Manifest of Agile Leadership
Dr. Barbara Schiller
Senior Agile Coach I Senior Scrum Master I Agile Unternehmensentwicklung
Manifest of Agile Leadership
Everyone who knows the agile way knows the Agile Manifesto.
It covers the principles which were the foundation of our agile mindset.
Here they are:
Those principles are as valuable and applicable as ever.
So why is there a need for a second Agile Manifest?
To explain this, I would like to give a definition what Agile is (in my eyes) – and what it is not.
You often hear it defined as: “dynamic”. Agile is “reacting dynamically to the challenges of the global world”.
You can also get definitions of this kind: “Agile is self-governance of teams”, implying that teams woul have the autonomy to completely decide on their own on all details and processes of their work.
In my opinion both of these very common definitions do not really fully explain what agile is all about, what lies at the heart of the agile concept.
I like to define agile as “a learning process, based on short feedback loops”.
This learning process can consist of lean management, scrum or Kanban frameworks, and this indeed will lead to more dynamic reactions on challenges and to self-governance, but these are effects of the agile practice, not their essence.
This is what I distilled as the essence:
The learning process itself is located at the pinnacle of the pyramid of power, instead of a certain person or a group of people.
Accordingly, agile leadership is not a kind of hierarchical order or framework to make people work in a defined way – or to control them.
Agile leadership is a communication process which is based on insight and understanding.
Agile leadership is what follows out of the necessity to manage more than one agile team and to manage the complex organization of a corporation.
To only manage those structures would not be enough since that would mean that the enterprise infrastructure just reacts on the teams’ impulses and administers the teams.
To make agile work, there is profound leadership needed, ?to enable coordination, support, guidance and overview.
But this leadership is not the classical top-down reign-on-rules which it used to be in former times of industrial work.
It is a new, innovative way of interaction which has a different foundation and new rules of communication.
The methodic foundations of Agile Leadership are the Agile Success Factors: transparency, competence, relationship, and focus.
To implement them in your enterprise and to apply them in your daily business can guarantee success with the agile method.
If… (!)
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If they come along with a certain mindset:
This mindset is a cultural matter.
It comes along with responsibility - and enables strong leadership.
People will feel if you have it - and if you live it.
If so, they will trust you and pursue as a team the quest to completeness of the respective project.
If not, there just is no guarantee that you can convince them and follow your directions.
So this mindset is my proposal for a Manifest on Agile Leadership:
1.????Speak the truth whenever you communicate. If you can not be true in your word, say nothing. Always complete to what you have committed yourself to.
?2.????Give unconditional friendliness, respect and fairness to EVERYONE in the industry. Realize that the emotional stability of a leader is his true strength.
?3.????Be willing to let go of personal advantages if necessary. A leader is only reliable if he can put his personal needs lower than the good of the people he leads.
The traditional approach to leadership often does not fit to those values very well.
In today’s complex working environment, the person apt to lead the way to master a problem at a certain point in a complex project changes accordingly. The expert should at some point take the leadership position - or at least the one who is best informed.
The agile leaders in companies today are often part of service units or support centers, they often come from networking centers – or belong to detached executive departments besides the line.
When we succeed in helping employees in those positions realize their responsibilities and their leading role in communication and decisions, then we are able to create new ways of collaboration.
They will really serve the overall goals, they will enable people to the benefit of everyone and they are fruitful, as well as solution oriented and generate good results and a positive working atmosphere.
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Dr. Barbara Schiller is Senior Agile Coach and Scrum Master.
She worked in the Health Insurance sector, in the Automotive and the Med Tech industry.
Dr. Schiller studied Social Science with a focus on System Theory (Luhmann) and acquired a profound additional education in Systemic Coaching and Organizational Development.
Based on this background she developed a concept of Agile Leadership, which can be regarded as a full program on agile practices to transform a company and to guide it into agility.
This program is successfully tested with customers who regard it as a very valuable tool for evaluating their agile setup and activities.
The unique value of this program is the ability to analyze and rate an enterprise on its level of Agility by 4 Agile Key Success Factors.
These Key Success Factors point to the role of Management and Leadership within the company and the role of its infrastructure and service functions.
As a result, customers are provided with OKRs to measure the status of their enterprise - not only by watching the output of agile teams, but also by measuring the ability of the whole company to align itself, to react swiftly on changes, to steer motivation and relationships - and last but not least to communicate the entire process effectively all the way through.