back to notes

What a Agile Coach does

Note from Rusty: If you want a list of things to do for the action oriented people in you group, ask yourselves the following question:

How do we put the below things in place, or at least start to, ideally before you start your transformation, but at least while you are executing your Agile Transformation. You know your organization better than I do. Or at least you think you do. I will guarantee you I know some small parts better than you do. This is not a challenge to you or meant to be disrespectful in any way. It is meant to let you know just a small portion of the value of an Agile Coach and Scrum Master. We have our ears to the ground all day long.

A coach is not empowered to tell you what to do but a coach is empowered to bring things to your attention.
When metrics become a target they lose their value.
Change occurs most quickly when all people are invested in the process at the same time.
No system can evolve faster than it's Leaders.
Individual Development is too slow and often disconnected from business realities.
Team building is necessary and great but does not address entrenched behaviors from individual Leaders.
Leadership teams must evolve together and quickly.
Even though we are not always with you, we are always conferring about you, putting together pieces of the puzzle from a systemic point of view.
Team building is great but does not address the entrenched behaviors of individual Leaders.
One to one coaching does not address the systemic dynamics.
Changing the entire system is the solution.
We provide tools to surface ideas from every corner of the organization.
Leaders and teams are at a crossroads.
We help you grow and evolve.

Unpacking, examining and evolving a series of symmetrical and interrlated behaviors.

We help to expose powerful and invisible forces that are driving and holding back your progress.

Agile Coaches skillfully make those forces visible freeing you up to evolve even faster than your competition.

And Agile Coaches keep at it, with you, until a range of possibilities appear from inside of your leaders, your employees and your teams in a way that promotes ownership and follow through.

This results in heretofore unprecedented innovation and excellerated execution and accountability.

This is accomplished through skillful honesty, diligent introspection, and high quality dialog.

We help you make the necessary mindset realizations needed to achieve a greater Business Agility

We help you think things through differently.

We help facilitate rapid improvement and performance.

Any behavior, good or bad, is rapidly balanced by reciprocal behaviors across teams.

Changing the system is the solution.

Agile Coaches have the advantage of being able to observe and work at individual, team, leader, and systemic levels. It is a rare advantage for an organization to have coaching that can work in all four of these levels, effectively at the same time. And they have the support from and force multiplier of Scrum Masters at the multi-team level.

Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters introduce micro shifts using differentiation, triangulation, and alliances which produce macro results.

Agile Coaches help leadership see things through a Business Agility lens and, more importantly, through an internal change lens.

Perhaps we might see the perennial ‘communication’ problem as a symptom of systems where Feedback is not sufficient, or the fact that the idea of obtaining good feedback from customers is still a relatively new idea for many companies.