Take It From Multi-Sport Athletes: Building Multi-Skill Mastery for Lasting Impact
There has been a great deal of discussion in the Agile community about the future of "agile" jobs, especially when it comes to roles like Scrum Master or Agile Coach. This often leads to thoughts about the skills agilists should possess. Recently, people wonder how agile practitioners can best demonstrate and bring value to their organizations.
I have strong opinions on these topics, but before sharing them, let’s talk about multi-sport youth athletes. What do multi-sport youth athletes have to do with the future of "agile" and agilists? Give me a couple of minutes to make the connection.
Youth athletes generally fall into two categories once they show athletic potential. Many promising young athletes are encouraged to specialize at earlier ages. Travel, all-star, or elite teams exist for athletes as young as seven or eight. Often, joining such a team requires full commitment to year-round activities, including games, practices, and workouts. This specialization comes at the expense of exploring other sports. Time was, you played football or soccer in the fall, basketball or hockey in the winter, and baseball or lacrosse in the spring. Nowadays, committing to an elite team often excludes other sports and happens earlier than ever.
Multi-sport athletes, however, shift their focus with the seasons. Although harder to find in today’s era of early specialization, being a multi-sport athlete has many benefits, such as:
Learning new skills not typically taught in other sports, like unique movements, vision, and flexibility.
Avoiding overuse injuries by resting some muscle groups while strengthening others.
Providing a mental break from one sport through variety and novelty.
Reducing pressure to make early commitments, keeping opportunities open as interests and physical growth develop.
Building connections across different communities of peers.
Still not convinced? Let’s look at elite athletes who credit their success to being multi-sport athletes growing up—people like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Mike Trout.
LeBron has spoken about how football contributed to his court vision, toughness, and body control—skills he brought to basketball. Brady has highlighted how playing multiple sports developed different arm actions, better coordination, and competitive instincts that contributed to his football success. Mahomes credits baseball for his unconventional throwing angles and arm strength and basketball for his footwork and spatial awareness. Trout shared in a 2024 Audacy podcast, Baseball Isn’t Boring, "Baseball was my favorite, but I played basketball to stay in shape and football to get stronger. The overall competitiveness and different aspects of the other sports helped me in baseball."
Now, let’s apply this concept of multi-dimensional skills to our professional lives. This lesson is especially relevant to my Agile community friends at a time when there’s growing emphasis on the value of agile skills and roles. Many in the Agile community remind me of one-sport athletes, specializing and spending most of their time using the same techniques with the same groups. Yet, modern product development requires diverse skills to achieve success—product management, user experience, software engineering, DevOps, and business domain knowledge—in addition to agile principles. Possessing multiple skills provides clear benefits:
Applying different techniques to meet the context’s needs
Gaining insights through diverse mental models
Avoiding tunnel vision or rigid approaches
Stepping into different roles as needed, fostering team resilience and continuity
Job rotations have historically been popular in organizations, particularly for high-potential employees, to broaden perspectives, build understanding across departments, and develop diverse skills. This practice, like many agile techniques, has roots in mid-20th century Japanese industrial firms.
Here are my recommendations for agile professionals to expand their opportunities and effectiveness:
Lose the labels – Don’t pigeonhole yourself as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach. Regardless of your title, focus on applying your skills to help your organization achieve its business outcomes. Agile practices remain valuable even in non-agile roles.
Expand your horizons – Develop as many skills as you can. The more diverse your skills, the more valuable you become to your team and organization. Learn about product development, customer support, sales, marketing, or finance. Even if your employer does not provide time or financial support, continuous learning is a worthwhile investment in yourself.
Volunteer for new opportunities – At small companies, there’s always a need to handle multiple responsibilities. Volunteer to tackle emerging requirements, and your broad skills will enable you to step up successfully.
Build cross-organizational influence – At large companies, diverse skills make you more likely to contribute across teams and projects. This not only expands your opportunities but also grows your network, enhancing your ability to influence the organization as your career progresses.
The Business Agility Institute has highlighted the demand for people with a combination of agile and technical or functional skills. Insights from their Skills in the New World of Work report include:
"Now more than ever, agile skills are in high demand. For individuals, this means developing agile skills alongside technical skills. For organizations, it means integrating agility beyond agile roles."
"The classic T-shaped skills (depth in one area, breadth in others) are insufficient. Pi-shaped skills—depth in two or more areas plus breadth—are now critical."
"Organizations struggle to find individuals with the right combination of skills. It’s easy to find expertise in one area but harder to find people with both."
In an ever-changing world, those who build a wide foundation of skills and experiences and step into diverse roles will stand out in a crowded labor pool. They’ll be best positioned to contribute to their teams and organizations. If you haven’t already, start developing a broad array of skills to be ready when opportunities arise to make meaningful, multi-dimensional contributions.