TL; DR: Agile Leadership

Agile Leadership: Success Criteria for Organizational Change

1. When there are leadership and guidance, not command & control.
2. When there is alignment across the organization instead of the pursuit of local optimization efforts or personal agendas.
3. When the collaboration of all participants beyond hierarchies is the norm, not an exception.
4. When we acknowledge that management principles of the 19th century are unsuited to solve complex problems of the 21st century.
5. When managers become servant leaders.

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Servant Leadership

• More unpredictability than predictability.
• Emergent answers.
• Many competing ideas.
• Cause and effect can only be determined in retrospect.

• Service to others.
• Promotion of community.
• Creation of a shared vision.
• A holistic approach to work.
• A shared decision-making process.

Intent-based Leadership

• Create leaders, not followers.
• Resist the urge to resolve problems of your people.
• Take deliberate action.
• Learn everywhere at any time.
• Specify goals, not methods.
• Don’t empower, emancipate.

Agile Mindset

Mindset, Complexity, and Planning

• The definition of mindset: “The established set of attitudes held by someone.”
• The complexity challenge:
• The scientific management methodology of Federick Taylor does not apply to “creative work.”
• Problem-solving in a complex environment cannot be achieved with “more” planning.
• The future in the complex or chaotic domain cannot be predicted.
• Hence different approaches need to be employed when dealing with creative solutions in unchartered territory, for example, Empiricism or Lean.

Focus on Delivering Value

• Continuous value delivery to customers; outcome over output.(Manifesto of Agile Software Development: “Working software is the primary measure of progress.”)
• Continuous learning & applying empiricism: Transparency, inspection, adaptation.
• Deming: PDCA cycle.
• Iterative, incremental.
• Accepting that failure is more than an option but inevitable.Willingness to adapt to change.

Self-Organization

• Teams can best decide how to accomplish work and achieve the goal.
• Teams outperform individuals.
• Team building is a crucial success factor: The team wins, the team fails.
• Optimize for flow not utilization, and move from push to flow.
• The importance of values: courage, commitment, focus, openness, respect.

Fostering collaboration

• Creating psychological safety and equal speaking opportunity.
• Respect for individuals.
• Inclusion and diversity.
• Core Protocols: Opt-in, opt-out, law of 2 feet — creative work requires voluntary participation.
• Prime directive: stop protecting the organization by assuming people come to the office to “rip you off.”
• Give people a voice, provide an opportunity to be heard.

Cross-functional Teams

• End-to-end (value) delivery capability of teams.
• The autonomous pursuit of customer value balanced with accountability.
• Abandoning functional silos in favor of focusing on delivering value.
• Avoidance of local optimization.
• A cornerstone on the path to achieving business agility.

More Articles on Agile Leadership:

• What Exactly is the Agile Mindset?
• A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.
• The New New Product Development Game.

Creating a Learning Organization

• “The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.”
• “People working together at their best. It’s a continuous, relentless process.
• ”There are two mindsets that can infiltrate an organization: control and learning.

How do you define a learning organization? by Peter Senge, Author of The Fifth Discipline

• System thinking: assessing businesses as a system of bounded objects.
• Personal mastery: the commitment of an individual to the process of learning.
• Mental models: assumptions and generalizations held by individuals and organizations.
• Shared vision: Creating a collective identity to provide focus and energy for learning.
• Team learning: The accumulation of individual learning.

• “A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.”
• New ideas, insights or moments of creativity are necessary to trigger organizational change. They are not sufficient, though to create a learning organization. The changes to the way work are accomplished need to follow suit.

Traditional vs. Agile Leadership Behavior — A Cheat Sheet

Traditional Management ➡️ Agile Leadership

• Predictive, long-term planning ➡️ Provision of vision, strategy, and direction.
• Control of work, task assignment ➡️ Fostering self-organization.
• Maximize utilization and capacity ➡️ Supporting teams by removing what is impeding them.
• The go-to problem fixer for subordinates ➡️ Let those closest to the problem figure out a solution.
• Motivating others by extrinsic incentives (bonuses, titles, etc.) ➡️ Motivating others by enabling autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
• Information flows up the hierarchy (reports, meetings) ➡️ Management moves to where the information is, for example, by participation in Sprint Reviews.

Agile Leadership — Conclusion

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