It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semistructured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.

翻译：敏捷教练的引入日益普遍，旨在帮助敏捷企业提升速度与竞争优势。继Spotify成功之后，敏捷教练的角色在任务与职责方面已呈现多元化发展，但关于这一角色实践方式的研究仍十分有限。本文通过对来自十家不同公司的19位敏捷教练进行半结构化访谈，深入剖析了敏捷教练的角色内涵。我们从敏捷项目中教练承担的任务、其核心特质、技能、工具以及敏捷教练的赋能因素等多个维度进行阐述。研究结果表明，敏捷教练在团队与组织层面均发挥作用，并对敏捷团队的努力、策略、知识以及技能产生直接影响。敏捷教练最关键的品质包括同理心、以人为本、善于倾听、富有技巧且具备持久性。基于实证研究，我们为敏捷教练实践提出建议，例如企业应授权其敏捷教练在团队内外实施必要的组织变革。