Auditioning an Agile Coach
Do they have the chops?
Most agile coaching certifications today require a test to determine whether someone can become or is an Agile Coach.
It’s typically run as a coaching conversation surrounding a scenario with someone role-playing the client. The test is whether you can conduct an effective professional coaching conversation with the client that aligns with predefined norms or constraints. It usually runs from 15 to 30 minutes.
The test is focused on ICF Professional Coaching principles and standards. These reference links give a fairly good idea of what the coaching conversation should look like and how it should be evaluated—
https://carlyanderson.com/the-flow-of-a-coaching-conversation
https://coachingfederation.org/blog/what-makes-a-great-coaching-session
https://www.coachingoutsidethebox.net/arc-coaching-conversation/
This approach determines if you have sufficient coaching experience or skill to enter a coaching certification program, teach a program, or exit a class and receive a certification. For more advanced certifications, the coaching is judged by several recorded conversations that a master coach reviews.
The Problem
There’s only one problem with this approach.
It only tests the Agile Coach’s ability to Professionally Coach—in other words, their competency and skill in one stance within the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. And it’s even worse: that stance focuses on only asking questions and listening.
It does virtually nothing to validate the depth or breadth of the coach’s agile domain business skills or real-world experience. For example, it doesn’t test—
Their Agile/Lean knowledge.
Their experience to be able to provide contextual advice.
Their experience to share stories of success and failure.
Their ability to mentor a client deeply in transformations.
And their ability to switch stances in service to their client’s agenda.
While it’s relatively easy to orchestrate and validate Professional Coaching skills, I’d argue that it does a poor job of determining if you are a well-rounded and capable Agile Coach.
Another Auditioning Test
I have another test that I’d like to suggest we use to validate the experience and capability of anyone who wants to become or stipulate that they are an Agile Coach.
It’s another scenario, one in which a leadership client is struggling to figure out how to introduce agile organizationally. They are wrestling with a traditional culture and structure.
And here’s the rub: they are NOT looking for questions. We’re not looking for the coach to sit in a professional coaching stance. Instead, we’ll be looking for their ability to sit in—
Agile/Lean Practitioner,
Leading,
and Advising stances.
So, Agile Coach…what experience do you have to share with this client? Create a conversation where you ask questions and provide advice and options for the client to consider.
Coaching Scenario
You’ve begun coaching the CTO of a mid-sized company that has been using SAFe for 3-4 years. They’ve rolled it out across the technology, product, and x-functional teams. They’ve tried to optimize their use of it, but they are essentially a traditional SAFe shop.
Lately, they have been struggling with the value proposition—the overhead versus the ROI of using SAFe. They’ve concluded that they want to move to another scaling framework, but they don’t know exactly what that should look like. The CTO has some minimal experience with LeSS.
She also wants you to help coach ~20 teams to improve their performance. Initially, the teams accelerated in agile ways of working, but their overall performance has dropped significantly in the past year.
They fired their agile coaches after their first year, so the CTO is wondering if that might have contributed to their backsliding.
The CTO is looking for—
Organizational advice around organization & delivery structure options.
Ideas for how to inspire/improve the overall team performance.
How to better connect the technical organization to the product organization & customers.
Determine the size of the “gap” between their current performance and higher performance.
The goal is to sort things out within ~6 months (the duration of the contract your consulting firm signed).
You’ve already established initial rapport with the CTO and coaching agreements, so this session is focused directly on coaching toward her goals.
Of course, you can ask a few questions as you begin in Professional Coaching stance, but you must shift stances as quickly as possible to minimally demonstrate Leading & Advising with Agile / Lean Practitioner experience as your core.
During the coaching conversation, you’ll want to lean into—
Establishing skin-in-the-game with your client.
Partnering with your client.
Co-creating goals with your client.
Solutioning around their top three items.
Dynamics
This is probably more than a 15-minute coaching conversation, so we’ll shoot for 30 minutes and see how you do.
Ok, let’s go…
Wrapping Up
I won’t tell you what passing versus failing looks like in the conversation because it depends.
One key for me is how well the coach leans into the other stances and respects the client while offering broadly and deeply experienced advice. I’m also looking for the coach to take a leadership stance by role modeling and coaching from the front. Finally, I’m looking at the degree to which the coach takes a more systemic view in their coaching.
Why share the scenario?
I’m looking for crowdsourced reactions here to help refine the quality and focus of my evaluation of the coach based on their response.
What would you be looking for?
What would “good” look like in coaching within these stances?
What would “needs improvement” look like?
Ultimately, I hope that we begin to evaluate Agile Coaches on more than just a Professional Coaching stance. Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob
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The moose brings over 35 years of technical and product leadership experience across a broad range of contexts. If you’re stuck and know it, reach out, as I can help.