Organizing agile coaches

Photo by Xuan Nguyen on Unsplash

We have seen articles of late, that talk about organizations getting rid of ‘agile’ roles CapitalOne being the most recent example and it got me thinking.

There are many tropes of Agile and Agile Coaches that have exhausted organizations of late and it is really challenging for them to understand, let alone justify the cost of such a misunderstood role

Is the ‘agile coach’ a long-lived role within an organization, is it a transitional role, is it an anti-pattern or a different beast all together? I do not think there is a simple answer to this topic, it really depends on your organizations reason for change.

How are the agile coaches going to be organized?

• is there a central team / competence center?
• is there a federate model in place so that coaches are closer to the organizations they are working with?
• how are you funding the agile coaches?
• how are your agile coaches interacting in terms of a team and across the organization (are they in a community of practice)
• what is the relationship between your agile coaches and your scrum masters / delivery managers?

How are the agile coaches aligned in terms of strategy, goals and practices?

• Is the team of agile coaches aligned with a common set of priorities and goals of the coaching organization?
• Are the coaches aligned to the priorities of the people they are ‘coaching’
• Are the coaches there to be long lived with a given set of teams or do they roam to new areas after either a period of time or some kind of adjustment to the environment?

How are the agile coaches measured for performance?

• do the agile coaches have a set of performance goals that are unique to them, the team or the broader coaching population?
• what are the incentives in place for an agile coach, are they optimizing for themselves (e.g. internal recognition of doing a good job, being seen as helpful, having completed lots of training or are they acting as a compliance / policing function)
• is the agile coach there to stir things up and challenge the status quo on how the team(s) are performing?
• is the agile coach there to make the team happy or push the team to conform or perform?

Are you building, hiring, or augmenting?

• If you are treating agile coaches as an accelerator / change agent, you are likely to be hiring people that are used to going into an environment and then leaving after some kind of agreed context.
• This can result in local optimization, minor changes that make teams happy but do not embed the long-lasting behaviours of continuous improvement. This often happens when consultants come in, roll things out and then move on.
• External agile coaches are there to get paid to do a job — so they will often have easier ways of measuring things that seem useful but are often superficial outputs that don’t translate into team or business outcomes.

Some options

• Hire many agile coaches into full time roles
• Hire some agile coaches into full time roles
• Hire many coaches as contracting roles
• Hire some agile coaches into contracting roles
• Identify internal champions

When it comes to hiring agile coaches, I have written about this before.

Looking at the article I wrote more than a year ago, my view on how an agile coach fits within an organization has become more nuanced after seeing the effects of agile coaches in an organization with local incentives.

What is the career path for an agile coach?

Depending on how your organization is setup, there may not be a lot of clear options for your agile coaches, depending on the size of the organization you may have options like:

• Agile coach to more senior leadership
• Agile coach to more teams
• Specialized focus on areas such as product or technical practices
• Manager / leader of other agile coaches
• Taking on a delivery role (e.g. becoming a product manager, delivery manager etc..)

What is the talent pipeline for future agile coaches in your organization?

• Regardless of the approach you decide to take, thinking about the future of this role in your organization is really important if you want people to stick around and if you want to build a pipeline so that you don’t have to go to market to find another agile coach who doesn’t know your organization. Things like setting up a competency model can be helpful, treating the role as a real profession with a few possible paths for how one can get into the role, establishing a team who train, mentor and coach future agile coaches within the organization. Just be careful to not rely on linear models that follow a step-by-step approach as agile coaching is a broad set of common practices but does not have the boundaries that these models suggest, especially if certification is involved.
• If you are becoming an agile coach you really need to get used to the idea of ambiguity and constant learning, if you are not learning anything new you are already falling behind. Any ‘Agile coach’ who claims they do not read or invest in their learning anymore as they have done it long enough is missing emerging practices and broader disciplines like complexity science, anthropology etc.
• When ‘coaching’ keeps an eye out for enthusiasts and champions who show a natural enthusiasm to the approach and practices.
• Invest time in mentoring if they show interesting in becoming an agile coach, in my experience these are the people who will show the most promise within the organization as long as they have the support they need to develop and the expertise around them to deal with challenges they face that they’ve not yet had the exposure to in the past e.g. dealing with conflict, toxic leadership etc.
• These are all tricky topics that require ability and practice so going into such a cold environment can be dangerous. This is where having a small team of coaches who are there to coach the other coaches can be fruitful — it gives them a support mechanism to fall back on and enables them to broader their learning and experience from people who have learned many lessons in other organizations but may not have your organizations context.
• This makes for a powerful combination — expert agile coach and an internal coach working together.

Hard won lessons…

• One of the key observations over the past few years is that if you only hire people from outside of your organization to act as agile coaches you end up with more opinions on how things should be done than you may desire…
• Agile coaches are quite opinionated people and do not often work in teams so if you are bringing in a lot of individual contributors who are used to working solo — this can cause a lot of disruption internal competition based on who has the most ability etc. a kind of natural pecking order of who knows the most…
• This is a potentially dangerous scenario if you have individuals working on agile coaching assignments and there is not an incentive for those people to work together to share knowledge, to pair and work on things together.
• This is where you can work as a team to produce shared goals for the coaching team so that you have a mixture of goals that are based on their individual coaching focus, a goal around team collaboration and a goal around overall community contribution e.g. presenting, sharing, teaching, mentoring etc..
• This is one way to express intent to the team so that they know behaviourally you are not looking for a team of individuals acting in isolation but instead a team of practitioners who work together to solve problems, learn, and grow from each other.

In summary… is all hope lost?

• I challenge you to consider the above and review your rationale for your approach on a regular basis.
• Think about how you give your agile coaches and future agile coaches a career pipeline, skill / competency for progression and make sure that they are supported with training, mentoring, and coaching or they will leave.
• Regardless of the approach you take to agile coaches, work with people who have been through similar context before, make sure they are pragmatic (rather than dogmatic) and focused on enabling the teams to be self-sufficient rather than becoming the teams admin / cheer leader.
• Decide on the types of outcomes you are going for and if you think that your organization can reach a stage where it can self-sustain its own continuous improvement and learning through communities of practices and with leadership acting as coaches? If that is achievable then you may not need to have agile coaches long term, you may however need expertise in certain domains such as technical practices, leadership coaching, product coaching etc… there are areas where ‘those who remain’ may end up specializing or contributing.
• A certain type of agile coach, who is used to a rinse and repeat approach — like to go into organizations for a couple of years and help teams get setup but are not interested in finding the underlying cause of hard problems that they may be facing (e.g. architecture. leadership, quality etc..)
• Do not be surprised if those coaches look to move onto the next gig after 18–24 months, they naturally reach a limit with their ability to change and influence and find it easier to move to the next engagement rather than roll up their sleeves and jump into the trenches with the teams.
• This can be ok if you know what you are collectively getting into, this will require clarity, trust and safety in the coaching team so that everyone knows what each other is looking for from the role they were hired to do. There is a time and a place for different types of coaches — just make sure you go in with your eyes open so that you know what is needed at the time and you have the necessary organizational probes in place to know when the coaching approach / stance is working and when it needs to adapt.

Things to look out for…

• Organizations can reach a natural state of equilibrium which could lead to a rejection of agile coaches. You can think about rotation as a way of keeping things fresh and even better if you have coaches working in teams, they can already be more familiar with the domain and teams even if they don’t already know the teams in detail.
• If you bring in an agile coach from another organization — the team(s) will not care how much expertise the agile coach has if they do not understand the business domain the teams are working in. To me this is a case of learning your domain and adopting language that works in your environment rather than coming in waving hands about theoretical practices that the agile coach has used in the past — not in ‘this context’.
• Another scenario I’ve seen many times, is when the agile coach is a ‘professional agile coach’ they get judged for not having ‘delivery’ experience, this can be a particular problem for teams who think they do not need a coach or are sceptical they can learn anything new from an outsider. I find in most cases coming in with an agenda is a surefire way to get kicked out of the room.
• Teams won’t trust you if you are here to implement things, you need to gain their trust and to do that you need to prove value to the team.
• Look for pain points and challenges, go and fix them, no matter how small. This will generate goodwill and eventually the teams will open up to you about the real problems they are facing. Anything they reveal before that is likely to be surface level.