Agile leadership: enabling change by empowering individuals

Leadership, when an organization introduces agile, can be really challenging. I had done the Professional Agile Leadership course from scrum.org recently with Itnove team Alex Ballarin and Guillem Hernandez. To me it was insightful and I would like to share some of my thoughts and learns.

Knowing when and where to use agile.

First of all, to successfully use agile we must know when to use it, to know its natural field. For this propose, we should recall the Stacey complexity model:

The X-axis represents how far from certainly is what needs to be done, Y-axis represents the level of agreement about how it should be done. Furthermore, we can add a Z-axis representing how many different people needs to be involved. In this tri-dimensional space we slice 4 areas:

• Simple: there is no real risk that it goes wrong, so our goal will be to optimize these processes.
• Complicated: something can go wrong, so we need a plan, and even though something can deviate, so we add a 'buffer' in our plan. In these projects, we focus on mitigation.
• Complex: we can not plan these projects, if we do so, there is a huge chance that it deviates from the plan. Adding buffers on top of the plan is not enough because there is too much uncertainly, so we focus inspecting and adapting.
• Anarchy/chaotic: there are no insights pointing out that such a project is going to go right. We focus on learns and we do portfolio management. We try to fail fast and cheap.

Company-wise, we can also assign them to a parallel category regarding revenue streams using the McKinsey horizons, the closest is the horizon we should get close to simple and complicated, the farthest the close to complex and chaotic.

The key fact is that agile is not for all the domains:

Agile is suited to effectively respond the projects in the 'Complex' domain

The agile leadership

We name 'agile leadership' to the leadership that grows agility in the teams and organizations.

Organizationally wise, to deal with mixed structures of hierarchical government and agile production teams may be one of the main issues making agility to grow. Something that's clear at this point is that this is one of the main challenges of agile leadership in big corporations.

Also, like many other kinds of leadership, agile leadership has a lot of challenges in the daily management work but can focus on 4 key action areas.

• Facilitate that around him/her the ownership of the product and value keep growing by increasing the maturity level in all statements.
• Co-create goals and key-value indicators (KVI) to drive the team and organization activity.
• Run experiments to increase the ability and skillsets and improve the time-to-learn of these experiments.
• Lead the creation of culture by extending good practices and habits and ensure healthy relational patterns between people.

Growing ownership also requires proper delegation policies: not too few, not too much. The maturity level of the team members and the team as a group must be continually monitored in order to take the proper growing and delegation actions, especially to keep a good relationship between what can be successfully delegated and what can not.

The maturity level should be continuously monitored in order to take the proper growing and delegation actions

Being wrong on what is delegated can make projects or actions fail, but also frustrate team members. Achieving with success each delegated responsibility is a key step on the growth path and is the responsibility of the leader to know what can be delegated to who and what cannot. To find this way communication between team members and leading people is the key tool, which should be driven by using proper maturity and ownership indicators.

There are many ways to understand what maturity is and personal knowledge is probably the best one. Furthermore, some guidance can help when it's no clear. For example, teams and individuals focusing on scrum events and rules to prevent conflicts are less mature than the ones focusing on scrum values and value creation. Other good indicators can be the trust inside the group, the understanding of the domain area, and use it to maximize value or the focus on quality and frequent releases.

For further developing the ownership inside the team there are 3 key factors:

• Skillset and knowhow: ownership of tasks and processes cannot happen without the ability to do these tasks or processes. Seems obvious but too many times is forgotten. Leadership must ensure that the team and its members can develop their abilities going ahead of the delegation path. For it, training and qualification are important, but also to have the necessary room for failure in the right contexts.
• Organizational support: the organization should encourage the self-organization of the teams. Empowered individuals without the right context will not develop ownership. For that, to provide the right information at in right timing about the product and the business is important. Other common issues are rewarding individuals and not the teams or an overall culture of collective achievements.
• Blockers removal: some individuals can still have issues in collaborating with their team. Lack of trust in the teammates or lack of trust in a new agile process may be a cause. Maybe the fear of not being necessary makes them expendable. Coaching individuals may be necessary after previous points are mature enough.

Management toolset

All these change practices need monitoring to track progress and take action when need. But most typical business metrics and culture are not suitable to monitor that. The key success factors are to relay on scrum pillars -transparency, inspection, and adaption- and the principles of Evidence-Based Management (EBM) to focus on empiric evidence. We should recall that agile is based on empiricism: inspection and adaption with transparency.

The EBM guide defines a set of metrics that can be useful like innovation rate or usage index. One interesting learning is that not all the tracked metrics correspond to the same maturity level. It can correspond to the maturity of the team, the leader, or the organization. In any case, we should do 'meta-inspection' and 'meta-adaption' of what is being measured and why.

The metrics usage can reveal the maturity level of the organization.

As leaders, we should focus on where we want to grow, and a tool for it is focusing on which KPIs we want to keep using, which ones we want to stop using, and most important which ones we need to start using. Here it comes a handful concept: the poverty trap. Poverty trap -and it's opposite, the rigidity trap- are about inertia. The lack of habit in measuring or focusing on some indicators -and the habit of doing in someones- can be a barrier to the change. Allocate enough time to change focus KPIs and help people understand and embrace the change is necessary and can be time-consuming, but is really important to move forward.

Finally, I want to close this article with the Nicolo Machiavelli's quote that best sums up the challenge of change:

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.“

Did you apply any of these ideas in your workplace? would you like to know more? Feel free to comment on sharing your thoughts.

Further lecture:

Images sources: https://www.scrum-tips.com/2016/02/17/stacey-complexity-model/ | Itnove | EBM guide | header image by https://unsplash.com/@epicantus