Agile Coaching: A Toolkit

3 Comprehensive Tools to Help You Shape Your Approach as an Agile Coach

With the vast amount of literature available and a myriad of best practices shared all over the web, the world of agile coaching can sometimes seem overwhelming. First off: that’s a good thing. There is no single right approach to agile coaching — only the one that suits you, your daily work and your team best. Still, I want to offer an overview of three useful tools that have helped shape my thinking about agile coaching. Hopefully, they can assist you as well by allowing you to locate your own capabilities and areas for growth.

Not all Agile Coaches are the same

Let’s preface this by taking a look at the various types of agile coaches. Generally speaking, there are three levels of agile coaching that we can identify: agile to team, agile to agile, and agile to organization.

The Team Coach, also known as the Team Facilitator, is responsible for promoting agile practices and fostering collaboration on one or more teams, improving their teamwork and organizational capabilities as well as conscious communication. Often, this is a task for the Scrum Master, for example by coaching the Product Owner and other agile practitioners on agile principles and how to work within the Scrum Framework. They are often expressly technical, driving agile software development techniques within the team, such as refactoring, unit testing, or Test Driven Development.

The Agile Coach takes a more general approach, often helping to develop teams by coaching and mentoring other agile practitioners (scrum masters/developers, product owners) on working with agile methods and promoting the agile mindset and adoption. Their domain knowledge allows them to take an advisory role for managers.

Finally, the Enterprise Agile Coach acts as a change agent for an entire organization, promoting the adoption of agile practices by developing the organization’s capacity for implementing them. They help define the strategic path for creating cultural change and coaching agile leadership. Typically, they work throughout all organization levels in order to structure and increase its agility.

Three tools: ACCF, Growth Wheel, and Zen Ex Machina Canvas

Being conscious of different agile coaching stances helps to identify approaches any coach might take while interacting with individuals, teams and organizations. For me, there are three tools that may help in this, which all land on the same basis and principles. It’s all about inspecting and adapting, always assessing where we are right now, where we want to be and what we need to do to get there.

Agile Coaching Competency Framework

Originally developed by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd for the Agile Coaching Institute, the Agile Coaching Competency Framework (ACCF) helps agile coaches categorize the different stances that one might take when supporting agile teams and organizations. In a nutshell, the ACCF breaks down the competencies necessary for agile coaching into three levels of mastery: technical, business and transformation. In addition, there are two areas of focus: content, which is the base for the teaching and mentoring part of agile coaching, and process, which focuses on professional coaching and facilitation. This approach helps agile coaches identify their coaching “core stance”, meaning that particular activity that you’ve performed for quite a while now, been improving and growing on, and feels really comfortable and easy to execute. It also shows which areas you should improve on to fulfill your role.

The ACCF has been extended and adapted — agile coaching is an evolving ecosystem, after all — to also reflect other key components, such as Mindset and Behaviors, and People and Influence. This brought into perspective something that became the basis for any agile environment, which is the agile mindset, by highlighting the need of understanding not only what it really is, and how important it is for an Agile Coach to be a living example of what those values and principles exist for. An agile coach must be a Servant Leader who always strives for continuous learning and improvement. Communication is key for an agile coach, but it should be thoughtful and positive, to generate value and help bring value in others, as well as encourage growth.

Agile Coaching Growth Wheel

It’s great to be able to locate one’s own abilities in these dimensions, but what about consciously building them up? This is where the Agile Growth Wheel comes in, providing a tool to help coaches, Scrum Masters, agile leaders and anyone who aims to grow as an agile coach increase their own capabilities. The Growth Wheel allows you to identify the competencies and stances in order to grow along the agile journey. The Growth Wheel includes nine core skill competencies:

• Self Mastery: Central to being a great agile coach is the resilience to keep on investing in yourself through learning, inspecting, and reflecting constantly. Take lessons from every little experience, good or bad. Emotional intelligence and social awareness are also part of knowing how and when to show up in any given context.
• Agile/Lean Practitioner: Has an agile mindset and understands the principles behind it. This is supported by the experience in working with its frameworks and practices.
• Serving: The primary focus of the Servant Leadership Stance. It’s about prioritizing the needs of the teams and business over our own agenda while promoting growth and well-being.
• Coaching: It’s about being dedicated to individuals or teams and partnering with them on an educational and creative process which will help them unlock their own potential and reach their goals.
• Facilitating: It’s the key to build effectiveness of a group of people by owning and promoting the process of collaboration. The facilitator should create a neutral environment of openness and safety and help build bridges of empathy between parties, leading to a most valuable formal outcome.
• Guide Learning: Guide Learning is about empowering and growing teams and individuals to be resourceful and efficient. It helps agile coaches to set guidelines, promote learning and identify the most effective learning method to trigger learning and growth.
• Advising: It’s the byproduct of experience and the ability to bring insights and observations to help guide clients and organizations into having a shared understanding of the agile mindset values that can help them to be successful on a long-term basis and to do it independently. An advisor is also able to help manage dysfunction and conflict within teams and reinforce positive behaviors.
• Leading: A leader of change and a growth catalyzer. Has the ability to focus on embedding change, developing paths that trigger change and inspire it in others.
• Transforming: Transformation is guiding teams and organizations to be more effective and self-organized. It’s about guiding towards a sustainable change, where they learn how to change and improve themselves through facilitation and coaching.

Zen Ex Machina Canvas

The Zen Ex Machina Canvas however, encapsulates the above definitions into eight agile coaching elements. Its proponents believe that there’s a close relation between agile coaching and agile consulting. Why? Effectively, an agile coach might tend to multiple teams and business areas across the organization to help understand what agile practices are and what benefits can be expected, embed best practices, nurture the agile mindset, and implement a culture of continuous improvement. The eight elements identified by ZXM are:

• Consultant: The Consultant focuses on analyzing how teams and organizations are adopting agile principles, providing diagnostics, such as Agile Maturity Matrix, to understand what the maturity is for teams/organizations and how far they are from what would be the ideal. They help to solve problems and advice based on their skills and expertise.
• Coach: A coach is focused on the development of groups and individuals to help reach shared goals. Creates a change and improvement mindset supported by resources such as tooling and/or documentation. The Coach helps change mindsets and behaviors.
• Counselor: The Counsellor is an element that helps manage team dysfunctions and conflict by helping identify and treat negative behaviors and reinforcing positive ones. It’s focused on active listening and helping to create empathetic and nonviolent communication.
• Change Agent: To be a Change Agent is to trigger change within organizations, teams and individuals. It’s about continuous improvement and self-actualization. A Change Agent must be a visible champion of change.
• Facilitator: As a Facilitator owns the process of collaboration, always acting as a servant-leader to help generate formal and independent outcomes. The Facilitator will take part in meetings and events to help form bridges of empathy between the attending parties.
• Lean Leader: As a Lean Leader, the agile coach will focus on developing people by helping and inspiring them reach their full potential, on the basis of continuous improvement (KAIZEN) and life-long learning. The Lean Leader also helps set guide rails that will help teams and/or organizations to stay on the path of the agile adoptions journey.
• Trainer: The Trainer element provides the agile coach with the focus to develop the skill set of teams and/or individuals by developing formal learning outcomes, creating training materials and providing training sessions, such as masterclasses and/or workshops.
• Mentor: The Mentor element of an agile coach is based on the experience gathered by continuous practice. As a Mentor, the agile Coach also acts as a “trusted advisor” and helps with the strategic view by asking deep questions.

The agile coaching field is constantly evolving: as new research and techniques emerge, it is important to stay up-to-date and incorporate these advances into your practice. Frameworks such as the ACCF and its extensions are living documents that are designed to be updated and improved over time as new insights and best practices emerge. Remember, agile coaches are champions for change and we embrace it constantly.

Evolving frameworks can help agile coaches stay current and relevant. By staying up-to-date with the latest best practices, techniques and approaches. Agile coaches can continue to develop their skills and become more effective in their role and ensure that they are providing value and delivering high-quality services to their clients. It’s all about continuous improvement.

Observation is key

By far, the most important aspect of identifying how to act, is understanding why. Therefore, the first steps to take are listening closely and asking questions. Good observation skills are key when assessing the maturity of teams and organizations along the agile journey. That’s why I would argue that the first stance for either an agile coach or a scrum master is to be an observer.

It’s important to pinpoint where we are and why in order to determine where we want to and are able to go, as well as how far we are from reaching it. That will set the tone and help strategize on what should come next. Context is important. An agile coach might work with a team or organization that is only just starting to adopt agile practices, but can also help those who have already adopted agility and feel they can improve. Of course that influences the depth and level at which I’m required to operate.

So, how to do that? In my opinion, the best way to do it is by attending sessions and events within the teams and/or organizations and assessing the engagement, team dynamics and psychological safety. Really observe how questions are posed and answered, the overall explicit mood, and the underlying emotions. Talk to those who find agile methods useful and to those who oppose them, and try to understand why. Take as many notes as possible and gather your thoughts while formulating non-judgemental suggestions and viewpoints on what you have observed. This will help understand which next stances to adopt, either as a facilitator, by moderating events and assisting in workshops that can trigger positive change, or as a coach, the most common approach for an agile coach, by helping others identify their obstacles to growth and overcome them.

Thoughts? We want to hear what you think. Drop us a message at hello@turbinekreuzberg.com.