Written by Before we proceed to discuss the career coach for agile, first of all, we should know that what are the qualities and skills which is needed for it.
The Skills Required for a Coach
- A relationship of equals where the coach and coachee have mutual understanding and respect is critical.
- The ability to maximize resources and inspire, in a similar way to that required of mentoring.
- The ability to recognize strengths and challenge the individual being coached, in order to propel them forward.
- The skill to tackle problems head-on and not dwell, or allow the coachee, to dwell on them.
- Ability to raise awareness and responsibility both with the individual being coached but also throughout an overall office and organizational environmental level.
- The skill to make it real, meaning finding the right balance of interpersonal skills and the practical skills to convert discussions into actions
How to become an Agile Coach?
Following are some points which make a successful Agile Coach.
Agile Fundamentals: Your Agile fundamentals should be very Strong. That means as a person, you should be “Agile” and have faith and a strong understanding of Agile Manifesto Values and Principles. In addition, you should be clear about Scrum Values and how they impact the teams and organizations.
Work as a Scrum Master: The first step in becoming an Agile Coach is to have worked as a Scrum Master. This helps you to understand team dynamics and help experiment with your ideas within the team. I do not believe someone can become an Agile Coach without working as a Scrum Master.
Organizational Cultures: You need to understand what are various types of organizational cultures (example: Competing, Controlling, Collaborative, Creative) and how Structure, Policies, Procedures, People, Tools work in those types of cultures. Also, understand how you can help those organizations to become more Agile without compromising their culture.
Leadership Types: Different leaders behave and work in different ways. So unless you understand what are various leadership types (example: Expert Leaders, Achiever Leaders, and Catalyst Leaders) and accordingly you need to choose the coaching models to help those leaders to be more agile in their role.
Know beyond Scrum: As an Agile Coach, you need to help organizations to transform into Agile ways of working and Scrum is one way to implement Agile. So depending upon the need there may be other frameworks and methods that may be required as part of transformation (Example: Kanban). So, it is important to have deeper knowledge and experience in other frameworks.
Technical Practices & Tools awareness: As a Coach, you should help your organization in optimizing the tools and technical practices. So having knowledge and experience in such practices as Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and so on will be an added advantage.
Professional Coaching: You should have a Coaching Mindset and you should be familiar with Professional Coaching and various coaching competencies such as Active Listening, Powerful Questions, Creating Awareness. You also need to know a bunch of change management models such as GROW, ADKAR, SCARF, etc which are useful in coaching the teams and beyond.
Certifications: A few certifications you can try to achieve which helps you to shape up your career as an Agile Coach, here are a few that we suggest.
Scrum Alliance CTC (Certified Team Coach): This certification helps you to become an effective Team Coach.
Scrum Alliance CEC (Certified Enterprise Coach): This certification helps you become an enterprise Agile Coach.
ICP ACC (IC Agile Certified Professional – Agile Coaching): This certification helps you understand various Agile coaching models, practices, and tools.