What are the three things about Agile Coaches before you hire?
As a hiring manager who has hired Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters and working alongside them, I have learned a few things about Agile Coaches and how their competencies either make or break your outcome. This post focuses on aligning the hiring decision to find the right fit with your business environment.
Before we get to the gist of it, there are three premises you should acknowledge before you start hiring Agile Coaches.
Firstly, you cannot expect your Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters to know everything about Agile coaching. They are as human as you and I. They might have deep knowledge and ability in some competencies but not in every competency in the Agile Coaching Institute’s Agile Coach Competency Framework.
Secondly, certifications can only tell you what they have learned and know. Know, and know-how is two distinct aspects. They are not the same. Knowing does not mean you have the know-how or ability to show how to do something. It is like I know what a cake is. Can I bake a cake from scratch? Can I show you how to bake a cake?
The Agile Coach is not the issue when the outcome misses your expectation. The problem is a misalignment between your hiring requirement and the business environment you are operating. What works in another company does not mean it will work in yours. There are driving factors you need to know first-hand in your company before hiring an Agile Coach.
Now that I have shared my premises, here is what I recommend when you want to bring the right Agile Coach to support your Agile initiative.
What are the three steps to hiring the right Agile Coach?
First Step – Why do you want to hire an Agile Coach?
Only you can answer that question. You don’t have to hire an Agile Coach because you want to. There are other types of abilities to help you deliver an outcome. They might not have the Agile Coach job title. But assuming you have a strong reason and want to bring in an Agile Coach, the next step will be to decide your hiring requirement.
Second Step – Diagnose your Agile Positioning in your Company
Ask yourself the following questions about your company’s Agile knowledge and reception.
Agile Knowledge
- Do the people in your business/team know what Agile is?
- Have your business/team members received any Agile training or certification?
- Do people outside your business/team understand what Agile is?
- How do you rate the Agile knowledge in your company?
Agile Reception
- Are people in your business/team interested and receptive to Agile?
- Are people outside your business/team receptive to Agile influencing their way of working? Or at least want you to adopt Agile to deliver business outcomes.
- Are stakeholders and leadership in your company receptive and supporting Agile?
- Are other business units or departments, like Finance, Project Office, Human Resources, or Sales, receptive to Agile? Do they take part in your Agile initiative?
Third Step – Find your Agile Positioning in your Company
After the above, answer the following two questions honestly.
- Do your company have low, medium, or high Agile knowledge?
- Do you have a low, medium, or high Agile Reception in your company?
Check your Low, Medium or High responses to Agile Knowledge and Reception below:
- If you have Low Agile Knowledge and Low Agile Reception, you are a Novice.
- You are an Advocator if you have Low Agile Knowledge and High Agile Reception.
- If you have High Agile Knowledge and Low Agile Reception, you are a Follower.
- If you have Medium Agile Knowledge and Medium Agile Reception, you are a Mainstreamer.
- If you have High Agile Knowledge and High Agile Reception, you are a Trendsetter.
Scan the 2x2 Agile Positioning Matrix below and find your Agile Positioning.
Next, check out my hiring recommendation based on the Agile Positioning Matrix.
Agile Coach Hiring Recommendation Based on Agile Positioning
Novice
I recommend sending your people to certified Agile courses first. You can hire an Agile Coach, but your Agile Coach will struggle to meet your goals because your operating factors are incompatible with or support an Agile environment. Your best bet might be to hire an Agile Trainer to train your business or teams first.
I would also recommend that you work on advocating the benefit of Agile with your stakeholders and leadership to create interest, buy-in and curiosity first.
You might start with one team to experiment to prove to your business that Agile is the way to go.
Advocator
An excellent position to be in, seriously. Assuming your stakeholders and leadership are receptive to Agile, I guess you have received top cover and buy-in to start your Agile journey. You need to increase the Agile knowledge among the people in your business or teams.
The recommendation is to send your people to the Agile school first. Then get an experienced Agile Coach to show your people how to apply their newfound Agile knowledge to improve your business processes and development.
Ensure that your Agile Coaches can prove those experiences by articulating how they intend to deliver your goals in your interviews with them. Do not just look at their resume. Go out and have a coffee meeting with them to explore this collaboration.
If you are after an Agile Framework, this position is also where a framework like SAFE or LSS or Scrum or Kanban has the most conversion and success factors. You might even outsource the entire framework implementation to professionals and not do any hiring yourself after all. Easy. It’s your call.
Follower
Although you can celebrate that your business or teams had the Agile knowledge and might be running in an Agile manner, you struggle with scale. So, your challenge might be scaling.
Your sub-optimisation (i.e., being the only Agile team in the supply chain) will eventually frustrate your team because they will be affected by upstream and downstream processes. You need a different type of Agile Coach here.
Before you hire an Agile Coach, ask yourself if you should advocate, lobby, and get executive buy-in to promote Agile Reception in your company first.
Or do you need an Agile Transformation Coach or an Enterprise Agile Coach to help you to advocate, champion and lobby for Agile adoption with your business or leadership?
Moving up the vertical axis of Agile Knowledge is easy. Moving to the right side of the horizontal axis of Agile Reception is harder. Not impossible. Just challenging, and you need a different mindset.
You cannot preach Agile Reception to businesses without knowing their needs and what is important to them. You must pitch for the bottom-line impact, project’s Return On Investment, measurable service or product improvement, customer satisfaction, speed-to-market or tangible business benefits that resonate with your business.
Mainstreamer
This is between a rock and a hard place. Your challenge is like when you are a Follower. You cannot scale beyond your current limit. You are not getting the promised results from the Agile framework you adopted. You start changing things around or checking if a new framework might work. For example, SAFE or LSS or any combination of Agile methods.
Your Agile Coaches do not seem to be effective in helping you scale your operations. You are frustrated with them. You keep hearing “excuses”. In response, you keep looking for more extraordinary Agile Coaches to help you. But is that it?
You must decide on your strategy first before you start hiring for the right Agile Coach. Is your plan about moving up the vertical axis of Agile Knowledge or to the right side of the horizontal axis of Agile Reception?
It is your call.
If your strategy is vertical, keep hoping that doing the same will change the outcome. If it is the horizontal one, find those that can help you lobby and position your Agile offering.
Trendsetter
Congratulations. You are one of the few leading companies in the realm of Spotify or Netflix or those with high Agile maturity that we heard about. We look to copy your style and methods. You don’t need SAFE or LSS. You have your own way and approach. In fact, you are designing new systems to overcome your limitation.
The Agile Coaches you need are those that can sustain or grow your business and help you go beyond your current limit. You hire Agile Coaches to replace those that have learned from you or have moved on to recycle your method elsewhere.
You need Agile Coaches that have surpassed the Shu Ha Ri realms. They are the ones you need.
Conclusion
Now that you know what type of Agile Coaches will fit your business environment, does it match with who you want to hire in the first place? Does it match with why you want to hire an Agile Coach? If not, what do you need to do next?
Finally, let me know if this is helpful and works for you as a hiring manager. And for Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters reading this, let me know if this helps your potential hiring manager make sense of their business environment and how you will fit into their requirements and contribute to achieving their outcome.
p/s: This article was first posted in Linkedin on 30 July 2021.