Your Core Values As An Agile Coach Are More Important Than Your Certifications. Here’s Why

[This is a draft chapter of a book on enterprise agile coaching that Cherie Silas and I are writing. Will you give us feedback in the comments below? We have not yet decided how to write with one voice while still sharing our distinct experiences so the "I" in this chapter refers to both of us.]

Completing a course or receiving a certification does not make you an agile coach.

At least, not a very good one. Agile, as an industry and an approach to work, is much more of a “state” than it is a destination. It’s not just a way of improving efficiencies within an organization or streamlining communication between team members. Agile is, in fact, a way of being—and a dedication to the process of always looking for ways to improve yourself and those around you for the greater good.

Which means, as agile coaches, we have to be just as committed to that same learning process in ourselves.

One of the most under-discussed aspects of agile coaching is the importance of personal values.

This is the difference between “being” and “doing.”

Most coaches only focus on what they do in a client engagement: their value proposition, project goals, timeline, costs, etc. These include their competencies, skills, degrees, books they’ve read, courses they’ve taken, masterminds they’ve attended, and so on. And all these things define and “speak for” our skill level.

However, they do not give very much insight into who we are as a human being.

These underlying qualities are our core values—many of which are arguably just as important, if not more important than our core competencies. These are the fundamental habits, traits, personality quirks, and soft skills we bring to each and every engagement. 

For example, mine are:

• Leave No Trace: To me this means that once I have worked with an organization, though the impacts of my presence can be seen in the outcomes they achieve there isn’t a visible imprint of my presence that someone can come behind and say, “Cherie Silas must have been the coach here because she always …” My goal is to honor the client and partner with them to design the right solutions for them. Not to implement some framework that might one day make me famous.
• Do No Harm: For me, this is a key value. It means that when I am finished working with a client they should be better off because of their experience of working with me. I strive to leave people better when I leave than they were when I first encountered them and that means that I must be invested in their success and not focusing on my own success. If I push my own agenda on people I will also push them to make decisions that may not be right for them. This is doing harm. My goal is to honor the client’s expertise in their own life and company and be a partner that causes them to flourish.
• Competent and Whole: Seeing my clients as competent and whole is what enables me to be all in for their well being and success and all out when it comes to how they accomplish their goals. During every moment I work with any client I must be able to see them as competent. They have the capacity to knock it out of the ballpark! They have capacity for greatness. They may not have the same skill set as me and there may be some knowledge or experience I have that is different from theirs; but, this doesn’t mean they are not competent. Rather, it means that we make a great partnership because we both bring different strengths to the relationship to work with. I must always consciously believe that my clients are not broken. Even if the systems they set up in their company seem strange to me, it doesn’t mean I need to fix them. My role is to partner with them. I’m not above them and I’m not beneath them. I walk alongside them in partnership and we figure out together what they would like to change or improve and design experiments to best find the right answers.
• Be The Mirror: As a coach, it is not my role to assess and determine what’s broken in my client’s world and decide what they need to do to fix it. My role is to understand the goals they want to achieve and reflect my observations, intuitions, concerns, and what I notice from a systemic perspective. I am not in a position to make judgments on these things or to tell them if or how they should change them. I am there to reflect to them what may be obvious but also needs to be made transparent. This gives them the opportunity to determine if they want a change so we can work together to determine how they want to bring that change into reality. 
• Truth Teller: This is my commitment to myself and to my clients that reminds me to courageously say what needs to be said when no one else will. My experience has shown me that no one wants to tell the leader a truth that might upset them. However, not having the person in your life who will speak frankly and cares enough to risk the relationship for your best interest can stagnate your ability to be successful and to grow. People need this information to understand what’s holding them back. As their partner, I commit to always speak the truth, even when it’s not the popular thing to say. When people hire me as a coach, they can be sure that they will hear the truth spoken with professionalism and kindness and I won’t back down from hard conversations.
• Engaged Neutrality: As a coach, I must help my clients focus on their personal definition of success. I must believe in them, be in their corner fighting for them, celebrate with them, and be sincerely invested in their future. At the same time, I must let them be in control of the path to get there. I will walk with them on the path and offer challenging support the decisions they make. I will design experiments with them and give them my perspective to consider. But, what I will not do is step out of a neutral position when it comes to where they want to go and how they will get there. These choices are theirs. As a partner, I respect their ability to be the expert in their own life so I will not try to force my ideas or agendas on them. My commitment to my clients is to be fully engaged in their success while maintaining a neutral stance.
• Empower: This value causes me to remember that I will not allow a client to become dependent on me. I refuse to be in a situation where people think they need my permission to take action or they need me to decide for them. I don’t want that kind of power in people’s lives. And, that’s not a sustainable model. I want to leave behind a sustainable culture and way of working so that people are able to continue moving forward in the direction we started long after we stop working together. Coaching should leave people empowered with a new way of thinking, a new way of sorting through decisions, and a capacity to see things from new perspectives. If I am working at my best with my clients they will learn how to work independently from me so their accomplishments do not roll back when I’m no longer in the picture. My goal from the beginning must always be how they will operate when we have finished our engagement. I want to leave a legacy of independent success.
• Let Passion Guide: This value is focused on me and not the client but it shows up in the client engagement because I have made a commitment to myself to never take on any work I am not fully passionate about doing. When my full passion is not engaged I am not the best coach I can be for my clients. This means that I will not accept work just because it is paying work. If I take a client because I need money but it’s not the right fit, I believe this violates an ethical standard.  The conflict resides where I enter the relationship for my own personal needs and not to serve the client’s needs. This also means that I have made decisions about how much I feel ethically comfortable charging and how much of the work I will do pro-bono. 

Most coaches do not take the time to think about their core values, let alone write them down and refine their list over time. Instead, they practice getting another certification, reading another agile coaching book, taking another training course, or going to another conference—all the while, avoiding the most important part: discovering and defining what makes them, them.

But here are some of the incredibly measurable benefits I’ve found that come from the hard work of defining your core values as an agile coach:

• Helps guide client engagements
• Helps you to be intentional about who you are when you interact with clients and serve as a grounding point for when you get off center
• Allows you to make more self-aware decisions
• Reveals who you should work with—and who you enjoy working with the most
• Encourages and fosters more meaningful collaboration

Your core values are what allow you to consciously create what is called “healthy tension” in a client/coach relationship.

Every client/coach dynamic naturally has some level of tension. The question, however, is whether or not the coach can create an environment of healthy tension where the client both feels supported and challenged—not overly challenged without support, and not overly supported without challenge.

The best way to think about this dynamic is by placing different scenarios in four quadrants (see below for image). On the Y axis is “challenge,” and on the X axis is “support.” 

If we use the client/coach dynamic as our measure for success, it becomes pretty apparent that more coaching certifications, books, courses, and materials that improve our service competencies won’t be the deciding factor in an engagement. The true measure of success is how capable we are, as a coach, to create an emotional dynamic where the individual client (or team, department, etc.) feels like they are both receiving the appropriate skill level and value, and the safety of a meaningful relationship. 

The following are examples of the 2 extremes:

High Challenge/Low Support

This dynamic is extremely common in corporate environments. There is a boss or a manager telling an employee to perform a task (high challenge), but being unwilling to provide additional resources in order to aid in their request.

For example, a manager may ask a team of developers to accelerate a project timeline, work longer hours, etc. But when the developers ask for additional tools to help them achieve this new goal, the manager says, “No.” 

Low Challenge/High Support

On the other side of the spectrum is this dynamic, where one party essentially wants sympathy but does not actually want to be challenged.

We call this “colluding.” It’s what friends do when one friend is venting, and the other says, “You’re right. Your boss is a moron,” but won’t challenge the individual to take any responsibility for what they may have brought to the situation. As a result, one party receives a significant amount of support for their situation, but because there is nothing challenging them to move forward, the cycle repeats itself endlessly.

Where you exist on the challenge/support chart speaks volumes about your core values as a human being.

When you are a professional coach, showing up to a company to perform your job, what values are you bringing with you? Again, in my case, I do not want to do harm; I believe that people are competent and whole, not broken; I aim to be a mirror for the organization; to be a truth-teller; and so on. And in every new client relationship, my primary goal is to ensure the work I am doing is being done alongside these core values—otherwise, I am letting the client (and myself) down.

The exercise I recommend to more junior agile coaches who have not gone through this type of self-inquiry is to take some time to think about what your values are (with respect to the clients you serve) and make them conscious and explicit. We all inherently have our own set of values. It’s more a matter of taking the time to say them out loud, write them down, and care enough about them to consciously bring them into your client engagements (and be able to explain them to the people you work with).

There’s a famous quote that says, “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”

If you can’t take the time to pinpoint the underlying values that make you a trustworthy and credible human being, then what does that say about your ability to help your clients do the same?

Here’s how you can discover your own core values for yourself:

First, imagine a time when you were super happy. 

Second, imagine a time where you were super unhappy.

Without overcomplicating things, these two scenarios become the variables you always want to move toward and against. Who were you when you were super happy? What was going on in your life? What did you value? What brought you the most joy, and why? And similarly, who were you when you were super unhappy? What was going on in your life? What sort of conflicts were you dealing with? How did they manifest in the first place?

The answers to these questions become the blueprints you need to follow in your to align who you are with your most fulfilling and honest work. It is an investigation, and you are tasked with defining what makes you feel alive and whole—and what causes you stress, sparks conflict, and ultimately leads to an unfulfilling situation. 

This personal discovery is very different than, “Let’s figure out what the customer wants, and tell them what they want to hear.”

It’s more like, “This is who I really am. Now let me go and find customers who want to work with who I truly am—because then we’ll both be better off.”

Now, once you’ve written down your list of core values, here’s how to keep yourself accountable:

Periodically throughout an engagement, I take some time to think about how well my core values are “shining through” in the work I am doing.

If I’m feeling particularly grumpy or frustrated by the engagement, I’ll ask myself why—specifically whether I am honoring my core values or not. “Am I censoring myself? Am I not being a truth-teller? Do I feel like I have to be a different version of myself in this environment?” Something about the situation is challenging one of my values, and that is what’s causing me to be unhappy. 

At the same time, when a client asks, “Do you want to extend our contract and continue working together?” this inner-questioning process is just as important. “Have I been able to be my true self? Has this client allowed me to be a neutral coach?” Earlier this year, actually, I chose not to continue working with a client, simply because the arrangement did not align with my core values and what I knew I needed in order to feel fulfilled.

Many beginner and intermediate coaches choose to wait until much later in their careers to begin taking their core values into account (which is ironic, but makes sense). 

When you are first starting out, there is so much focus on landing clients, generating new business, and “proving” that you are competent at the work you’ve been hired to do. 

To be clear, I am not saying that hard skills and core competencies should not be the priority. What I am saying is that your competencies and values should be pursued on parallel paths. You are not just on a path of career advancement, but also one of self-discovery. I can say, for myself, my values have changed in the 10 years I have been an agile coach. I value different things today than I did five years ago, or a decade ago. And so, as time goes on, it’s my responsibility to continue checking in with myself and redefining my core values as a professional—which allows me to make more conscious decisions about who I want to work with, and why.

When you prioritize starting down this journey of self-discovery sooner, you’ll quickly find that your core values actually end up informing your core competencies. You start to realize the parts of yourself you need to work on the most, and then you start to deliberately seek out opportunities that allow you to grow that part of your personality while simultaneously practicing your core competencies.

However, if you don’t understand your values, you may very well spend years and years at odds with yourself. 

For example, one of my core values is to do no harm. However, in many corporate environments, leaders love the idea of “pushing” people—pushing, pushing, pushing. I don’t enjoy doing that, nor do I believe it leads to the most effective result. So even though there are a lot of clients who would be willing to pay me lots of money to push, push, push, those engagements would actually force me to abandon one of my core values. I would be at war with myself. And that internal friction would end up causing problems—for me, and for the client. 

Ultimately, this is the journey we are asking our clients to go on. So we should be willing to go on it as well.

As agile coaches, we are coaching people through transformation. That is our role. And whether that transformation takes the shape of a measurable internal efficiency, or more depth-oriented relationship dynamics between team members, we have to “be the change,” first. 

Agile is not just about “driving business results” (at least, not an agile mentality that lasts). It’s about bringing our individual state of awareness into a team and organization, so that it permeates, takes hold, and ultimately guides the group forward in a more productive and empowering way. 

And it is impossible to do that without having a strong sense of your core values.