Our Leadership workshops are intended for:

• Leaders who believe their organization needs 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.
• Leaders who support, lead, or interact with Agile teams
• Agile and Leadership Agility is not just for programmers!!It's for the whole business.

Take 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 leadership agility involves ongoing personal development, it is not something that can be mastered in a single training course.

Leadership training goals

• Develop leadership agility 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

A 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

There are no formal prerequisites.

We do not require you to be a Certified ScrumMaster or Product Owner to attend.

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

Leadership Agility Key Topics Include:

• Understanding how technology and change are shaping new leadership approaches.
• Differentiating your authority as a leader from the respect required for effective leadership.
• Recognizing how your own technological mastery impedes your growth as a leader.
• The art of letting go - and why it is only half the battle to becoming a better leader.
• Developing a more strategic orientation, and aligning and engaging others towards it.
• Navigating the fine line between influence and manipulation and how to know if you’ve crossed it.
• Honing your power as a leader to foster safety, shared ownership, and engagement.

Day 1: Agility in 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: Agility in Organizations

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

Laying the Foundation for Success

By Pete Behrens, Leadership Agility 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 leadership Agility 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 a 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 Leadership Compass

I’ve developed a tool to provide orientation and direction for leaders: the Leadership Agility 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: Leaders role model agility through their own adaptive thinking and behaviors.
• Organization: Leaders guide organizational agility inside out by creating a culture of safety to experiment, learn, and grow.
• Enable: Leaders enable agility through personally and organizationally living the Agile values.
• Action: Leaders exhibit catalyze behaviors and guide organizational delivery and change.

Where Leadership Agility Comes Into Play

Having a solid leader can create a solid foundation for long-term success in an organization, but how do we get from Point A, where executives are aware of Leadership Agility 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 Leadership professionals like myself, as well as a myriad of organizations. I am happy to say that a solution has been developed: the Leadership Agility 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 Leadership 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 Business Agility 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.