One Simple Leadership Mistake That Kills Agile Stone Dead

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a big fan of Agile, although I don't think it's a silver bullet solution for everything, but it does help in many areas, and you should look to leverage it to help improve operational performance as the results can be amazing.

Implementing Agile into one clients development process allowed them to triple their on-time delivery rates to over 90%.

However, when you implement Agile, you need to do it with the right approach, because if you make this one simple mistake it can kill your implementation stone dead.

However, I have experienced implementations that just didn't work. The leadership wanted to get the benefits that Agile offers, but they wanted to do it with their old leadership style, one that was that was a top down dictate of what had to be done, and by when.

The leadership wanted to just issue commands and now allow for any bottom up confirmation. They believed that they knew better what could be delivered and by when, and they just wanted the team to use Agile to meets these demands.

You're probably not going to be surprised when I tell you that boss won out and the date was cast in stone as he had insisted, yet the project was not only late, it was way late. The team lost their engagement and normal productivity level, which juts made the situation worse.

And when they failed to meet the date, the leader first blamed the team, then thy blamed Agile, blamed how the team had implemented Agile. They blamed everyone but themselves.

It's ok to make top down requests, but they need bottom up confirmation, and if you don't get that, then there is no commitment to the goal. This doesn't mean that questions can't be asked, or insights given on what might help, but without the bottom up confirmation, there will be no commitment. And without commitment success rarely happens.