Agile matchmaking Part 2: Choosing the right Agile professional
In part 1, I wrote about what an Agile professional should be looking for in a prospective company. In this part, I'll be addressing what an Agile company should be looking for in a prospective employee.
As I discussed in Part 1, Agile is taking hold in more and more companies around the world. Yet scaling Agile to the size required is no easy task and is not coming without serious pains for many. I believe that good Agile professionals are not being matched up with companies who have the courage to make the required changes up and down the organization. The goal of this two-part series is to help the right companies find these good practitioners and vice versa. For now, I will focus on Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters - two roles that any company hoping to be successful in Agile have to get right.
Begin with an Agile coach
Whether your transition to Agile began in a grass roots, ground up fashion, or because your CEO had lunch with another CEO who told her it was great, you need a coach to implement Agile at scale. Like a college football team, this is a full-time position. It's very easy for organizations to slip back into old ways. It just takes a single hire near the top with a right brain blindspot to undo months - even years - of hard work.
Now is a good time for me to make an important distinction (Recruiters, may I have your attention?): An Agile Coach is NOT a Scrum Master and vice versa. Please get this right. One of the reasons a lot of time is being wasted on both sides of interviews is because these two titles are being mixed up in job postings and resumes.
These are not technical positions
Before we talk about what you should be looking for in an Agile professional, it's important to point out what you shouldn't care about: technical or subject matter expertise. This seems counterintuitive, but you want a person in the room who is spending their limited brain cycles entirely on the process, not the implementation of the solution.
As an example, let's say your Scrum Master is a former hotshot developer and he's facilitating a backlog grooming session for a development team. What do you think the likelihood is that this Developer/Scrum Master will be able to stay out of the content discussions the team is having? Instead, you want them paying attention to the fact that there are 10 stories to get through in the next hour and the team has already spent half the meeting discussing just the first one. It's difficult to keep that perspective when your head is down in the weeds with the team.
Modern leadership and coaching requires expertise in communication, team building, conflict resolution, human psychology, morale building, executive coaching, and organizational structure. Each of those skills require immense amounts of training - in fact entire degrees can be earned for some of them. It's not realistic for you to think you'll find someone who's dedicated so much effort in all of those areas AND is also a computer security, java, or legal compliance expert with the latest knowledge. If it's relevant that your Agile Coach or Scrum Master is a technical or subject matter wiz, you're doing Agile wrong.
Here are the things to watch for while interviewing for either an Agile Coach or Scrum Master:
Agile Coach
A good coach has a firm grasp of Agile and the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to be sure, but the main skill you want from them is communication. To see why, let's look at some of the duties of an Agile Coach:
Leads training on Agile for all levels of the organization and for all positions on the team.
Coaches executives on organizational structure to ensure that teams are set up properly and that reporting structures aren't going to interfere with Agile Principles and the Agile Manifesto.
Coaches executives on HR policy and incentives.
Helps to set up metrics for the organization and coaches executives on how to use them.
Coaches executives and mid-level management on servant leadership.
Coaches executives on metric and goal setting strategies that drive the right behaviors like work/life balance, commitment, and high quality.
Coaches Scrum Masters with problems on their teams and, if necessary, works with those teams directly for a short time to get them back on track.
Represents the Scrum Masters' concerns to executives.
Mentors Scrum Masters in gaining the skills necessary for them to become Agile Coaches - which is typically their career path.
Help the organization implement change with minimal anxiety and maximum retention.
As you can see, a majority of these responsibilities require communication skills. Executive Coaching requires formal communication training, experience, and certification. I strongly recommend that Agile Coaches balance their Agile training with general coaching training like that provided by the Co-Active Training Institute or a similar organization. Executive coaching programs offered at many universities can help to provide the well-rounded skills needed to counsel those in charge.
If you're hiring an Agile Coach, here are some things to look for:
Good listener. Listening happens at three levels (1:Self; 2:Other; 3:Others in the room). Look for people who know about this and practice Levels 2 and 3 listening. If they get a glazed over look on their face while you're talking but light up when they're talking, that's Level 1 listening. If they seem to be deeply involved in what you're saying and ask relevant questions, that's Level 2. If they're aware of the arc of the conversation, pick up on it when you or others in the room start to glaze over while they're talking, that's Level 3.
Passionately transparent. If they tell you they don't know something during the interview, apply more weight to the honesty it took to tell you that than whatever it is they don't know. The courage to be honest and transparent (yet still tactful) is one of the cornerstones of this role and what better time to demonstrate it than during an interview. Teaching someone a skill is a lot easier than teaching them to be honest.
High degree of empathy. Coaches really connect with people by empathizing with their plights. The best way to help someone out of a bind is to be capable of imagining what that bind feels like.
The leadership two-step. Leadership means both stepping in front and stepping aside. Good coaches know when to do which, and work with leaders in the organization to help them learn it too.
Good teacher. They can distill complex concepts into easily understood, relatable, and memorable explanations - often with humor - because it keeps people engaged.
Change experts. They believe that human behavior is driven from within, not manipulated with incentives and punishments (See: MBOs). If you get a lot of carrot or stick answers from them in response to hypothetical challenge scenarios during the interview, that should be a red flag that their management style is still stuck in the 1960's.
The psychology of Agile. They have a strong understanding of the intentions behind the Agile Manifesto and the Principles. When Agile works, it's because the human psychology behind it is respected and honored. Your coach needs to deeply understand this or they won't spot the not-so-obvious behaviors that are the canaries in the Agile coal mine.
Scrum Master
Scrum Masters are on the front line of your delivery teams. They are often trained and certified Agile experts and many come from project management backgrounds so they have good organizational skills. It's tempting to take existing project managers, send them off to a Scrum Master class for a few days and think you're done. That rarely works if not supported by an experienced Agile Coach.
If you're interviewing a potential Scrum Master, you should be looking for:
Strong communication skills. They will need to listen and speak effectively to handle communication at all levels of the organization.
Honesty and transparency. Tactfully pointing out - and helping teams get past - their ugly truths is a very important skill.
Trustworthy and trusting. A good Scrum Master should earn the trust of the team and use that trust only for good.
Strong Agilist. They have a good understanding of Agile artifacts and ceremonies and their purpose because they'll need to answer questions about the processes as they come up including the dreaded "why do we have to do this?" question. It also helps them know what parts of Agile are necessary and what parts could be modified as a team's agility increases.
Strong disposition. The Scrum Master is the protector of the team and is often called upon to stand up against those above their pay grade when they intentionally or unintentionally undermine Agile principles. While politics may mean that these types of situations are escalated to an Agile Coach, the best Scrum Masters are passionate about their duties to protect the team and that requires a bit of thick skin at times.
Organizational skills. The Scrum Master coordinates the schedules and communication of multiple teams including helping to resolve blockers. This requires someone who can juggle quite a bit at one time without becoming overwhelmed.
A great resource for the kinds of duties a Scrum Master does is here.
Agile professionals need unique skills that sometimes differ and sometimes expand on traditional project management skills. Companies that want to use Agile need to be aware that it involves changing some very engrained mindsets for the entire company, not just laying a new process on the development teams. Behind every successful Agile story we hear, there were qualified Agile professionals matched up to a company with executives who cared more about getting it right than being right.
