Hello everyone,
Me and Mónica we were together for practice week as Reps Coach trainee and here we’re document how it was and learnings from this practice week.
Earlier in the last week we had a call with Faye to talk about how was the training under Teachble course, discuss, feedback, explain the Practice Week and next steps.
We have been assigned case studies to discuss, and they are:
- The coachee is a part of a small but growing community and would like to know how they can increase their numbers, enable these volunteers to make impact and make their community visible in the local tech scene.
- The coachee is an existing member of a community who do activities as the opportunity comes (i.e new campaign, invitation from schools) making the community stalled sometimes. The mentee wants to learn how he can step up to drive his community to a better direction.
- The coachee is an active functional area contributor who has contributed to a couple of projects but this is the first time he’ll be involved in a community. He wants to learn how he can reach out to people inside and outside the community to grow and make quality contributors.
- Being a new rep, the coachee wants to be more involved in being a leader in his community. His community had a lot of achievements before, but it all stalled as community members slowly became inactive due to organizational changes, community conflicts and shifting priorities. He wants to learn how he can move forward as it feels like a big task to him that he isn’t even sure if he can do something about.
We alternate the coachee and coach positions around these 4 study cases and at the end of each session we discuss the whole situation in general, including talking about similar real cases in our communities.
Around all of these discussions and training we take some relevant learnings:
- In all cases good questions give you the opportunity to make people rethink an idea, strategy or even the way of thinking, good questions make people see the other side of the horizon, the other side of each case, within a strategy, problem or idea, it is possible to refine communication to reach a root or main point of case.
- Feedback is important, we all know, good feedbacks are those that not only say “awesome” but they point out everything that went right and wrong, and advice to keep improving, using “good questions” can refine the understanding of a case in-depth and give the best feedback.
- Within a discussion on a crucial problem losing focus and agenda is something common and at the same time unproductive, one but better ways to solve this is by conducting a dialogue or discussion based on the quick coaching session which is like a flow for discussions where defined a problem, blockers, brainstorm, and next steps.
- It’s important before doing something, to see what they have done or said before and try not to fall into the mistakes that others have made.
- This activity also allowed me to be more interested in doing some in-depth research on how I can advise others and make their contribution to Mozilla an impact.
- It is always necessary to investigate and have style guides or manuals to undertake processes and projects. In The process of giving feedback ends up being key to having documentation to show.
- For many projects and communities, it is necessary to better document and write down the ways in which they can contribute.
- In many community cases, we can use instances such as work teams to review what is happening at the local level and see how to improve processes and continue to contribute to make the Internet better from our initiatives.
Thank you @fayetandog for guidence 
Cheers,
Geraldo and Mónica from LATAM