The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

TL;DR

This study explores the multifaceted role of agile coaches across organizations, highlighting their traits, skills, and impact on team and organizational agility through interviews with practitioners.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of agile coaching practices, traits, and enablers, offering practical advice for organizations to enhance coaching effectiveness.

Findings

Agile coaches influence team effort and organizational strategies.

Essential traits include empathy, listening, and diplomacy.

Coaches require authority to implement organizational changes.

Abstract

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semistructured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.