What makes a good Agile Coach?

Agile Coaching requires more than just good competency measures

There are some excellent models for how to be a great Agile Coach out there. Clearly the Lyssa Adkins Agile Coaching Competency Framework, the Agility Health Radar, and the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel do an excellent job of describing the areas of competency, skills, and style that make one a great coach.

As you evaluate those three models above, you’ll find lots of commonality and places to focus your time to improve your coaching skills. They cover foundational agile mindset elements, a breadth of communication and education skills (facilitation, teaching, coaching, mentoring, etc.), even business and technical skills to reflect the immense scope of knowledge and experience required to be able to coach at multiple levels in any company. They also cover various scaling strategies to help define coaching teams of teams and driving change through transformation. In general, these models are amazing and a wealth of knowledge to guide an agile coach on their learning journey.

And yet, it leaves me wondering (like most competency models and rating scales across a spectrum of varying topics) what else is required? What are the unspoken secret ingredients?

I have a theory. And it’s not much different than my theory on how to be a good human. And it is a simple list.

1. Before offering any advice or counsel to anyone, you must first earn their trust. And the best way to establish and build trust between two people is to offer it first. Express humility and genuine interest through showing vulnerability and asking questions to which you do not know the answer and are honestly interested in knowing the answer. (This I’ve of course stolen from Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein)
2. Have and express passion for the problem space that your client lives in. If you do not genuinely have passion for solving their problems, you will likely not be the best coach for them. Notice, I said problem space not solving or solutioning. You will further build trust by demonstrating your ability to understand the subtleties of their problem space and really, only then, will you best be able to coach individuals and teams. “Problem space” is intended to be a broad term that fully embraces the industry, the market, the company’s complexities (history, culture, politics), the technology, and their current state of change adoption and transformation.
3. Be open and infinitely flexible when it comes to the client’s business, situation, politics, and complexities… and yet firm on the matters they have asked you to help them change. As agile coaches, we sometimes forget we cannot fix everything (and we often have opinions on virtually every topic). It is critical that we acknowledge our role in the corporate environment. If they’ve asked us to focus on one particular problem space or part of the organization, we should do so and no matter how much we’d like to offer advice on things outside of our purview, we should be cognizant of our role in their complex ecosystem and stick to the problem domain we’ve been assigned to. That said, an excellent coach may subtly learn to plant very small seeds that grow into ideas in the minds of others who may actually have the role and influence to impact those other areas.

I recognize there is an uncomfortable gap baked inside number 3 above. This gap often takes the form of the question “they’re about to drive off the side of a cliff! shouldn’t I help?” And it is especially difficult to solve because it depends on very many things. First, we must consider our level of influence, trust, and relationships with the people who can directly solve the problem. But perhaps more importantly, we should consider the consequences. Often, and especially if you’re a third party, no matter how justified you may feel based on your experience and prior successes helping to solve a problem outside of the space you’ve been invited, it will be met with resistance. If you do not have trusted relationships and all of the information all the way up to and including those involved, it is almost always better to not meddle. YMMV.

That said, I do also believe in some conflicting advice: “In doing the job of an agile coach, if you are not on the verge of being fired at all times, you’re probably doing it wrong!”

Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com

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