An Agile Leadership Style

Given the tight connection between agility, complex problems and our focus on Scrum, it makes sense to talk about the traits of agile leaders in Scrum terms.

Those that use an agile leadership style create an environment where empiricism and self-management can flourish. 

For example, agile leaders:

• Act with great humility. They recognize that complex problems have no obvious solutions so there is no need to show they have all the answers.
• Create the conditions that support strong, empowered self-managing teams: 
  • Help the teams set meaningful goals and help them inspect their progress toward them
  • Make certain that the boundaries and accountabilities are clear and well-understood. If they are managers, agile leaders delegate much of their decision-making authority to the teams
• Foster empiricism by encouraging experimentation. Experimentation centers around creating hypotheses and then seeking to either confirm or disprove the hypothesis. When a hypothesis is disproved, agile leaders recognize that this is not the experiment failing, but rather a successful learning process.
• Keep the team’s focus on the value and customer outcomes that the team is creating, rather than managing the team’s output and activities.
• Creates an environment of trust and transparency by modeling and reinforcing the Scrum Values.
• Use techniques such as coaching, teaching, mentoring and facilitation to build high performing teams. They do not command or direct the teams to achieve a goal.
• Help teams transition to agility by letting go of old ways of working:
  • Agile leaders transform themselves first. They adopt an agile mindset and an agile leadership style.
  • Agile leaders focus on value instead of tasks, actions and velocity. So instead of using dashboards and metrics that don’t support agility, agile leaders use Evidence-Based Management (EBM) which focuses on four Key Value Areas (current value, unrealized value, ability to innovate and time to market).
  • Agile leaders continually look for ways to shift reward structures and promotions away from emphasis on individual accomplishments to the value that the team creates.

Resources:

Blog Post

Productivity: Creative Versus Reactive Leadership

Stephanie Ockerman

Productivity culture kills business agility. But productivity itself is not the problem. It is possible to have a creative relationship to creative rather than a reactive one. Let's look at examples of both.

4.2 from 5 ratings

April 1, 2024

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