Growing your own agility coaches to adopt new ways of working

Agile coaches play a vital role in enterprise-wide agile transformations. To develop enough coaches, companies should create specialized training academies.

Companies are increasingly looking to infuse agility into their operating models. However, as organizations attempt to scale these efforts across their entire business, new challenges that simply didn’t exist at the micro level are beginning to surface. These challenges are especially prevalent where traditional organization silos need to interact.

The big realization for many companies is that scaling agile is not simply a matter of replicating agile practices across more teams. This is why trying to adapt project-management offices (PMOs) to support agile projects or bringing in more scrum masters is unlikely to be effective (see sidebar, “The scrum master’s role in scaling agile”). Rather, agility as an operating model requires the rewiring of core enterprise-wide processes. With this comes a need for the organization to operate differently.
The degree of change required to adopt agile ways of working across an entire organization is simply too large to repurpose existing roles and structures. Only by investing in agility coaches—and a comprehensive program to identify, train, and support them—can companies expect to scale and sustain agile across the enterprise.

To ensure the success of the agility coaching academy, it is critical to have the right support and leadership structure. Typically, the academy is led by a full-time executive who reports to either the CHRO or some other member of the C-suite depending on who is really driving the agile transformation—it could be the CIO, the head of transformation, or the COO. The academy lead is accountable for the following:

  • Setting the strategy and defining the delivery road map for the academy
  • Running the day-to-day operations of the academy, such as building and refining the academy backlog
  • Leading the recruitment of coaches
  • Overseeing learning and development of the trainee agility coaches, and administering the learning and development of graduated coaches
  • Defining the evaluation criteria and mechanisms to measure effectiveness of the agility coaches
  • Deploying the right agility coaches to the right areas and teams
  • Overseeing performance evaluations for the agility coach cohort

More: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/

By Amit Anand, Sahil Merchant, Arun Sunderraj, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall

About the authors: Amit Anand is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Sydney office, Sahil Merchant is a partner in the Melbourne office, Arun Sunderraj is a digital expert in the New York office, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall is a partner in the New Jersey office.