What Makes a Good Coach?
When I tell people I am an Agile coach, people tend to remember back to coaches that they have had in their past. I have had mentors in my career and coaches in sports back in school. I had plenty of bad coaches that were uninspiring, demotivating, and ineffective. Those were the people that would tell me what I was doing wrong, how lousy I was, and where I would never get. Those also tend to be the coaches that would sit on the sidelines, were in terrible shape, and were not a role model for others to imitate. You probably picture somebody who looks like this:
There were, however, coaches I will never forget. These were the visionaries, who showed me things that I could not see on my own and provided the help and support that made me a better person and more effective on a team.
When I learned about Agile development several years ago, I found that I wanted to be an example of the good coach or mentor. While I felt I accomplished that within my organization as we adopted Agile, I wanted to give other organizations the ability to see what a good coach is. So: what makes a good coach?
A good Agile coach should:
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Be the champion of the process, to help others get excited.
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Have foundational knowledge and experience, to help others gain understanding.
- Focus on what can be improved instead of what is going wrong, to help others focus on continuous improvement.
- Guide the team in the right direction while allowing the team room to make mistakes, to help others learn from experience.
- Have the courage to change what needs to change and to say what needs to be said, to help others deliver sustainable software frequently.
- Be able to listen to what is really going on and to be empathetic, to help others go through the organizational, team, and individual change it takes to become an Agile organization.
- Understand that every organization is different and that Agile needs to be adapted to the organization’s ability and capacity of change, to help others increase their agility at a pace they can handle.
- Enable teams to become self-managing and highly productive, to help others overcome dependence on a coach or management to know how build software right, and instead focus on the right software to build.
- Know what they know and always be looking for things that they ought to know,to help others inspect themselves and continually adapt through learning.
February 18th, 2009 at 10:26 am
It stirkes me that the qualities you have enumerated would be excellent qualities for a ScrumMaster. This raises for me the question: Would it make sense to say that very good ScrumMasters (should) operate as coaches?
February 18th, 2009 at 11:19 am
> Would it make sense to say that very good scrum masters (should) operate as coaches?
Taking the bait meant for Skip, I’ll barge in and say that coaching skills can be useful for a ScrumMaster, but most useful is a conception of oneself as a servant leader. By serving the team in a variety of essential ways, the very good ScrumMaster provides leadership. Coaching, on the other hand, draws on an in-depth knowledge of what it takes to succeed in the endeavor being coached. I maintain that one can be an very good ScrumMaster with a solid understanding of the Scrum framework and a focus on helping the team clear impediments; while those are important for coaches, they are only elements of the skillset required for those who want to be effective coaches.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I would say yes, in fact I have seen ScrumMasters grow into very good coaches. When you get into larger organizations, the role of coach spans many teams. While each ScrumMaster may be able to support the coach within the team, there is a need to have a separate coach at the enterprise level. In those situations, I have seen ScrumMasters that are much more comfortable working within the team as a leader than working across teams.