Agile (and Scrum) is not just for programmers. The Agile Leadership workshop is intended for:

• Leaders who support, lead, or interact with Agile teams
• Leaders who believe their organizations need agility to meet their business objectives and who have committed to making the transformation successful.
• Executives, middle management, and other leaders with organizational influence
• Organizational Leaders include senior executives, vice presidents, directors, middle management, and process and program-level leaders
• Any leader sponsoring, requesting, or involved with an Agile adoption within their organization
• Leaders who need skills and tools that will help their organizations—from startups who want to disrupt an industry to enterprises who want to continue to lead the pack—navigate the constantly evolving business landscape.

This program takes the following into consideration:

• Agile leadership is a broad topic, currently without a shared definition or understanding.
• Organizational agility cannot exceed the level of personal leadership agility of those with the most influence in an organization.
• Because Agile leadership involves ongoing personal development, it is not something that can be mastered in a single training course.

Program goals

• Develop Agile leadership competency and maturity, which increases effectiveness of a leader in a complex and rapidly changing environment
• Balance education, practice, and peer collaboration
• Flexible for participants and education providers
• Multiple touch points to apply and deepen learning

An Agile leader . . .

• Operates effectively amid uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change
• Is knowledgeable about Agile values, approaches, and practices
• Surfaces more creative solutions through increased self-awareness, a growth mindset, and engaging others
• Aligns and empowers teams toward delivering more customer value
• Personally integrates feedback and experiments, and adapts their ways
• Takes a collaborative continuous-improvement approach to organizational effectiveness
• Catalyzes change in others and facilitates organizational change

We do not require you to be a Certified ScrumMaster or Product Owner to attend. We do, however, expect participants to have a core knowledge of Scrum and Agile Learning Objectives.

If you are coming in with little to no agile experience or education, we will send out some pre-reading and video watching to catch you up to speed on the basics.

In general it would be helpful if you are able to:

• Evaluate the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto for how they relate to an organization’s ability to thrive in complex and rapidly changing conditions.
• Describe at least three characteristics of a high-performing team, and how these characteristics relate to agile thinking.
• Compare and contrast the practices and benefits of at least two common Agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP, etc.)
• Describe the benefits of an Agile approach from the perspective of at least three stakeholder groups with differing needs.

Day 1: Personal Agile Leadership

Share in a historical perspective of organizational development and leadership providing a current global context that is driving the need for agility.

Learn a Leadership Agility Maturity Model that fosters self-awareness of their own leadership maturity and discovers more agile thinking and behaviors.

Explore agile leadership mindset and behaviors of leaders at varying maturity levels to reflect on leadership traits in our own leadership and in others.

Practice a 5-step catalyst conversation technique to positively impact every aspect of our work (and personal) life – engaging others without micromanaging them.

Day 2: Leading an Agile Organization

Explore organizational culture and structures and how they impact organizational agility, speed, innovation and collaboration.

Evaluate multiple case studies of real organizations with different cultures applying different structures to drive effective and sustaining change with positive results.

Reflect and share participant organizational cultures and structures in comparison to these case studies and other participant models.

Practice a 5-step organizational change approach (V2MOM) to guide effective and sustained change

Leading Agile: Laying the Foundation for Success

By Pete Behrens, Agile Leadership Coach, Trainer & Speaker

While Agile offers myriad benefits to an organization, the fact is: adoption and subsequent success of software development projects across the board could be better long-term. Why, when we have a system that has proven to work for countless organizations in various verticals, do initiatives still fail, or else the whole Agile endeavor peters out after a few months or years?

While there are many reasons why Agile approaches can fail, inadequate Agile leadership can be a large contributing factor. Note that it’s not necessarily inadequate leadership, because you can have the most stellar executive leader, but if she doesn’t know how to lead and support an Agile team, she can put it at great disadvantage.

Why Coaches and Consultants Can’t Save Your Organization 

Organizations spend millions on Agile coaches and consultants, then point the finger when, a few months down the road, the “whole Agile thing” has gone off the rails. Is it really the fault of these Agile professionals?

Not at all.

Coaching and consulting can only take a team so far, but beyond that, it’s up to leadership to foster an Agile mindset and behaviors which support and sustain an agile environment.

The Makings of an Agile Leader

So what’s the difference between a leader and an Agile leader?

An Agile leader understands that rapid change, complexity, and uncertainty are central to the role, and can operate effectively in such challenging conditions. She knows and can apply Agile values, approaches, and practices to her own thinking and behaviors to foster creative solutions through increased engagement, feedback and self-awareness.

An Agile leader knows how to engage her employees, and can align, empower and free them to deliver increasingly more customer value.

Feedback and collaboration are important to the Agile leader. She understands that continuous improvement is crucial to foster long-term organizational change.

Reading the Compass of Agility

I’ve developed a tool to provide orientation and direction for Agile leaders: the Agile Leadership Compass. Like a traditional compass, there are four directions: north and south represent the opposing views of the leader and organization. And representing true north is the leader herself - the leader who does not first develop herself as a leader will likely be ineffective at developing others or the organization as a whole.

East and west directions represent the opposing internal and external aspects of the leader and organization. How leaders think impacts how leaders act, and what organizations value impacts how organizations deliver, sustain, and grow.

I’ve noticed that the focus of most Agile initiatives is toward the southwest, focused on organizational delivery. However, without first orienting the leaders and enabling the organization, these early results often don't last. That’s why I encourage balance for Agile leaders:

• Leader: Agile Leaders role model agility through their own adaptive thinking and behaviors.
• Organization: Agile Leaders guide organizational agility inside out by creating a culture of safety to experiment, learn, and grow.
• Enable: Agile Leaders enable agility through personally and organizationally living the Agile values.
• Action: Agile Leaders exhibit catalyze behaviors and guide organizational delivery and change.

Where Certified Agile Leadership Comes Into Play

Having a solid Agile leader can create a solid foundation for long-term Agile success in an organization, but how do we get from Point A, where executives are aware of Agile and maybe even support it, to Point B, where they are actively taking a role in its success?

And how do we make leaders aware that there is even a journey to take? Once they’re aware, how do we convince them to actually take that journey?

These very questions have long been up for debate among Agile professionals like myself, as well as organizations like Scrum Alliance. I am happy to say that a solution has been developed: the Certified Agile Leadership Program.

Anyone who is involved in implementing Agile, from the person who signs the checks to those leading Agile teams, can now get a better roadmap to help them strengthen Agile practices within their company.

The course is designed to increase the effectiveness of those involved in Agile, as well as foster continual learning and interaction with Agile. When leaders become Agile leaders, they increase the success rate of Agile implementation and long-term — or even permanent — adoption.

While the broader certification program is in its infancy, the work and experience behind it are anything but. I have been focusing and guiding leaders across these dimensions for the past half decade, but I fully expect that, once executives and leaders see the value of increasing their fluency in Agile, it will become a requirement for all aspiring Agile leaders.

Reprinted with permission.