Agile leadership

Last updated

Rooted in agile software development and initially referred to leading self-organizing development teams (Appelo, 2011; [1] ), the concept of agile leadership is now used to more generally denote an approach to people and team leadership that is focused on boosting adaptiveness in highly dynamic and complex business environments (Hayward, 2018; [2] Koning, 2020; [3] Solga, 2021 [4] ).

Contents

History

There are many perspectives on the origins of agile leadership, some of which align with the advent of the Agile manifesto. [5] With the rise of Agile software development also a new leadership style arose. When markets are becoming more and more VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) organizations have to be able to respond quickly and handle all the uncertainties. In these markets, traditional management is often seen as too slow. Agile promotes giving the teams the mandate and freedom to make their own decisions. Making teams able to respond quickly to new market changes and technological opportunities. This transformed the style of leadership, towards creating the right context and environment for self-managing teams. See Workers' self-management.

The framework for business agility has also created a set of Agile Leadership principles. [6] These principles have been adopted by a number of universities across the globe. [7] These principles also form the basis of the agile business consortiums views on Agile culture. [8]

This leadership style fits well in today's culture of giving autonomy to employees to do their work and not tell people what to do. Instead, create clarity on the objectives or desired outcome and let people and team discover the best ways to achieve. Next it also fits with the importance of customer-focus or customer-centricity. With the rise of [mobile phones] and [internet] more and more organizations are becoming digital (internet culture). Software is eating the world [9] Where there primary contact with customers isn't face-to-face but through a digital device. These organizations have to respond quickly to customer feedback and make sure that their customer-satisfaction is high. By giving teams access to NPS (Net Promoter) and CES (Customer success), they can quickly respond and adapt.

Leading self-organizing teams

For some authors, the essence of agile leadership is creating the right environment for self-managing teams. Koning (2019), [10] for example, defines four corresponding areas of action:

  1. Co-create the goals – instead of giving instructions, rather make sure that the goals are clear. So teams know what to achieve, and if their actions are bringing them any closer to their goal.
  2. Facilitate Ownership – create an environment in which agile teams can grow and thrive. Teams can't be forced to take Ownership, leaders can only create those circumstances in which teams take ownership. This is a balancing between stepping in and letting go. Finding the sweetspot where teams have the right amount of freedom aligned with their level of maturity.
  3. Learn faster – being fit and ready for the future is not about being the best, it's about learning faster. Self-managing teams need to get fast feedback on their actions and their decisions. Preferably from users and customers. It's the leaders role to promote learning from experiments and failures.
  4. Design the culture – The agile leader has to envision, design and improve the culture of the organisation.

'Enabler - disruptor' model of agile leadership

Favoring a more general approach and highlighting the leadership demands linked to digitization, Hayward (2018) [2] describes agile leadership as simultaneously enabling and disrupting teams and the organization (a paradox, he refers to as the 'agile leadership paradox'):

Agile leader as 'enabler'

  1. Learning agility
  2. Clarity of direction
  3. Empathy and trust
  4. Empowering
  5. Working together

Agile leader as 'disruptor'

  1. Thoughtfully decisive
  2. Digitally literate
  3. Questioning the status quo
  4. Creating new ways of thinking
  5. Close to customer trends

'Align - empower' model of agile leadership

This framework (Solga, 2021) [4] strives to integrate the various ideas that have been floating around the concept of agile leadership. It defines the purpose of agile leadership as enabling people and teams to meet performance expectations and customer demands in business/task environments that are charged with VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and where process knowledge (knowing how to produce desired results) is weak.

To achieve this, an agile leader needs to simultaneously foster divergence and convergence (Solga, 2021). The former involves enabling and exploiting a multitude and diversity of options and possibilities to boost adaptiveness, that is to say, promote responsiveness, flexibility, and speed to effectively deal with dynamic change and disruptive challenges (the 'empower' component). The latter involves promoting alignment with overarching goals and standards as well as across teams (the 'align' component).

Solga (2021) defines three 'alignment' practices and three 'empowerment' practices:

'Alignment' practices (ensuring convergence):

  1. Motivate: Giving esteem, inspiration, and care to inspire emotional engagement and, with it, 'emotional alignment'
  2. Infuse: Creating value orientation and commitment to the purpose and values of the organization ('normative alignment')
  3. Focus: Creating a shared understanding of goals and priorities, roles, processes, and crucial boundary conditions within teams and across the organization ('task alignment')

'Empowerment' practices (enabling and exploiting divergence):

  1. Facilitate: Providing resources, removing obstacles, enabling self-organization, and giving decision-making discretion ('structural empowerment')
  2. Coach: Enabling people and teams to (co-) operate effectively in 'structurally empowered' task environments ('competency-focused empowerment')
  3. Innovate: Enabling an explorative or iterative approach to problem solving and task delivery (i.e., spiraling between experimentation and reflection, prototyping and feedback); also, promoting a constructive approach to handling tension (understanding frictions and conflicts as 'drivers of development'); since all this is about expanding and testing options to reach improvements and novel solutions, its focus is on 'innovation empowerment'

See also

Related Research Articles

Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.

In software development, agile practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s), adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, and flexible responses to changes in requirements, capacity, and understanding of the problems to be solved. Popularized in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development, these values and principles were derived from and underpin a broad range of software development frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dynamic systems development method</span>

Dynamic systems development method (DSDM) is an agile project delivery framework, initially used as a software development method. First released in 1994, DSDM originally sought to provide some discipline to the rapid application development (RAD) method. In later versions the DSDM Agile Project Framework was revised and became a generic approach to project management and solution delivery rather than being focused specifically on software development and code creation and could be used for non-IT projects. The DSDM Agile Project Framework covers a wide range of activities across the whole project lifecycle and includes strong foundations and governance, which set it apart from some other Agile methods. The DSDM Agile Project Framework is an iterative and incremental approach that embraces principles of Agile development, including continuous user/customer involvement.

Lean software development is a translation of lean manufacturing principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System, it is emerging with the support of a pro-lean subculture within the agile community. Lean offers a solid conceptual framework, values and principles, as well as good practices, derived from experience, that support agile organizations.

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) is a set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, and guidelines for delivering information technology services from Microsoft. MSF is not limited to developing applications only; it is also applicable to other IT projects like deployment, networking or infrastructure projects. MSF does not force the developer to use a specific methodology.

The concept of operational excellence was first introduced in the early 1970s by Dr. Joseph M. Juran while teaching Japanese business leaders how to improve quality. It was formalized in the United States in the 1980s in response to "the crisis" among large legacy companies whose market share was shrinking due to quality goods imported from Japan.

A flat organization is an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. An organizational structure refers to the nature of the distribution of the units and positions within it, and also to the nature of the relationships among those units and positions. Tall and flat organizations differ based on how many levels of management are present in the organization and how much control managers are endowed with.

Emergent Design is a phrase coined by David Cavallo to describe a theoretical framework for the implementation of systemic change in education and learning environments. This examines how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms through studies in Thailand. It is related to the theories of situated learning and of constructionist learning. The term constructionism was coined by Seymour Papert under whom Cavallo studied. Emergent Design holds that education systems cannot adapt effectively to technology change unless the education is rooted in the existing skills and needs of the local culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scrum (software development)</span> Software development framework

Scrum is a framework for project management commonly used in software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing and advanced technologies. It is designed for teams of ten or fewer members who break their work into goals that can be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints. Each sprint is no longer than one month and most commonly lasts two weeks. The scrum team assesses progress in time-boxed daily meetings of up to 15 minutes, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: one sprint review intended to demonstrate the work done for stakeholders and solicit feedback, and one sprint retrospective intended to enable the team to reflect and improve.

A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern which empowers knowledge workers to create and leverage information to increase competitive advantage through the collaboration of small and agile self-directed teams. It is emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.

Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.

Strategic leadership is the ability to influence others to voluntarily make decisions that enhance the prospects for the organization's long-term success while maintaining short-term financial stability. Different leadership approaches impact the vision and direction of growth and the potential success of an organization. To successfully deal with change, all executives need the skills and tools for both strategy formulation and implementation. Managing change and ambiguity requires strategic leaders who not only provide a sense of direction but who can also build ownership and alignment within their workgroups to implement change.

Lean integration is a management system that emphasizes creating value for customers, continuous improvement, and eliminating waste as a sustainable data integration and system integration practice. Lean integration has parallels with other lean disciplines such as lean manufacturing, lean IT, and lean software development. It is a specialized collection of tools and techniques that address the unique challenges associated with seamlessly combining information and processes from systems that were independently developed, are based on incompatible data models, and remain independently managed, to achieve a cohesive holistic operation.

Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. Continuous testing was originally proposed as a way of reducing waiting time for feedback to developers by introducing development environment-triggered tests as well as more traditional developer/tester-triggered tests.

Roebuck (2004), defines entrepreneurial leadership as "organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal using proactive entrepreneurial behavior by optimising risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, taking personal responsibility and managing change within a dynamic environment for the benefit of [an] organisation".

Agile Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the use of Agile software development for BI projects to reduce the time it takes for traditional BI to show value to the organization, and to help in quickly adapting to changing business needs. Agile BI enables the BI team and managers to make better business decisions, and to start doing this more quickly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extreme programming</span> Software development methodology

Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.

Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted by for-profit and non-profit organizations in several countries. This can be seen as a greater movement within organisational design to cope with increasing complex social environments, that promises a greater degree of transparency, effectiveness and agility.

Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) is the software development portion of the Disciplined Agile Toolkit. DAD enables teams to make simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DAD builds on the many practices espoused by advocates of agile software development, including scrum, agile modeling, lean software development, and others.

The scaled agile framework (SAFe) is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. Along with disciplined agile delivery (DAD), SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team.

References

  1. ↑ Appelo, J. (2011). Management 3.0: Leading agile developers, developing agile leaders. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.
  2. 1 2 Hayward, S. (2018). The agile leader: How to create an agile business in the digital age. London: Kogan Page.
  3. ↑ Koning, P. (2020). Agile leadership toolkit: Learning to thrive with self-managing teams. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  4. 1 2 Solga, M. (2021). The 'align - empower' model of agile leadership ('practice' whitepaper #03, cidpartners GmbH)
  5. ↑ "Manifesto for Agile Software Development". agilemanifesto.org. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
  6. ↑ "Agile Business Consortium". www.agilebusiness.org. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
  7. ↑ "The nine principles of agile leadership". theagileleader.co.uk. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
  8. ↑ "Whitepaper. Towards and agile culture" (PDF). ymaws.com. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
  9. ↑ Marc Andreessen - Software is eating the world
  10. ↑ Koning, P. (2020). Agile leadership toolkit: Learning to thrive with self-managing teams. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.