Struggling to bridge hierarchical and agile project leadership styles?

Balance hierarchical and agile leadership? It’s like mixing tradition with creativity and innovation. Use the 'hierarchy' to set very clear goals, but let agility and flexibility determine how you get there. Give your team the freedom and trust they need to be creative, innovative to come up with new ideas, all within a project plan framework. Lead with your skills and expertise but really trust your team to figure out what the best way forward is. Be there but don't be one of those Leaders that's 'in their face' all the time!!

Bridging hierarchical and agile leadership styles involves a few key steps. Start by mastering agile basics, understanding its flexible, iterative approach. Recognize the limits of hierarchical structures, such as rigidity and slow decision-making. Use bridging strategies to integrate agile practices into a traditional framework, creating a hybrid model. Encourage a culture shift that values collaboration and adaptability. Develop leadership skills to balance both styles and promote open communication. Finally, employ tools and techniques that support this integration, ensuring a smooth and effective blend of leadership approaches.

I find that balancing hierarchical and agile project leadership styles can be challenging, but it's crucial for modern project success. To bridge this gap, I focus on clear communication channels and decision-making processes that respect the hierarchical structure while allowing for agile flexibility. I also strive to cultivate a culture of trust and empowerment, encouraging team members to take ownership of their work within the framework of our organizational structure.

Unless management is on board and prepared for agile teams to fail fast and experiment then agile won’t work in the organisation. Nor will expectations that 1/2 the people will produce twice the amount of work. Agile frameworks works have there place especially if you are trying to develop a solution but don’t know what it is and you need to iterate to deliver the end game. When you are delivering an ERP you need waterfall as you know the outcome and need to deliver in planned work packages as there are lots of moving parts. An MVP just doesn’t deliver the required outcome or return on investment. Change management needs to be part of the process and people taken on the journey.

Struggling to merge hierarchical and agile leadership styles? Start by identifying the strengths of each approach. Hierarchical leadership offers clear structure and authority, while agile promotes flexibility and team autonomy. Integrate the two by establishing clear roles and responsibilities within an agile framework. For example, maintain a traditional leadership hierarchy for decision-making while empowering teams to self-organize and adapt within their projects. Regularly communicate the value of both styles to your team, ensuring they understand when to apply each. This blended approach can enhance both efficiency and innovation, creating a balanced and effective leadership style. ???

One of the biggest barriers to adopting agile is a lack of understanding about what it entails. Providing training for all employees, including those in leadership positions, can help demystify agile practices. Training should focus not only on the methodologies themselves but also on the mindset that underpins agile — one that values flexibility, customer feedback, and rapid iteration.

Recognize the limitations of hierarchical leadership, such as reduced flexibility and slower decision-making. Identifying these pain points allows for a more targeted integration of Agile methods to address them. #agileleadership

Hierarchical leadership is in my personal opinion required at specific stages of a product life cycle, call it when it’s in MVP stage or when the product-market fit is not yet achieved. Where there are lot of ambiguities to be addressed and only a few higher up have the maturity to see beyond current. Anything beyond this will only hinder the capacity of empowered product teams, this clearly shows the lack of preparation, prepping required for the mission to be achieved. By design cross team/topic professionals need to be assigned who can address the lock horns. Especially this holds good when an enterprise organisation is the case. Leadership teams eventually end up becoming bottle neck for growth with hierarchical structure.

In my experience, the problem happens because so called agile coaches with no development experience are brought in and they immediately declare that managers are bad. No efforts are made to figure out how to leverage managers’ abilities to transition to agile and support teams. Managers should be trained on the agile methodologies your organization is planning to adopt and how their role fits into a particular methodology. Managers need to become mentor, coach, and sponsors and build high performing teams. Managers also need to identify risks such as attrition, low morale, skills gap and work on addressing those risks.

Sometimes, the best approach is to use a hybrid model that incorporates both hierarchical and agile elements. This can involve setting up agile teams within a traditional structure and allowing these teams to operate semi-independently. Over time, as the organization becomes more comfortable with agile practices, more teams can be transitioned into agile ways of working.

Leaders in a hierarchical organization may need to adjust their leadership style to be more in line with agile principles. This might mean moving away from a command-and-control style to one that is more coaching and mentoring focused. Leaders should encourage innovation, accept that mistakes are part of the learning process, and be willing to iterate on their approach as needed.