January 18, 2023
At Spotify, change is a continuing, and our agile coaches are right here to assist groups and leaders thrive as we evolve. With agile rules famously a part of our DNA, Spotify doesn’t want “transformation coaches,” as they’re usually identified within the business, however coaches who rework as organizational wants change. In the early 2010s, our first agile coaches established efficient supply and steady enchancment practices in cross-functional growth squads. Over time, they expanded to allow profitable supply for complete organizations, and with that, we needed to broaden our serious about what agile teaching at Spotify is.
In a tradition that celebrates aligned autonomy and “controlled chaos,” this path was not a straight line. By 2018, we discovered that with out shared expectations for agile coaches, the standard and impression of teaching diversified broadly. Additionally, some leaders and crew members weren’t in a position to make the most of agile coaches to their best potential and wanted steering to handle agile coach efficiency, progress, and promotions. Chaos, certainly!
To be sure that we have now an intentional strategy to establishing agile coach excellence, we created an Agile Coaching Career Framework that features:
- Clear accountabilities for the agile coach perform
- Definition of 4 teaching ranges
- Three pillars of competency: conduct, craft, impression
- A rigorous hiring course of
- A self-assessment instrument to help growth
- A promotion course of
- A set of archetypes to offer choices for customized progress
In the 18 months since rollout, coaches and their managers have used the framework for biannual growth talks. They consider their present contributions and create a progress path that advantages them and the groups they work with. Roughly a 3rd of our coaches have been acknowledged for exceeding expectations and promoted to the following degree, and all coaches and their managers have a construction that helps them pursue impactful alternatives for progress. Importantly, everybody within the group now has a shared rubric for understanding what good teaching seems like and what it would convey to their groups.
See the framework right here and browse on for more information.
Our profession framework is a matrix of 4 ranges and three pillars.
The ranges — Associate Agile Coach, Agile Coach, Senior Agile Coach, and Staff Agile Coach — describe the rising accountabilities and expectations as coaches develop at Spotify. This permits us to have clear standards for hiring, mentoring, and rising coaches all through their careers.
The pillars — conduct, craft, and impression — present descriptions of the areas important for coach success. They describe how coaches go about their each day work at every degree. As an agile coach advances, they broaden behavioral abilities, deepen their craft experience, and broaden their impression.
Agile coach pillars
Pillar 1: Behavior
Like all Spotify leaders, we anticipate agile coaches to stay by our values. In addition, the behaviors within the graphic above are important for all ranges of coaches to achieve success. Senior and Staff Agile Coaches sort out extra complexity, assume extra danger, and function in larger ambiguity. They construct relationships with more-senior leaders, give higher-stakes suggestions, and garner excessive ranges of belief. They navigate battle with talent and discretion.
Pillar 2: Craft
We imagine that numerous specialization is an asset to our teaching crew, so our framework encourages that. We worth completely different sorts of specialists as a result of they bring about distinctive talent units and views to downside areas and unlock completely different paths to impression. There are 4 areas within the craft pillar: Agile Lean specialist, teaching, facilitation, and educating. For Associate Agile Coaches and Agile Coaches, we anticipate a baseline of talent in all areas. At the Senior and Staff ranges, coaches might focus on a number of craft areas. The archetypes illustrated under categorical completely different mixtures of experience you would possibly see in our Senior and Staff Agile Coaches.
Pillar 3: Impact
In essence, impactful agile coaches speed up team-based worth supply, drive sustained enchancment for his or her groups, and give attention to long-term outcomes. They transfer to the place the challenges are and accomplice with groups and leaders to design and implement options. Experienced agile coaches assess wants with larger independence. They see and are able to responding to a broader organizational scope. However, we don’t imagine that to have the biggest impression senior agile coaches should at all times work on the highest ranges of the group. They independently assess the place the best alternatives for impression lie, which might be with a single crew. Our agile coaches set strategic teaching targets that complement what the enterprise wants, they measure the outcomes and search suggestions.
As we drafted, we labored carefully with key companions to pursue adoption throughout Spotify. It was vital that the framework creation course of was inclusive and collaborative. This contributed to the framework’s success in 3 ways: our content material is richer due to the artistic views included, mutual understanding is stronger due to the discussions we had, and buy-in is achieved as a result of we offered the chance for enter. From begin to end, the next parts have been essential to finishing the method:
- Leaders entrenched within the day-to-day of teaching who have been dedicated to driving it throughout the end line
- A proposal with supporting information, insights, and beliefs (we used DIBBs) that gave it a transparent scope and objective
- A various group of trusted advisers (coaches, managers, authors of different profession frameworks at Spotify) who gave suggestions, participated in workshops, and requested laborious questions
- An govt sponsor who believed within the significance of the purpose
- Cooperation with an HR consultant who challenged assumptions and ensured framework adoption by HR
- Collaborators on supporting supplies who have been dedicated to efficiently rolling out the framework
We regularly optimized for inclusion of all customers of the framework — agile coaches, their managers, their shut stakeholders, and HR.
A profession framework itself will not be sufficient. In addition to the readability it creates, there are different key elements that guarantee our coaches’ success:
- Leaders who perceive what impression may be unlocked by proficient agile coaches
- Managers who advocate and create alternatives for his or her agile coaches
- A tradition that, along with short-term supply outcomes, values the long-term enhancements and lasting change that agile coaches are centered on
- A wholesome group of agile coaches who share their learnings, failures, and accomplishments so that they’ll multiply their impression
Like any worthwhile pursuit, creating this framework had its highs and lows — the magic of coach collaboration alongside the setbacks that include adopting a brand new strategy. But there is no such thing as a doubt in our minds that it was price each little bit of effort we invested in serving to others perceive what we worth and what impression Spotify agile coaches present. We anticipate the framework will proceed to evolve as we study extra.
If you’re trying to construct, broaden, or make clear the teaching observe in your group, we imagine our expertise can be tutorial. Every group has its distinctive tradition and constraints, so this isn’t a recipe to comply with blindly. Your competencies might differ, however we anticipate lots of the elements we’ve created to be broadly relevant. If you’re fascinated with studying extra, we might love to talk! Reach out to us, Fiona and Cara, on LinkedIn!
Alia and Fiona initially constructed the Agile Coach Career Framework with help from many agile coach managers and consultants at Spotify, and so they partnered with Cara to convey the agile coach archetypes to life.
Many due to Natalie Francis, Trisha Kanjirath, Arne Roock, Ezra Sheppard, Jason Yip, Andy Park, Justin Kotzé, Kristian Lindwall, Kimberley Miller, Kathleen Bright, and all managers of agile coaches at Spotify.