Cultural Requirements for Agile Success

Larry Senn, a pioneer in corporate culture, concluded, ‘Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives.’

Agile approaches require a culture shift from traditional project management.? So, how do you know if your corporate culture inhibits your organization from adopting agile practices?

Here are four major factors to consider:?

First, look at your organizational structure. Traditional hierarchical organizations are vertically oriented with clear reporting lines. In these scenarios, managers can view agile as merely a tool for speed rather than a comprehensive shift in work culture. Agile requires work to be done horizontally across departments, teams, and expertise. The risk is having too much emphasis on vertical alignment and insufficient horizontal cross-team activity. In this case, the required employee empowerment, autonomy, and accountability are inadequate, and the collaboration Agile requires falls short.

Second, assess the organization’s preferred leadership style. The way your executives, managers, and middle managers lead has a significant impact on your agility. A leader's directing style can hinder people from working better and developing new ideas. Leaders in agile companies are there to help and guide their teams. They act as visionaries and coaches, empowering competent individuals to lead, collaborate, and deliver exceptional results. Leaders directing work without understanding and endorsing agile values and practices keep teams from collaborating and developing new ideas.

Third, evaluate your organization’s view of Agile. For organizations to embrace the agile mindset, buy-in must come from all levels. Agile is not just a methodology; it’s how people work and interact daily.? It requires a holistic alignment of culture, leadership, and governance. The Agile Business Consortium identifies seven elements that constitute the DNA of an agile culture, offering a Development Matrix for Agile Culture to help organizations assess and enhance their agility across these dimensions. The seven elements range from organizational alignment and leadership to collaboration and innovation. When those seven elements are misaligned, Agile will struggle to come to life.? (https://www.agilebusiness.org/resource/video-seven-elements-of-agile-culture-dna.html)

Finally, learning and innovation must be embraced. Running regular retrospectives to learn from successes and failures is a core principle in Agile. Reviewing and improving performance is key. Suppose your organization seeks to find the guilty or struggles to review performance objectively, learn from initiatives, and incorporate lessons learned in future initiatives. In that case, your likelihood of succeeding with Agile isn’t great.

This article is based on my and Christina Charenkova's LinkedIn Learning course entitled AI-Powered Agile: Strategies for Modern Project Managers

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Coming up

Office Hours Live - Thursday, March 13, 2025, 10:00am AEST Brisbane Time

Making the Leap to Consulting

Working as an independent consultant is an exciting and dynamic way to make a living. And it’s significantly different than working as an employee. The challenges of the job, the things you must learn, and other aspects you might not anticipate are part of the transition from being an employee to working as a consultant. Even people who are well-equipped to become consultants are surprised by some of the adjustments they must make. Failing to make those adjustments can lead to a bumpy road. Join me and fellow project consultant Steve Haydon as we discuss how to successfully prepare, anticipate, and adjust to make the leap to consulting. Come along and bring your questions – we’ll answer them LIVE in this informative, informal, and high-energy discussion!

By attending this session, you will learn:

• What to expect and not expect when transitioning to consulting so you can confirm that you are leaping for the right reasons
• If you are ready (or not) to make the leap yourself!
• The range of expectations you may receive from clients
• The varying norms and cultural differences you may encounter
• The roles consultants are expected to play (some may surprise you!)
• Defining what success looks like in a consulting context

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Office Hours Live - Monday, March 24, 2025, 4:00pm US Eastern Time

Managing Up: Dealing with Challenging Leaders

We call them different things: bosses, managers, stakeholders, or clients. No matter the term, we must deal with them, their strengths, and the “personality features” they bring. How we deal with these characteristics determines our success. In this Live session, I will be joined by Dana Brownlee, the author of The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up, and the instructor of the LinkedIn Learning course Managing Up for Project Managers – Working with Challenging Senior Stakeholders. We’ll discuss methods for dealing with the varying personalities and characteristics our bosses present to us during our leadership journeys. Join us and bring your questions – we’ll answer them LIVE.

By attending this session, you can:

• Understand personality “states” and “traits”
• Learn how to deal with challenging managerial traits, including: Micromanagers, Absent Stakeholders, Wishful Thinkers, and more!
• Explore how a mixture of interactions based on tasks, facts, and relationship building can be used for optimal results
• Adjust your project control documentation to conform to the needs challenging leaders present to your project
• Determine the best way to communicate with different leader types to get the best results

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Office Hours Live - Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 10:00am AEST Brisbane Time

How to Negotiate - Without Dreading Every Minute

It’s common for a leader to have to negotiate and negotiate often. Negotiation is a critical skill in the leader's toolkit that must be applied with managers, clients, team members (or even family!). Project managers must negotiate to get reasonable timeframes, budgets, scope, the right team members, and more. It’s a big part of the job, and if you hate doing it (or even if you want to get better at it), this LinkedIn Live session is for you! I’ll be joined by Sam Trattles, a negotiation expert, the Founder of The Other Side of the Table, and the author of two books, Negotiate Your Worth and I Love Negotiating. We’ll talk about how to prepare for negotiating, increase your chances of getting what you want, and walk away from a negotiation with positive relationships with everyone at the table. Join us, and bring your questions; we’ll answer them live.

By attending this session, you will learn:

- How can you best prepare for negotiating

- Pitfalls to avoid and how to change your mindset around negotiating

- How to use your project charter to back up your negotiation points

- Strategies you can use in any negotiation scenario

- Maintaining relationships after a negotiation

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Additional thoughts can be found in my project management and outsourcing classes on LinkedIn Learning, including:

• Project Management: Technical Projects
• Strategic Leadership: Deploying Intelligent Disobedience
• Outsourcing Fundamentals, the first of six courses on outsourcing. This series of courses focuses on defining services, performing service-level?management, and helping figure out what is required to support a business in an outsourcing or service provider scenario.

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This article is part of Bob’s Reflections newsletter series, which discusses project management, outsourcing, and “intelligent disobedience”, a leadership approach. If you want more of this content, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article is posted.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library or check out https://intelligentdisobedience.com/

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