What is an Agile Coach?

The answer to that question according to the Scrum Alliance is:

An agile coach helps individuals, teams, and entire enterprises embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values. This culture shift helps people and organizations continue to thrive in the ever-changing world of work.

That sounds good to me, so let’s dig a bit deeper into what is the actual work that an agile coach does in order to help individuals, teams and entire enterprises.

Does an agile coach actually coach?

To answer that you need to find out what it actually takes to embrace a culture shift based on proven human-centric agile principles, practices, and values.

Obviously an agile coach needs to convey values and somehow encourage or ensure that people actually live these values. First think that comes to my mind when talking about values is, you need to live them yourself in order to convey them to others. An agile coach acts as a role model for values, in order words leads by example. Apart from that an agile coach needs to make these values known and raise awareness for the potential gap between actually behavior and behavior according to these values. That can be done in different styles, from teaching, mentoring or actual coaching. From my experience this alone requires skills such as empathy, emotional intelligence, feedback and good communication, just to name a few.

The values are backed by principles or “proven human centric principles”. For anything that’s human centric the above mentioned skills are of high importance. Also for principles and agile coach should lead by example. My favorite principles for example is “Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done”. An agile coach should act in line with that and don’t make things complicated. This requires skills to reduce complexity, thinking in systems and causalities, identifying the smallest possible change in order to create a certain impact.

In order to convey principles and the corresponding change to other people and agile coach needs to be able to teach, guide or mentor and coach. Depending on the individuals, teams or organization the approach how to convey principles and communication style can vary and needs to be adapted to the context.

There are several practices that actually implement principles. These practices are known and people need to learn and implement them. This again can be done in different ways, teaching, advising, mentoring, etc.

So does an agile coach actually coach?

Yes, partially but not only. The values, principles and practices are core work of any agile coach. Along the way there is a lot of work (for me it’s fun, challenge and learning) that needs to be done, such as managing team dynamics, facilitate team development towards self-organization, ensuring the individuals and teams have the environment to be productive, grow and flourish. Therefore, agile coaches need to be able to talk with managers, executives and directors on eye level. On the other hand agile coaches also to simple things like serving fruits and snack for a standard meeting.

–

The variety of activities and skills needed is huge for an agile coach. That is on the one hand a challenge and requires some experience in professional life, on the other hand exciting and fun. An Agile Coach certainly does a lot more that what I’ve outlined above, but the core is basically that. Each individual, team or organization is different, so please let me know in the comments below what else you do as an agile coach or what you have seen agile coaches doing.