Agile Coach Qualities - Progress Report

Representing the work of the "Agile Coach Qualities" working group, including: Nora Sunhilt Beyerle, Diane Brady, Craig Carrington, Lorie Gordon, Michaela Hutfles, Diana Larsen, and Neal Peterson.

When you work with a great agile coach, you know it. But have you ever wondered what qualities make an agile coach highly impactful?

The Agile Coach Qualities Project started as an exploration by a group of practicing agile coaches from AgilePDX & AgileSEA: a discovery and brainstorming session to wrap our heads around the basic question of "What are the qualities of an outstanding agile coach?". We collaborated to discover, organize, and create connections among the diverse set of qualities that an agile coach may encounter along their career journey. The exploration took the group where we expected to go and also beyond, to new and unexpected places.

As we worked our way through this ever-evolving effort, we confronted questions about our fundamental assumptions: Who is an agile coach and what is agile coaching? What problem will this work solve? For whom? What’s in it for an agile coach? Who else might be interested? What’s in it for them? 

Addressing the key questions

We grounded our work by defining “agile coach” as a person whose various coaching practices have a foundation in the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, extended by closely related principles, such as the Disciplined Agile Manifesto, Manifesto for Agile HR Development, Business Agility Institute statement, and similar works.  

Next we discussed the problems faced by agile coaches and the potential solutions offered by examining the set of qualities we discovered. We defined four problems and related solutions. 

A. New or experienced agile coaches, wondering how to start or enhance their professional development come face-to-face with the overwhelming volume of potential resources of varying quality.

Solution: Offering support and guidance for a learning journey, through:

• Describing potential paths of progress
• Offering clues about possible next steps to developing increasing expertise, and even mastery, in various areas
• Offering pointers to choices about the combination of qualities each agile coach may want to develop.
• Providing indicators for why some coaches are more impactful (or differently impactful) than others in various situations. 

B. Experienced agile coaches may find it difficult to explain what they do to others.

Solution: Propose a common language with explanations and connections to the vast scope of agile coaching qualities, through:

• Providing a differentiator or comparison frame of reference to inspire partnership or collaboration, for networking or resumes
• Clarifying that no individual agile coach can do everything well (Unlike the “Hungry Hippo” in the children’s games, none of us can grab it all.)
• Supplying ways to examine options for creating an individualized path 

C. People working with agile coaches or embarking on the practice of agile coaching lack a clear understanding of what it means to work with or as an agile coach

Solution: Help teams and leaders know what to expect or ask for when working with a coach:

• Understanding that each coach brings different combinations of qualities, attributes, or skills
• Negotiating what the work might look like, how it’s done, and how it fits into or changes the work culture.
• Seeking agile coaching team members who provide the right mix for specific situations (for internal Agile Centers of Excellence or from external coaching partners, etc.)

D. Hiring managers who need to recruit/hire an agile coach struggle to identify the most suitable person for the role. “Will a novice coach suit our business purpose? Shall I develop from within or hire? Will I satisfy our business needs with a good-enough coach, or do we need a great coach?”

Solution: Offer clues to managers/leaders who have no or unsatisfying prior experience with recruiting and hiring for agile coaching roles, in:

• Understanding that coaches don’t all bring the same qualities, attributes, or skills
• Finding the right mix of these traits is needed for their situation
• Setting boundaries on what they can expect, or not expect, from an agile coach or agile coaching group

How we worked together

In the Spring of 2019, Diana Larsen posted a question on two agile-related LinkedIn groups: “I’m conducting a little survey. When you think of the Agile coaches you most admire, which one or two of their qualities or skills stand out the most? #agile #coaching”. She received 100+ responses. Diana, ever the collaborator, thought, “I need help with making sense of all this data.” She turned to her local user group, AgilePDX.  

When the offer of this volunteer opportunity appeared in the AgilepDX Slack space, six folks stepped up. Neal Peterson, Diane Brady, Lorie Gordon, Craig Carrington, Nora Beyerle, and, in a surprise twist, Michaela Hutfles from the Seattle agile community. Our group started meeting in early September and continued on alternate Saturday mornings. During this time we realized connections, distinctions, and interactions among the qualities. 

After six months devoted to parsing the data this way and that, adding pertinent qualities into the mix, and deciding how best to organize it, the result was ready for feedback. After sharing the information with our communities at work, various user groups, and at local conferences, we received lots of comments, opinions, and suggestions. The reviewers saw holes that we’d missed. Their feedback showed us new benefits and applications, making our work better and richer. Now we are ready to share an overview with you.

Building the scaffolding

To help us organize and make sense of all the information, we created a scaffolding of sorts. This scaffolding helped us grow this work. Parts, or perhaps all of it, will be removed before we’re done. As the base of the scaffolding we identified seven themes across all of the qualities. We used each theme as a container to hold different sets of thematically-related qualities.

Next, we adapted the concept of Shu-Ha-Ri to place the qualities in a progressive order within each theme, from foundational, to advanced, and on to mastery. This concept helped us imagine hypothetical pathways a coach might take as they journey through to mastery within a particular theme or even across themes. Using the Shu-Ha-Ri scaffolding also helped us discover some gaps, which we filled in with additional qualities. 

Emerging themes

Six themes emerged in our scaffolding, along with a seventh that we set aside for now. (More on that seventh theme later.) The six themes are:

1. Commit to Ongoing Personal Development
2. Encourage Learning
3. Build Strong Collaborative Working Relationships
4. Execution / Delivery Excellence
5. Related Disciplines and Areas of Practice
6. Think, Plan, Invest with the System in Mind

The seventh theme, Coaching as a Business, included the skills and qualities a coach might use to market/promote themselves, find and persuade a client to hire them, and administer their coaching career effectively. While we see the value of this theme (and therefore we might choose to develop it in the future), it seemed to us it was an “odd duck” in the midst of the other six themes. In other words, if you don’t grow as a coach in the other themes, you may not have much of a service to sell.

Exploring any of the six themes in more depth started to reveal the essential qualities that an agile coach can develop at any stage in their development journey and career. This led us to notice connections among qualities, both within a theme, and across themes.

We are not proposing a “one size fits all” set of qualities and themes. Nor should every coach have every quality. Different individual coaches will dive deeper into some themes than others, yet both of those coaches could emerge as great. This is more a choose-your-own adventure and less a step-by-step, how-to instruction manual.

Exploring some of the qualities and themes: examples

The Commit to Ongoing Personal Development theme includes the quality of Active Learning as a foundational intention for coaching. As an agile coach begins their journey, their directed learning builds both skills and understanding. The importance of a focus on learning can’t be overstated. It will serve them throughout their career. This quality never leaves, though it may change. As the agile coaches’ professional development continues, we see the emergence of Wisdom: Integration of All Experience and Knowledge. Wisdom enables the coach to discover more sophisticated questions to pursue. The wiser a coach becomes the more they discover there is more to learn. 

The theme of Encourage Learning begins with a quality that encourages the effective use of Facilitation Skills. This includes familiarity with group collaboration techniques and meeting process design. It is needed to guide groups of people through a variety of sessions focused on learning, improvement, and decision making. The Encourage Learning theme relates to a coach’s ease with adopting and adapting pre-defined group process techniques and other group learning activities to their toolkit. Later in the development of this theme we see ways more experienced coaches will offer customized learning events to suit a particular need or context.  

The Execution / Delivery Excellence theme begins with the quality of Knowledge of Helpful Technical Practices & Tools. Here the agile coach underscores their role with clients as a collaborative and informed partner, meeting each team or leader where they are. Weaving in the thread of learning and knowledge qualities we touched on earlier in the Commit to Ongoing Personal Development theme, this is one of a multitude of ways these qualities can symbiotically support each other across themes.

If we look ahead to the intermediate stages of an agile coach's journey in the Execution / Delivery Excellence theme, a coach might apply a more judicious application of their technical knowledge, exhibiting a quality to guide their clients toward more Balance [between] Efficiency & Efficacy. This requires unlearning and setting aside what one knows, in order to learn newer ways than the tried and true methods that have been honed to efficiency at the cost of greater effectiveness.

Finally, let’s turn our attention for a moment to the theme of Build Strong, Collaborative Work Relationships. Even the most basic qualities in this theme are quite advanced professional stances and are unlikely to be developed effectively without also harnessing some of the mid-level qualities in the Encourage Learning and Commit to Ongoing Personal Development themes. For example, exhibiting proficiency in the quality of Emotional Range includes awareness of EQ, empathy, and knowing how to “read a room.” Further advanced qualities to develop include: Comfortable with Vulnerability, Candor, and Courage; Talk with Leaders as your Peers; and an ineffable quality we called Social Center of Gravity.

In Process: Looking forward to what’s next

Working as a collaborative group, we have spent eight months, so far, exploring the six themes in depth, as well as building out the model for our own use and to share more broadly. We believe our experience compiling the agile coach qualities has strengthened and deepened our understanding of our own professional development journeys; both where we are now and what we have yet to explore. Based on the feedback we’ve received so far, we feel confident that many of our colleagues will find it helpful as well. Each time we’ve asked for review on drafts/versions, the reviewers have told us they hunger for more. 

We’ve identified two parallel next steps for our work together:

1. We plan to refine our graphic representation of the themes and qualities. We seek a two dimensional portrayal that shows the three dimensional, sequential, yet non-linear nature of this learning.
2. We have begun writing about each of the qualities in more depth, using a common structure for each description and the links among them. 

As we work toward the completion of these tasks, we will determine the best way to publish the entirety to the wider community. We look forward to sharing our work with you.