I’m an entrepreneur. Will becoming an Agile coach help me lead my organisation more effectively?

If you're an entrepreneur, you already have a job that requires all of your attention. Should you embrace Agile? Yes. Should you embrace coaching skills in addition to your entrepreneurial skills? Yes. But you don't need to become an Agile coach to lead your company more effectively. You can simply hire one. John McFadyen explains.

John McFadyen

5 months ago | 3 min read

The short answer is no.

You’re an entrepreneur, you already have a significant job to do.

What I would advise that you do is hire or observe an Agile coach in practice.

Agile is a natural fit for entrepreneurs. It aims to connect customers with products that delight them, frequently and continuously. It aims to produce rapid feedback cycles where teams can inspect, adapt and iterate in ways that create competitive advantage for their brand.

Agile is also a great fit for teams.

Rather than having a single person as a project manager, Agile embraces the creativity and collaborative power of teams. It pushes decision-making down to the experts that actively build the product and aligns a product owner and scrum master to support the development team.

The keyword is team.

You can achieve so much more with a team than you can through a single individual.

Agile recognises that and actively embraces community development with a shared vision, mission and purpose.

An entrepreneur is natural fit for product ownership rather than Agile coaching, however, there are heaps of benefits for entrepreneurs who embrace coaching over management.

If you are an entrepreneur who works with an Agile coach to coach your team to discovering and creating the best ways of working imaginable, you have a lucky team.

An Agile coach works with teams to create an environment where everybody within the team can thrive and contribute. An environment where people understand the purpose of the team and actively work toward creating better outcomes that truly delight customers.

In the 21st Century, we are encountering problems that we simply don’t know the answers to upfront and we are operating in environments where the vast majority of variables are unknown.

Very few people possess all the answers given the challenges of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

It simply can’t hinge on a single person, be that a project manager or an entrepreneur to know all the answers or have the ability to determine what single action best serves the team.

For that reason, coaches are invaluable.

They tap into the collective creativity, expertise and cross-functional skills of teams to discover opportunities, actively test hypotheses, and work toward incremental and continuous improvement.

An entrepreneur needs to have a strong vision for their brand. They need to have a strong sense of purpose for the organisation and communicate that effectively within and without the organisation.

A coach works through questions, coaching techniques and a myriad of soft skills to help individuals and teams uncover opportunities to improve and ways of working that enable them to achieve organizational goals and objectives.

They don’t drive the team, nor do they tell the team what to do.

Their unique position as a coach enables them to get the most out of everyone within the team environment and create feedback loops which empower teams to continuously improve, innovate and create.

As an entrepreneur, you would find it incredibly difficult to straddle the space between Agile coach, Agile practitioner, and Entrepreneur. It simply isn’t a great fit.

So, in closing, my advice would be that you hire an Agile coach to help your organisation become the very best version of itself that it can be. You don’t need to invest years in an apprenticeship to become an Agile coach when you can simply tap into the benefits of a great Agile coach.

If you are interested in becoming a product owner, visit our Certified Scrum Product Owner course page. If you would still like to pursue the journey to Agile coach, visit our Certified Scrum Master course page, Advanced Certified Scrum Master course page, Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master course page and Agile Coaching Academy course pages.

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John McFadyen