Can we decently measure the value of agile coaching?

form doesn’t fit to content

In our company, my colleague asked me how to measure agile coaching?
It sounds like a trivial and straightforward question. Some coaches will tell you that you can’t measure coaching; some measure the implementation of XYZ methods. But is it that simple?
Let’s put agile beside us and start looking at coaching.
Coaching per se has simple rules.
The coaching federation, in its Code of Ethics, explains that:

• “Coaching: Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”
• Professional Coaching Relationship: A professional coaching relationship exists when coaching includes an agreement (including contracts) that defines the responsibilities of each party.
• Roles in the Coaching Relationship: To clarify roles in the coaching relationship, distinguishing between the client and the sponsor is often necessary. In most cases, the client and sponsor are the same person and are therefore jointly referred to as the client. For purposes of identification, however, the ICF defines these roles as follows:
• Client: The “Client/Coachee” is the person(s) being coached.
• Sponsor: The “sponsor” is the entity (including its representatives) paying for and arranging for providing coaching services. Coaching engagement agreements should establish the rights, roles, and responsibilities of both the client and sponsor if the client and sponsor are different people.
• Student: The “student” is someone enrolled in a coach training program or working with a coaching supervisor or coach mentor to learn the coaching process or enhance and develop their coaching skills.
• Conflict of Interest: A situation in which a coach has a private or personal interest sufficient to influence the objective of their official duties as a coach and a professional.”

What can we notice in the reality:

• The creative process is more of a show-off from the coach, and the client expects that distraction.
• Professional Coaching Relationship is partially accomplished when you charge for the coaching and do not offer it free in a bundle.
• Coaching relationships are often unclear. Customers are buying a service and tend to high-jack the purpose of coaching.
• Conflict of interest is an open wound. It would be best if you said anything to your customer, but you are not allowed to tell everything to your customer because you have to comply with a collection of hidden agendas called work agreements and NDAs.

This picture sounds quite damaging, but don’t take it as such. This picture reminds you of designing your contracts and your relationships with your customers. Coaching shouldn’t be another way to train people or facilitate games; it is a sense-making process. Your partnership as a coach should start at the early beginning of your customer relations, even if you are a small part of a 300 PDA project around the globe.

Measuring Agile Coaching

When you start your mission, boundaries and relationships are clearly defined. You are coming to support people and their organizations to achieve something. That something is never agile, and it makes no sense. Agile Coaching is the actions you put to enable the excellent move to reach expected ambition but unlock potential.
If you consider Agile Coaching a set of methods and tools, you are all wrong. Tools and methods are your custom channels to connect with your clients.
Agile Coaching has to be considered an evolution of systemic Coaching with permanently evolving systems due to the complex nature of human ecosystems. Unlike system thinking which wants to reduce variability, Agile embraces diversity. We are looking more for the organization (adaptive) than the structure (rigid).
You have genuinely three levels in Agile Coaching that you can measure:

Team coaching

• Is the team proactive?
• Fully dedicated?
• Is there a team or membership?
• Does the organization empower the team to be self’ organized?

Organizational Coaching

• Here we are a team of teams level.
• Enterprise-level
• Teams layers including first level stakeholders (customers, users, managers, experts, and sponsors)
• And the second level of stakeholders: HR, Board of Directors, Compliance, Security, etc.
• If your agile team is a software team without any business developer, you have to consider it rapidly. It means that you are missing a crucial point of the Manifesto “business and It is working days together,” or even an essential point of scrum “developers having all necessary skills to get the job done.”
• Suppose you don’t want an organizational waterfall-like agile software team in Switzerland handing over tasks to developers in India, waiting for the job to be done to run user acceptance testing. It has nothing to do with agile.

Individual Coaching has a tiny part of the agile coaching activities.

• Personal Coaching consists of coaching your team members or executives to better interact with the agile system you created for them.
• You will often discover that you face a conflict of interest between individual and team well-being.
• At this moment, you should be able to hand over personal Coaching to someone outside of the agile system.

Measuring Agile Coaching with ADKAR.

ADKAR is one of my favorite toys helping me highlight where we are, where we should be, and where to go.

ADKAR is a change method sequencing change in a set of activities:

• Awareness
• Desire
• Knowledge
• Ability
• Reinforcement

If your transformation is mainly in the enablement zone, you are doing any other than agile coaching. I explain. Having a coaching work agreement means that your customer is already aware, has the desire, and has just enough knowledge to understand what its lofty dream looks like. Don’t get me wrong; there is still enablement work for your next customers.

Agile is a sense-making approach based on experimenting, measuring, and learning, and it is a pragmatic approach, not a theoretical one.
If your agile transformation is engagement-based, then most of the organization’s work is in action and reinforcement or, if you prefer, in pivot or persevere.
I used to work on a significant transformation. When I asked the purpose of the change, the answer was the customer wanted to become an agile company. Most activities included training, planning sprints, and feeding management with OKRs. Nobody cared about the delivery, and I never had the chance or had never been authorized to connect with the delivery teams because they were mainly offshore and handled by vendors. This transformation will never work. The main reason is that the monolithic organization wanted to remain the same with an agile flavor. One of the gremlins I identified was the need for control and applying best practices or existing processes. I hope they will read these lines, change their strategy, and use their existing talents to become a great company.
On the other hand, I worked on a governmental program between Europe and Africa where difficulties and complications were clearly expressed. The organization constantly moved from one large team to several small groups and back to a large team. It wasn’t a perfect scrum model, but it followed the AO approach to a continuous organization. No one was forced to organize the units in a certain way; they adapted due to the context and emerging challenges. They applied agile techniques when needed and when it made sense to them. Typically, an action or experiment and learned and reinforced each time.

Measuring the Agile Coach

Adding to everything written above, an agile coach is primarily a designer. You design a safe-to-fail container allowing fail-safe experiments.
If you are mainly doing facilitation, you are doing less than 10% of agile coaching.
You are doing less than 5% of agile coaching if you are mostly training.
If you know the context, if all your teams are end-to-end and no one can see the difference between vendors and customers, then you are a master.

An agile coach is like a football trainer. The performance of your team measures you. And when the team fails, you are the first to get fired. That’s the risk; that’s the deal.