Friday, September 11, 2020

What Leaders does during Agile Transformation



Leadership is crucial in any Organizational Agile Transformation.


Adapted from: Wikipedia: Complex Adaptive System

Leadership in Agile Organization is like a Complex Adaptive system leadership. Things are emergence, Patterns are evolving based on the input receiving from the agents.

Agile Transformation starts with Agile Leadership.

Organizations need to pursue business benefits happening owing to Agile ways of functioning.

In the Agile organization, leaders are servants. Leaders are coaches. Leaders are strategists. The operational responsibilities have been delegated to the scrum teams. Leaders facilitate the conversation to assure the bottlenecks are eliminating continuously.

Leaders understand why we are doing Agile Transformation. What value we will receive when we complete Agile Transformation for the whole organization. Leaders are in the driver seat to build an Agile Culture and Mindset changes. Leaders will never pretend that they know everything and think they do not need to learn anything fresh. Leaders will be vulnerable and accept the limitation of their knowledge.

Leaders need to create Cross-Functional, Self Organized, Long live, Agile Teams. The team own end to end product & solution delivery. Leaders coach the team to achieve such a maturity state. Leaders will not interfere in the daily working discussion by micromanaging team member’s activities.

Leaders ensure all the organizational impediments encountered by team members are eliminates at the appropriate moment by deliberately driving these activities. Leaders look for those issues/challenges, gather those, and systematically address those. Some of those challenges are profoundly substantial in nature. Leaders engage in a value stream workshop to understand the product development flow-related roadblocks. They call for a discovery workshop to analyze and get rid of those challenges.

In the Agile Organization where team members start showing self organize, self-driven, cross-functional teams where team members are committed and own end-to-end delivery responsibility, Leaders coach the team to sustain those high-performance team traits. Leaders mentor the team members wherever they identify gaps and room for improvement opportunities are there.

Leaders engage in numerous problem-solving workshops to facilitate teams to resolves different types of issues the team is dealing with. Leaders will not be looking at the status updating and will not act like an action delegating master. Leaders will involve and cocreate the agile organization.

Leaders transform the organization’s culture. Agile culture is more about collaboration and cultivation among people. More concentrated on People’s aspects. Leaders ensure teams and team members are connected in the diverse platforms to demonstrate each other deliverable. Minimize dependencies among each other and Maximize exchange knowledge.

Leaders ensure organizations embrace a more experimental mindset. Encourage team members to gain by experimenting, failing, and sharing and caring approach. Leaders also exhibit the same mindset by walk the talk.

Leaders ensure the Kaizen process is in place. Leaders facilitate many such events to ensure, the great minds are functioning at the team level are prepared to contribute to the bigger purpose in the organization. Leaders will not ask for the ideas and calculate the ideas generated by the team members. Leaders will generate more ideas than their team members.

Leaders lead the organization change management journey. Leaders establish the change is accepted by the whole organization and changes are appearing due to Agile transformation. Leaders are leading from the front and acting as the lighthouses.

Leaders of change must be eager to move first. They exhibit the behaviors and attitudes that are expected of everyone else. Employees watch leaders for consistency between words and actions to look at if they should believe the change is absolutely going to happen. Leaders are self-aware and deliberate.

Leaders create a sense of urgency and importance about the change and demonstrate commitment and passion about getting things done. They offer recognition to those who are performing and operating well.

Leaders energize the team members, motivate them. Leaders identify the right talent, bridge the knowledge gaps if any by providing the perfect environment and training. Leaders establish the trust is in the air. Leaders provide the right supply of resource and assistance to maintain the right momentum and pressure in the ambient.


Situational Leadership® According to Blanchard and Hersey.

Leaders act based on the situation, based on the maturity of the team members, leaders delegates everything.

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