At The Agility Concept, we run our coaching from what is best from a delivery & flow sense, not pure agile. Sure, we use agility behaviours & tools to help get the right outcomes for our clients & where it makes sense to do so.
For us though, it’s all about enabling people & flow of work to get value to our clients customers & colleagues in the most safe, efficient & high quality manner – this is what our coaches are known for.
Coaching Certifications - do they matter?
Good coaches should have a mix of certification & tough delivery experience, weighing more favourably on the experience side. At The Agility Concept, our opinion is certification should really be used to help align & confirm your thinking to a particular framework. Certification can also help arm a coach with some additional tools that they weren’t aware of. Certification can’t however make an individual a coach, only a broad range of delivery experience does that.
So in short, certifications are great to have but they should not be the first thing you look for.
Coaching traits we think are a must have
- Empathy – One of the most important traits for a coach to have is empathy. Being able to balance that empathy with broad program/project delivery experience is also key so they know when & how to hold leadership, teams & individuals accountable. Without this, a coach is simply methodical and probably evangelical which simply does not work in any organisation.
- Hands on Experience – Experience depending what level a coach is working at is key. For a squad coach, ideally someone with some great Scrum Master experience is going to fit the bill. A senior developer or BA may even fit the bill if they’ve take a squad coaching role on (via double hatting a Scrum Master role) as part of their day to day role. At the Enterprise Coaching level they should have experience making positive impact across senior portfolio/project/program delivery leadership and the system of work, not to a mention an expert understanding of the critical roles and how they connect in the system of work to generate flow.
An expert understanding in scrum and business agility frameworks, gained through years of experience in different organisations, delivery environments, and measuring success is critical for engaging a great Enterprise Coach.
- Emotional Intelligence – Being able to know how to deal with the various personality traits is critical for any coach. Ensuring people are heard and others are not overly dominating is part of how great coaches improve safety and drive empowerment in teams & individuals. If a squad and/or enterprise coach can’t read the room, they can’t truly be effective.
- Flexible application of Lean & Agile frameworks – All organisations are different with the challenges they face into and the outcomes they are prioritising for their customers. There are often legacy technology, process, and cultural challenges to navigate so it is critical that coaches adjust their application of lean & agile frameworks accordingly. At The Agility Concept, we use maturity curves to assess, measure, and plan the application of change in a lean agile & scrum sense.
In our experience if you have coaches that are evangelical & methodical in their approach, this is a red flag. An example of this is getting caught up on industry terminology – if the organisation has called something different than an industry standard, then they should go with what the organisations common language is, not what it ‘should be’ according to the letter of an agile framework law.
- Continuous improvement focus – The feedback loop is critical in any delivery environment (don’t think that just applies to agile delivery). Great coaches will constantly look for feedback both with the individuals & teams they work with, and themselves. Step change improvement, no matter how small, is part of the journey great coaches will enable. So, make sure feedback is always part of the agenda coupled with the implementation of the feedback to drive a culture of continuous improvement across your leadership, teams, and individuals.
- Fact based Insights (backed by data) – Being able to translate fact based delivery data against the behavioural findings of leadership, teams, and individuals is critical for coaches. To be able to continuously drive a change journey, setting a baseline, goals, and being able to illustrate the progress to achieving those goals (via quantitative & qualitative data) makes a big difference for people staying the course of a change journey.
Wrapping up...
In closing, we’ve seen a lot of good & bad agile coaches across a broad range of industries we’ve had the pleasure of working in. Knowing what to focus and when is a culmination of the above traits, and is a sign of a great coach. If you have a coach that exhibits this, hold on to them! Great coaches will give you return on your investment many times over.
Also, It’s important to note that coaching results can be mixed if leadership is not onboard with an agile change journey. This is more often than not game changing for a coach at any level. So, if leadership is not onboard to begin with then our recommendation would be to take a different approach than hiring a coach – which we’re more than happy to talk to you about.
So, if you’re hiring an agile/enterprise/scrum/squad/leadership/delivery coach (there’s so many isn’t there!) consider the thinking above, we have years of experience in this stuff! And if you want to bounce some ideas or thoughts off us, feel free to get in touch for a chat.
Nick Wallis
Nick is a Co-Founder, Director, & Principal Consultant with The Agility Concept and has 15+ years experience in project delivery and transformation & change across a variety of industries including Banking, Mining, & Government. Nick is also a certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) and has advised & coached leaders from some of Australia’s most well known organisations in value stream management, operating models, lean portfolio management. agile ways of working, scrum, offering game changing program & project delivery insights.
