In large organizations using an Agile approach, it’s not uncommon to have roles like a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Enterprise Agile Coach, or specific roles like RTE. The distinction in this role is made clear by the different responsibilities, focus areas, and salaries. For salaries, it’s pretty simple:
Scrum Masters 💰
Agile Coach 💰💰
Enterprise Agile Coach 💰💰💰
A Scrum Master’s focus is often a team; the Agile Coach works with multiple teams and their environments, and the Enterprise Agile Coach works with the broader organization.
What often happens because of this is…
👉 It reduces the value and effectiveness of Scrum Masters
👉 It creates silos, especially when you organize events like “Scrum Master CoP,” “Agile Coach CoP,” etc
👉 It creates a coaching hierarchy (junior, medior, senior)
More importantly, it limits all coaches’ ability to remove impediments and improve team- and organizational effectiveness.
Impediments often surface on the team level. As such, Scrum Masters are the first to identify them. Most impediments (the tougher ones) have their roots deeper in the organization. For a team-focused Scrum Master, this already becomes difficult to resolve, so they report it to the Agile Coach.
The Agile Coach promises to ‘look into it’ but needs help to fully understand what’s happening and find a solution for the team. At the top of the organization, the Enterprise Agile Coach isn’t aware of this but only wonders why organizational effectiveness doesn’t improve. 🤔
In short, all coaches identify a problem, but nobody can resolve it. 🤷♀️
My point is not to remove the coaching hierarchy (although it’s worth considering) but to be mindful of the consequences, especially when improving team- and organizational effectiveness.
In some organizations, I already see a shift from ‘horizontal coaches’ to ‘vertical coaches.’ Instead of connecting a coach to a specific level (team-level, multi-team level, organizational level), they are responsible for focusing on a vertical slice (end-to-end) of the organization.
I don’t care what label you put on these roles; I do believe it’s more effective to resolve problems by acting on all levels of the organization. Since most challenging problems are systemic, the solutions need to be systemic, and you need to focus your coaching efforts on the entire system. 👊
What’s your take on this? Any experiences or recommendations to share?