Agile Coaching Growth Wheel Guidance

Authors and Acknowledgments

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is a collaboration between a number of contributors including:

John Barratt, Shannon Carter, Rickard Jones, Martin Lambert, Stacey Louie, Zia Malik, Helen Meek, Rohit Ratan, Tom Reynolds, Andre Rubin, Kubair Shirazee and Mark Summers.

We would also like to thank all the other Agile Coaches who have provided feedback.

What is Agile Coaching?

Agile Coaching is a collaboration with people in a thought provoking and creative journey using coaching approaches with an agile mindset and principles to help individuals, teams and organisations be the best they can be.

What is the “Agile Coaching Growth Wheel”?

Imagine you’re an Agile Coach. You’ve worked with various teams and organisations, helping them grow and deliver sustainable value using Agile/Lean principles and practices. You’re good at what you do, but there’s always room for improvement. You want to be better and grow for yourself and the teams and organisations you serve. But where do you start?

Enter the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel, a tool that serves as your compass in your journey towards professional growth. This initiative, led by Product Owner Mark Summers, is a collaborative effort involving many practising Agile Coaches. They have evolved it to help you understand where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you might be going.

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel
The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel

At the heart of the wheel is self-mastery. This is the hub that holds everything together. Self-mastery starts with a focus on yourself, having the emotional, social, and relationship intelligence to choose how you show up in any given context.

Radiating from this hub are eight spokes, each representing a competency skills area:

  • Agile/Lean Practitioner: an Agile/Lean practitioner has a deep and tacit understanding of the principles behind Agile and Lean and has experience in working with frameworks and practices of Agile and Lean.
  • Serving: serving is about being concerned with the needs of the team or business over your own agenda. They do this from the stance of Servant Leadership which focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of the team or business and the communities to which they belong.
  • Coaching: coaching is partnering with a person, team, or organisation (client) in a creative process to help the client reach their goals by unlocking their potential and understanding. A coach can accept the client as a whole and capable and serve their agenda ethically.
  • Facilitating: facilitating increases the effectiveness of a group of people to align collaboratively, interpret their context, and mutually identify the most valuable outcomes desired. A facilitator has the skills to create a neutral environment of openness, safety, and innovation in a group setting.
  • Guide Learning: guide learning is about effectively growing an individual, a group, or a team’s skills and enabling them to be competent and resourceful. With this competency, you choose the most effective learning method to help the learner achieve their learning objectives and inspire future learning.
  • Advising: advising is the ability to bring your experience, insights, and observations to guide the client towards a shared understanding of the value that can help them to achieve sustainable success, even after you have moved on. As a trusted adviser, you are invested in the success of the client, creating a long-term and sustaining relationship with the client.
  • Leading: leading is about being the change you want to see to make the world a better place. As a leader, you are capable of catalyzing growth and inspiring others to realise the shared vision.
  • Transforming: transforming is guiding sustainable change that will allow the individual teams and the organisation to be more effective and learn how to change for themselves through leading, facilitation, coaching, facilitating learning, and advising.

Around the wheel is a tread representing your domain knowledge. These specific areas of knowledge support the skills of the main competency areas.

Using the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is a journey of self-discovery and growth. You start by identifying an area of improvement. You reflect on your current competency in this area, challenging yourself to be honest and thorough in your self-assessment. You brainstorm options for growth and formulate a plan of action. And then, you inspect, adapt, and repeat the process, continuously striving for improvement.

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is not just a tool. It’s a commitment to continuous learning and improvement. It’s a pledge to strive for excellence, not just for yourself but for the teams and organisations you serve. It’s a step towards professionalising the world of Agile Coaching. And it’s a journey that you, as an Agile Coach, are ready to embark on.

The wheel now has its own home; use it, and give the gift of feedback so that it keeps growing with us and the profession of Agile Coaching.

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel

Another way to assess where you are against the wheel is to use the Agile Coaching Personal Improvement tool through comparative agility.

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