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Coaching as a Skill

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 Learning Leadership Culture

Coaching in agile has been watered down. People now enter the workforce with “coach” as their first title, as though coaching were a career path of its own. It was never meant to be. To coach a thing, you first have to be able to do it.

The coaches who succeed bring both knowledge and experience: stories of success and failure, a record of building capability in past teams, and the pattern recognition to see what a team needs and when. They’re as comfortable teaching and facilitating as they are pairing on a team’s real work. In a dojo, a coach combines coaching skill with real depth in product, engineering, workflow, or DevOps. A good dojo coach looks a lot like a team-oriented senior engineer or lead who has done the work and now enjoys helping others do it.

A Working Definition

A coach is anyone who helps a team or an individual set, refine, and reach their goals. Coaches use stories to earn credibility. They transfer skills by teaching, facilitating, and working hands-on. They succeed by working themselves out of a job: the team becomes proficient, and the coach isn’t needed anymore.

You Can’t Hire Your Way There

Large transformations run out of coaches. You can’t hire 100 to 150 good ones in any reasonable time, and outside coaches, however adaptable, don’t know the company’s culture, politics, or systems. Renting coaches doesn’t scale.

Build the capability inside instead. Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular describe this in “The Leader as Coach”: companies training their own leaders to coach, so that coaching becomes part of the learning culture instead of a service bought from outside. We do the same in our recent dojos. We find influential, talented people inside the company and grow them into coaches.

Picture a career path where senior engineers rotate through the dojo as coaches for six to nine months. That’s enough time to build social skills that last a career, alongside the technical ones they already have.

Professional coaches still have a role. They train and mentor the internal coaches, and they handle the hard cases while that bench develops.

Coaching as an Organizational Capability

We tell clients that a dojo is a three-to-five-year investment, because what it builds is a learning culture. That culture won’t last if coaching lives only in a dojo team and not in the leaders around it.

Start small. In a challenge, pull team members into coaching: “You know how continuous delivery works here. Can you show the rest of the team?” Then go further and mentor the product, technical, and workflow leads who come through a challenge until they coach on their own.

If your transformation still depends on coaches you rent, you don’t have a coaching capability. You have a contract.

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