Agile Coaching Framework

[Rosella Bowlan]

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is a tool for agile coaches, scrum masters, leaders, and anyone who wants to get better at helping teams and organizations grow and deliver sustainable value using agile/Lean principles and practices.

The growth wheel is an open alliance of coaches from around the globe who believe in the mission of "Professionalizing the world of Agile Coaching." They are doing this through the creation of a common vocabulary and framework around agile, agile coaching, and leadership.

Scrum Alliance has been a strong supporter of the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel initiative since its earliest inception. Scrum Alliance has a vision of a world where an agile way of working is so universal, it's simply called working. To achieve this vision the world needs inspiring changemakers and leaders.

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is the natural evolution of Scrum Alliance CEC Emeritus, Lyssa Adkins' Agile Coaching Competency Model on which many of the learning objectives for the Scrum Alliance's scrum master and product owner certifications are based.

Using the growth wheel as a self-assessment tool can help you to determine what is the next step for you in your scrum learning journey. Do you want to improve your team coaching skills? Then the Advanced Certified ScrumMaster course may be the right thing for you. The Agile Coaching Skills - Certified Facilitator program was created to help anyone interested in growing their facilitation competency to the next level. In the future, Scrum Alliance expects to pull more inspiration from the growth wheel to provide our members with paths to their desired career goals.

May 2023 marks the fourth major update to the growth wheel. In this update, all nine competency areas have been fully fleshed out with five stages of skill progression. The wheel is now fully online with future updates planned to be delivered in shorter increments based on usable increments of value.

The latest version of the growth wheel can always be found at AgileCoachingGrowthWheel.org. This includes resources for self-assessment and resource links to books and other learning that can help one grow as an agile leader.

And stay tuned here for future updates on how Scrum Alliance plans to leverage the growth wheel as a tool for our members to grow as the inspiring changemakers and leaders that are needed to change the world of work.

The Agile Coach Competency Framework was developed by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd as part of their work at the Agile Coaching Institute (ACI). The framework has since been used as a reference model globally for Agile Coaches to explore the different competency areas (or stances) to take when supporting agile teams of all shapes and sizes.

This website has been created to discuss, explore and share the Agile Coach Competency Framework under Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) -nc-sa/4.0/

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First, let me give you a brief history of my life in coaching. Around 20 years ago I found XP, Lean and a bit later, Agile. It was exactly what I needed in my life as a Tester and Test Manager. Over the next few years I worked as an Agile Tester, Agile BA, Test Automation guy, a very useless Developer, Product Owner and Scrum Master. Then suddenly people started asking me for advice and guidance, based on my Agile delivery experience, and I kind of fell into the world of Agile Coaching.

My next step, buy a book and start reading. Here I made a great choice by going with Coaching Agile Teams, by Lyssa Adkins, and was first introduced to the Agile Coaching Competency Framework. This framework was brilliant and helped direct my learning and growth over the next few years as I improved my coaching skills. Then, once I felt I had enough years of good experience under my belt, I went for the ICP-ACC Certification. I contacted Simon Powers, who had just set up Adventures with Agile, and he and I attended the course he had arranged with the Agile Coaching Institute, wonderfully presented by Lyssa and Michael Spayd. My hero worship was complete, and the Agile Coaching Competency Framework defined who I was and where I would improve.

The four main areas of activity have not changed from the original, but I have altered the order in which they appear, swapping Mentoring and Facilitating to highlight specific themes. Of course, there will always be some overlap with these four, as they are so closely linked, but hopefully you can recognise the focus I was trying to generate.

By supporting these individuals as they develop insight and grow personally, you help bring about Team and Organisational change at a cultural level as these people work together and implement different ways of thinking and acting. This leads beautifully into the right-hand area of Mastery.

In the 18 months since rollout, coaches and their managers have used the framework for biannual development talks. They evaluate their current contributions and create a growth path that benefits them and the teams they work with. Roughly a third of our coaches have been recognized for exceeding expectations and promoted to the next level, and all coaches and their managers have a structure that helps them pursue impactful opportunities for growth. Importantly, everyone in the organization now has a shared rubric for understanding what good coaching looks like and what it will bring to their teams.

Like all Spotify leaders, we expect agile coaches to live by our values. In addition, the behaviors in the graphic above are essential for all levels of coaches to be successful. Senior and Staff Agile Coaches tackle more complexity, assume more risk, and operate in greater ambiguity. They build relationships with more-senior leaders, give higher-stakes feedback, and garner high levels of trust. They navigate conflict with skill and discretion.

We believe that diverse specialization is an asset to our coaching team, so our framework encourages that. We value different kinds of specialists because they bring unique skill sets and perspectives to problem spaces and unlock different paths to impact. There are four areas in the craft pillar: Agile Lean specialist, coaching, facilitation, and teaching. For Associate Agile Coaches and Agile Coaches, we expect a baseline of skill in all areas. At the Senior and Staff levels, coaches may specialize in one or more craft areas. The archetypes illustrated below express different combinations of expertise you might see in our Senior and Staff Agile Coaches.

Alia and Fiona initially built the Agile Coach Career Framework with support from many agile coach managers and experts at Spotify, and they partnered with Cara to bring the agile coach archetypes to life.

Many thanks to Natalie Francis, Trisha Kanjirath, Arne Roock, Ezra Sheppard, Jason Yip, Andy Park, Justin Kotz, Kristian Lindwall, Kimberley Miller, Kathleen Bright, and all managers of agile coaches at Spotify.

In the context of agile teams, coaching takes on the dual flavour of coaching and mentoring. Yes, you are coaching to help someone reach for the next goal in their life, just as a professional work/life coach does. You are also sharing your agile experiences and ideas as you mentor them, guiding them to use agile well. In this way, coaching and mentoring are entwined for the sake of developing talented agilists so that more and better business results arise through agile.

As Agile Coaches, we support the teams into their agile journeys and growth, using different methods and tools: teaching frameworks and practices (teacher), sharing our experience and learning (mentoring), asking insightful questions that help teams figure out ideas and solutions on their own (coaching), advising them on the path to take at a roadblock, where the need arises (consulting).

The TCF defines Coaching Tools, instruments that a coach can introduce in the work of a team to change its behavior. An Assessment allows the coach to measure the maturity of a team, and through Coaching Cards she can focus on a specific behavioral goal for it. Measurements help understand which Coaching Tools are the best fit to improve the team.

The list of working Coaching Tools that a professional coach may use is very large, and the TCF provides templates of Coaching Cards that help understand which Coaching Tools to use and how to apply them.

agile42 coaches use the TCF during Assessment and Coaching with teams at clients, as part of our Agile Transition and organization-improving efforts. The TCF is also used and taught during the Advanced Team Coaching Course we launched in 2015.

agile42 is also developing a Team Coaching Framework App: a tool to save, edit and share Coaching Tools, Coaching Cards and standard metrics to measure the effectiveness of the coaching. Everything is stored for later reuse by yourself and other coaches in your organization. It lets a new, relatively inexperienced coach pick the right tools and metrics to get up to speed quickly and to get advice from more experienced coaches.

agile42 enables leaders and their teams to create a resilient organization and a sustainable change process. We equip them with the tools they need daily to grow the business and foster the right organizational culture.

At Dandy People we work as Agile Coaches at our customers and support them in Agile change journeys over time. I started to create this poster to create a common understanding at our clients, as well as within Dandy so that we have a shared view of our core capabilities. I have used it many times with great success, the confusion of what we do is gone in minutes and we can get started to bring value to people! This poster has now been updated many times with great feedback from you all. The development has been in a collaboration with the experienced Agile leader Frank Olsen who is Chief Agile Coach at Simcorp, leading their LACE team. Thank you Frank for awesome collaboration!

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