The profession of Agile Coaching is, in a word, confusing. That’s because of a number of factors, including:

• It gets conflated with Professional Coaching and it’s so much more than that;
• There isn’t a standard or generally accepted model for what it is and isn’t;
• Clients don’t understand it, so shared accountability is unbalanced with their coaches;
• There is specialized nuance around the skills of coaching at the Team, Enterprise or Organizational, Technical, and Leadership levels.

This confusion has created a space where nearly anyone can claim to be an Agile Coach with little experience and narrow skills, resulting largely in mediocrity and negative impacts for our clients, who, by the way, are counting on and paying us for help. 

Bob Galen has written Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching to help alleviate the confusion. The book centers on the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as the competency and skill maturity model to baseline your agile coaching skills against. Its core goal is to “raise the bar” as to what true excellence looks like and to help you establish a personal development and growth plan. 

Bob intentionally uses the term Badass to create a vision of professionalism, craft, passion, accountability, and expertise that you need to bring to bear in service of your clients if you represent yourself as an “agile coach”. 

Being an Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coach isn’t easy, quick, or for the faint of heart. It takes lots of hard work and dedication. It also requires a map to point you in the right direction. Consider this book that maps to coaching badassery, personal growth, and client service.