Five Ways in Which Having a Team of Coaches Around Will Help You Skyrocket as an Agile Coach

Many people in the Agile community believe it is better to work individually or as a consultant rather than internally as a team. I defend the idea that the opposite is the best.

The single-person approach can easily fall into several issues. I think this common opinion sits in the fact that the industry is full of consultants who share more content, and therefore, we usually see them as an example. As a result, there is a lack of visibility on how working together as an internal coaching force can help you grow as an Agile Coach to your higher potential and scale the impact for the company.

From faster feedback loops to experimentation, I have listed here five ways in which working inside a team can help you grow as an Agile Coach.

Peer exchange and peer coaching

When faced with challenging situations, assemble your team and benefit from collective wisdom.

If you have exhausted your ideas, avoid going in circles and try something new. Share your case with the team and reach new proposals, free from confirmation bias.

If you have a team around, this is faster and easier to organize than waiting for a meetup or looking for opinions in a support group and will help you move forward when you get stuck.

Coaches rotation

Consider switching the teams you support with one of your colleagues to bring a fresh start to your coaching engagements.

Sometimes you work for so long with a team that you are not neutral anymore, or you find a different coaching style beneficial for your service. If your supported teams are up for the challenge, having someone with a different mindset and set of tools can be what they need.

For you, as a Coach, this will prevent that you burn out or having the feeling you need to keep hitting the wall no matter what.

Shorten your feedback loops

Ensure frequent feedback in your team because no one can better help you improve than those who share your role.

After every team meeting, when you see other team members facilitate, when reading their communication, as often as you can, engage in kind feedback exchange. Respectfully challenge each other and highlight what you observed to be especially valuable.

We usually execute the daily work individually, so having an external perspective from someone who understands the context and can serve as a mirror is invaluable.

Use the Agile Team as a Lab

When you want to test a meeting format, new tool, or any group technique, your colleagues can provide you with a safe environment where you can try, gather results and iterate.

There will be cases when you do not want to run your experiments directly with the teams you coach because changing a tool can be risky, the team is hesitant to change, or you want to test how long some group dynamics can take to execute. In those situations, your teammates can be your beta testers.

This benefit is among my favorite ones as my experience is that, in just one go, the number of improvements and observations you can get would take you several rounds if you would not have around people who know what to observe.

Shadow each other interactions

Whether you use it as a feedback mechanism for the coach that is being shadowed or not, observing another coach in action will give you direct access to her mind and toolset.

If this would not be an issue for the people working with your colleague, silently observing them will give you a direct insight into a differet way of doing things than you do. Also, and not so often mentioned, you will be able to read the whole group without being part of the interaction so you can have a more neutral and high-level perspective.

This approach is typical for Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters in training. Still, it can also be super valuable for anyone, as it provides a unique point of view that otherwise, you would very rarely have the opportunity to experience.

My first experience as a Scrum Master was a lonely gig.

Sure it gave me a lot of “in the field experience,” thick skin, and strong foundations of what an Agile initiative means when you start it from scratch, but once I was ready, a team approach was what I was craving.

In my last two positions as an Agile Coach, I experienced the privilege of working surrounded by a team I feel made me grow exponentially because of these five and many other reasons.

Since I transitioned to a new role as a Tech Transformation Lead, my old team is looking for a new colleague who wants to grow with them and help them grow.