I recently shared a piece entitled Measuring Leadership Coaches and Their Impact. The perspective in the article was primarily mine. What did I look for in leadership coaches (agile coaches) when they coached me in agile contexts?  

There were a few questions in the LinkedIn responses where folks sought specific metrics. I’m guessing outcome-based, results-based, specific measures I used to evaluate my coaches. The reality was I didn’t have those. Truthfully, I didn’t care about them. I cared about how the coach connected to me as a human and leader rather than some arbitrary metric that I applied to the coach. And to me, any metric was a “system metric” in that it applied to the coach + me and how we impacted the system…together.

I feel like this answer will disappoint those looking to create a leadership coaching metrics dashboard, but so be it.

All that being said, I was inspired to share these indicators of a leadership coach’s performance. They augment what I was trying to say in the first article, and I hope you find them more helpful in guiding you toward measuring your systemic value.

Today, there’s a tremendous amount of discussion on measuring the impact of agile coaches and their coaching effectively. 

The coaches referred to in this discussion would include—

• Leadership coaches

• Organizational coaches

• Change Management coaches

• And, most importantly for this discussion, Enterprise-level Agile coaches

These are people who often coach up to leadership and across the organization. It’s a different sort of coaching that requires different skills, competencies, and experience than other forms of coaching (Scrum Masters, Team-level, RTE, etc.) in agile contexts.

While often the organization and coaches try to tie success downward at the team level towards execution performance and delivery impact, I believe these are red herring measures for these sorts of coaches.

So, the critical question becomes, how should we measure the effectiveness of this sort of coach?

I’m glad you asked!