Whilst at Agile Testing Days, we attended a workshop by Andreas Schliep and Peter Beck on internal coaches called “Raising the bar for internal coaches”.
I was surprised by how few internal coaches there were in the room. I think many people want to be internal coaches but the actual role isn’t valued in their organisation. Peter and Andreas shared with us that most large organisations want to scale their internal coaches but it is very slow process to grow a coach. They mentioned how they teach and grow coaches over a 6 month period. They also covered various certification paths (ICAgile and Scrum Alliance).
We also struggle with this time consuming task in large organisations – growing coaches is difficult. So I started thinking about how could we scale this? What could we do differently?
I was surprised when the word “managers” flashed through my mind. There are some great managers and many of them have coaching skills. Also most managers are confused with what they should be doing when teams go agile. Large organisations have MANY managers. Imagine if we could help transition all the world’s managers into coaches…