Agile Leadership

Published: 2022-02-26
Updated: 2022-02-26

Since the year 2001, agile leadership has become a hot and even controversial topic in many business-related discussions. The questions making the topic hot and controversial are:

• Is an agile organization the right direction to transform your business into a sustainably successful one under VUCA conditions?
• If so, what kind of leadership do we need in an agile organization?

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The acronym VUCA is essentially describing an environment of permanently accelerated change which is too complex and turbulent to understand and manage.

When I started to do research on what agile leadership is, I found that there are mainly two classes of resources:

1. One is about "agile leaders" – as in "leaders using their skills flexibly" – describing and explaining skill sets every leader needs to act and react when dealing with her or his different subordinates in different situations. I call those skill sets the "basic leadership skills" which are well known, most of them for more than fifty years.
2. The other one is about "leaders of agile business", addressing things like setting up an agile business, or the transformation to it, and how to lead an agile business. This is what I call "agile leadership", which emerged over the last twenty years, and what I am laying out here.

In this article, I would like to give you answers by

• Describing what we mean by "agile"
• Clarifying what would make it relevant in most business contexts
• Lining out the characteristics of agile organizations
• Following up on the question: what is "agile leadership"?
• Presenting its principles and obstacles
• Drawing conclusions for its practice

The meaning of "agile"

What does "agile" mean? In most dictionaries, we find the following definitions:

Being agile is being able to

• move quickly and easily
• think and understand quickly

I adopt both definitions for the following considerations.

The meaning of "agile" in a business context

Before we can continue with exploring agile leadership, I would like to describe what we view as "agile business". As an example, let's look at the software industry.

Back around the year 1995, software development was heavily documentation-oriented and had to follow very detailed processes, allegedly for developing stable software with superior quality. In real life and from a customer's point of view, we observed that those processes were

• slow and often delayed,
• leading to expensive results, usually, much more expensive than originally estimated,
• not fit for reacting to a changing environment, which made the results questionable in terms of stability and quality.

Simply put, that "classic-style" software development did not seem agile at all, and it was a major bottleneck in most value chains.

In 2001, from 11th to 13th of February, a group of seventeen experienced and independent software practitioners, later naming themselves The Agile Alliance, gathered to find an alternative to the classic approaches of software development.

By the end of those three days, this group had created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development which was signed by all seventeen participants. Here is its text:

(cf. https://agilemanifesto.org or https://www.agilealliance.org)

The application of the values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development leads to an agile organization. Meanwhile, we can see that agile software development successfully transformed from bottleneck into driver of most value chains.

Obviously, by simply exchanging the term "software" by "hardware", or "services", or "project", etc., the message of the Manifesto would still hold, with some adjustments to the respective subject matters, of course.

Therefore, the transfer to other – or any – business fields is possible because the Manifesto characterizes an agile mindset, indirectly giving us a guideline how to set up an organization for "Agile" by arranging a network of small teams with the above-mentioned values.

Observation and research of meanwhile abundant real-life examples show that agile organizations achieve:

• Short time to market, due to deliverable value to customers by the end of each incremental iteration cycle
• Adaptability to their environment, by swiftly reacting to change, supported by frequent feedback from customers and other stakeholders
• Long-time sustainable business, because of fast responses to new opportunities or threats.

Characteristics of agile organizations

The agile organization typically consists of a network of small development teams, each of which is

• Self-organizing
• Creating results in short, incremental iteration cycles
• Continuously learning by "act-analyze-adapt" experiments
• Openly, transparently, and proactively exchanging information, knowledge, and learnings with other teams
• Supporting individual team members striving towards mastery of their craft.

And all of this, in an organizational structure in which

• silos are removed
• its governance is oriented towards adaptation, continuous learning, and long-term sustainable growth and success.

What is agile leadership?

Leadership in an agile organization builds on the basic leadership skills. As leaders, we still need to communicate with or influence people, give and receive feedback, use situational leadership, know what people motivates, build and retain trust, apply coaching skills, and moderate or mediate conflicts, to name just a few.

However, agile leadership calls for more. To find out what this is, let us look at the characteristics of an agile organization. Creating, or transforming into, an agile organization requires a fundamental mindset change for all involved employees across all levels.

1. Every team in the network of teams is self-organizing. There are no fixed roles anymore. For example, the team mutually identifies necessary skills which they need to achieve their wanted work results. Whenever a special skill is missing, they communicate their need with the other parts of the organization, or they decide to go for learning that skill. The leadership role can be a "rotating" one, based on criteria which are given by the content of their work. Consequently, a fixed leadership role for each team is not needed anymore either. What is needed, though, is all information about the organization's vision and purpose. Only then, self-organizing teams can make informed decisions which keep them on track towards that vision and purpose. However, we still need leaders in an agile organization who fully trust the teams and their members. These agile leaders need to be facilitators or enablers of the self-organizing teams and their work, by delegating the decision making to the teams.
2. Value creation or problem solving happens in short, incremental iteration cycles. The teams choose their own processes and tools which fit to the content of their work. Definition and setup of processes and tools need support arranged by themselves or by the leaders.
3. Continuous learning by "act-analyze-adapt" experiments means that the teams will make experiments for finding the best solutions. These experiments will not always go well. To succeed with the approach of act-analyze-adapt, all team members need to rely on a "culture of tolerance" in case those experiments have to be repeated, time after time. For this we need agile leaders who fully understand, embrace, and support the fundamental idea of appreciating the opportunity of learning what works and what does not work.
4. The teams communicate within their own team and with the other teams openly, transparently, and proactively to provide and obtain information, knowledge, and learnings for and from all others. This encourages and promotes a learning culture across the whole agile organization. All agile leaders across all levels facilitate and enable open and transparent communication, encouraging teams and their members to build up and use all channels and platforms they find useful.
5. All team members are striving towards mastery of their craft. Agile leaders ensure that all team members have access to channels which support their learning on their paths to become masters of their craft.
6. Agile leaders orchestrate their leadership practice in form of a leadership team. This leadership team will then also be a self-organizing; doing their work in incremental iteration cycles; learning by act-analyze-adapt experiments; communicating openly, transparently, and proactively inside and outside their team; and, striving to master their craft, which, in this case, is agile leadership. By doing so, agile leaders become role models and, as a byproduct, it becomes much easier to avoid the formation of organizational silos or remove them.
7. The same counts for the executive team, making it easier for them to focus their governance on adaptation and long-term sustainable growth and success of the whole agile organization.

Let us re-organize and summarize these points as the principles of an agile leadership culture:

Agile leaders

• Facilitate and enable self-organizing teams and their work, by delegating the decision making to the teams.
• Support the definition and setup of processes and tools which the teams need to continuously create value for the customer
• Practice and support open, transparent, and proactive communication of all team members, including arranging for appropriate channels and platforms.
• Fully understand, embrace, and support the fundamental ideas of learning in an organization and ensure access to learning channels for their team members' paths towards mastery of their craft.
• Advocate and support the avoidance of the formation of organizational silos or their removal.
• As members of the executive team, focus on adaptation and long-term sustainable growth of the whole agile organization.

Obstacles to agile leadership

For startup companies, it seems to be easier to adopt the form of an agile organization and the culture of agile leadership from the beginning. This does not come as a big surprise since, in most cases, they do not yet have established structures or processes, neither any deeply rooted cultural traditions.

Companies that are already around for a longer time have well established customer bases and legacy products or solutions to maintain. They are usually organized in traditional hierarchical structures, equipped with comprehensive process landscapes and IT systems, and an organically grown company culture of governance, leadership, as well as communication and interaction patterns. So, if the leadership team of a settled company decides to transform into an agile organization, there is resistance to be expected.

Consequently, in the leadership domain, we observe the following main obstacles in the transition to agile leadership:

• Existing organizational structures and processes,
• IT systems,
• Organizational culture, as the most serious source of resistance.

As noted above, startups launching their business as agile organizations will permanently review their agility and correct small deviations as early as possible. Then, "Agile" becomes their second nature.

Traditional companies that want to transform have a bigger task ahead. To overcome those obstacles, they still can do it by incremental iteration in small steps, department by department. Vital for the desired success will be the buy-in from their executives. They act as role models for the whole organization by working as a self-organized leadership team. As soon as the first department can demonstrate that their agile organization works, it will also turn into a role model for the other departments. However, the larger the organization is, the more time it will take because cultural changes are slow by nature, just like mindset changes of all involved individuals.

The practice of agile leadership

If you made it through this article until here, you might ask yourself what you could try and do to become and be an agile leader. Here are my thoughts on what could make the difference.

Being an agile leader is about your mindset, enabling others to develop their capabilities to their ambitions and full capacity, for the sake of adaptability, and therefore, sustainable success of the organization you work for.

To become an agile leader, start with yourself, with your own mindset change, because you are anyway the only one whose mindset you can change.

Self-awareness and frequent, almost permanent self-reflection are the prerequisites to remove your ego in the workplace. Only then, you will be able to delegate the decision making to the teams. Bring your ideas into the discussion and then, leave time and space for the team members, be quiet, observe, and listen. If you have a question, ask and then, be quiet again, and observe and listen.

Commit yourself and the others to permanent learning of how to improve cooperation and work results.

Consciously, observe and review the impact you have on others. It helps you to respect and value people and their interactions over processes or tools. Not every action you take or every behavior you display may have the outcome you expect. This is normal. Following the principle of experimenting with your own actions by "act-analyze-adapt", guides you to adjust your leadership behavior towards "Agile".

In our VUCA environment with all its overwhelming complexity, no individual alone can have the best answers, but a team can. This understanding helps to let go of a plan and examine where it needs to be changed.

Uncertainty is a feature of all complex things. Get comfortable with uncertainty and unlock the bigger intelligence of the team. Thereby you and the team will find the best ways to proceed and adapt to change and complexity.

By Peter Stoemmer