As an Agile leaders, whether in executive, management, leadership, or other roles, are spearheading innovative management styles at today’s leading organizations.
While a traditional command-and-control management style worked years ago, in today’s VUCA world, organizations must be flexible, responsive, iterative capabilities to keep up and outpace the competition. Agile leaders make it possible for teams and organizations to adopt and practice agile capabilities.
Here comes a few behaviors of agile leaders for your reference
- Navigate change and uncertainty
- Trust the team
- Support culture that encourages experimentation
- Advocate skill development
Navigate change and uncertainty
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the world lately, it’s that there’s only one certainty—uncertainty! No one could’ve predicted the pandemic and its economic impact or how consumers’ preferences are rapidly changing as new generations become primary consumers of products and services.
As an agile leader, you should be able to embrace change and uncertainty and quickly pivot plans that make the most sense for customers. It’s essential as an agile leader to stay ahead of the trends, watch what’s happening with the competition, and be able to respond quickly if your plans no longer make sense.
Agile Leaders can try to embrace changes by
- Plan work only a quarter ahead of time but aligned to a long-term objective. Communicate to stakeholders that it’s a flexible plan that may change.
- Review the quarterly plan with stakeholders frequently, probably 1 or 2 weeks and discuss any modifications that may need to be made based on market trends.
- Empower the team to make quick short-term decision and modifications to work.
Trust the team
Agile teams are capable of pivoting quickly and solving complex problems independently, which ultimately they can deliver value frequently. As an agile leader, influence organization’s culture to adopt trust in teams—trust them to make decisions, solve problems by their own, respond to stakeholder and customer feedback.
Agile Leaders can learn to trust the team by
- Support team focus, especially if the team uses the scrum framework to focus on a sprint goal.
- Set clear expectations and let the team run through it.
Support culture that encourages experimentation
As an Agile Leader, you should allow for any failures. In agile environments, teams are capable of game-changing innovations because of culture that encourages experimentation, fully acknowledge that not every experiment will have satisfactory results. Therefore, the team knowing that they won’t be punished when failures happen and try their best to deliver value.
Agile Leaders can navigate agile leadership to encourage innovation by
- Allow the team to experiment with a low-risk project.
- Contain costs and mitigate risks by encouraging small, minimal experiments that can be scaled up depending on the results.
- Ensure that the team discusses the outcome and comes up with a solution by themself when something fails.
Advocate skill development
Agile leaders typically foster cultures that support professional development. They enable teams to be the best at their craft, coach and mentor them, and provide growth opportunities.
Agile Leaders can build people’s skills by
- Offer regular coaching sessions with team members to provide growth opportunities.
- Encourage employees to try something new.
- Provide training opportunities to enhance their skills.
Isabel Leung and Howie Sung are the co-founders of The Agile Eagle, the premiere Scrum, and Agile training and coaching organization.
Join Isabel and Howie in a Professional training course: https://theagileeagle.com/category/professional-training.
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