick one tip from the list and run a single, time-boxed experiment around it for one collaboration session.
Suggested micro-experiment (20–30 minutes): Run a 5‑minute wall walk at the start of a collaboration session and finish with a 15‑minute paired work block. Before you start, ask the team to flag one stalled card. During the paired block, the pair focuses only on unblocking that card. End by noting one learning and one next step in the card. Repeat the experiment once more the next session and compare momentum.
Why this works: it makes risk visible, forces small, collaborative practice, and produces a demoable artifact quickly—covering three of the core practices with minimal overhead.
Final note
Coaching isn’t about adding another meeting to someone’s calendar. It’s about asking the right questions, compressing learning loops, and creating habits that turn uncertainty into progress. Try one small thing. Observe what changes. Repeat. Over time, those small changes add up to teams that can form fast, align clearly, and pull real work to done.