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What makes a good agile coach for companies?

Companies are progressively adopting agile ways of working in their operating models. However, the degree of change and transformation required is not as simple as replicating agile practices across teams. Investing in agile coaches allow companies to sustain and scale an agile transformation.

At its core, the agile coach is a change agent who will help teams or leaders to adopt new ways of working with agile mind-sets. It is a vital element in any company’s transformation model aiming at developing more modern ways of working. The agile coach will bring a culture of high performance and will train people across all layers of the company to ensure the new practices and behaviours are understandable to everyone.

But what makes a good agile agent? Some intrinsic qualities are necessary and can be identified as the following:

  1. Self-less: agile coaches have the soft skills and behaviors to be responsive to a certain environment, be empathetic and active listeners. They use various communication techniques empower people. The coach is the one influencing and has the self-less role to let the teams be in the light.
  2. Business acumen: they are experts in the industry they are working with and understand its relevant trends. Thereof, they do recognize the commercial impacts of transformations they are bringing. This can be translated in various ways: productivity, customer satisfaction, market shares…
  3. Agile mastery: they understand the mind-sets underpinning agile ways of working and can translate them to operational teams. Knowing that transformations may imply new technologies, coaches can also be experts in software development and are successful in talking with IT teams.
  4. Coaching: a good agile coach is a person that can remain comfortable in uncomfortable situations. It has the capacity to identify what is dysfunctional and will explore solutions and strategies to overcome them. Besides, it masters in challenging people so they can evolve, make the right decisions and create growth.

Many profiles will claim to be agile coaches but few of them truly possess the right intrinsic qualities listed above and the necessary skills.

Various skills and numerous learning paths will be necessary for any coach to be successful. On the other side, companies need to value and understand what agility coaches do to succeed in their transformation efforts.