Leadership

Introduction

Scaling Agile requires support from leadership at all levels to see a real and sustained enhancement of the capability of their organisation or part of their organisation. Leaders have a duty of care to cultivate an environment or system of work to unleash the human capital in their organisations. They should see fostering an effective agile culture and all that goes with it as one of their primary responsibilities.

There are many Leadership styles, Agile encourages a more inclusive and empowering leadership style; broadly, this style is sometimes referred to as Transformational Leadership (James MacGregor Burns) or a Coaching leadership style.

Transformational leaders engage stakeholders in an inclusive and collaborative change journey, continuously evolving the organisation through a cycle of inspection and adaption. They catalyse a clarity of purpose throughout the organisation to enable aligned autonomy for empowered teams to rapidly innovate, learn and deliver value to customers and stakeholders. All of this is only possible with a supporting culture, where it is safe to offer diverse opinions, question common assumptions, recognise and learn from failure and feel safe enough to be vulnerable and ask for help or admit ignorance. In other words, a Psychologically Safe environment.

Many of the frameworks and practices we explore in this section are aligned with this overarching style of leadership.

This section describes principles that should be applied by leaders to maximise the effectiveness and sustainability of an agile transformation.

Principles

• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Foster a high trust environment
• Maximise engagement
• Cultivate learning between teams
• Catalyst for change
• Create clarity of purpose
• Involve those affected by change
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Own your own approach
• Provide an impediment removal service
• Are lean practitioners

Further Explanation

Leadership - Further Explanation and Models

Related Practices

• Agile Transformation Leadership Team Approaches (TODO: Consider moving under a Leadership Principle e.g. change incrementally or impediment removal service)