Transforming teams with agile leadership: A beginner’s guide
Companies must embrace fast-moving and adaptable business practices to stay ahead. Some organizations start this transformation at the top, taking a page from the Agile Manifesto to foster an executive perspective that embraces empowerment, innovation, and trust. These leaders become agile ambassadors, modeling the philosophy and guiding their teams to adopt the agile mindset.
As the practice expands across all organizational levels, agile leadership aims to inspire everyone – from the C-suite to the mailroom – to become more efficient, effective, and productive, especially when faced with instability.
Here’s how organizations entrench agile leadership principles within their executive ranks and take advantage of this highly respected industry philosophy.
What is agile leadership?
Agile began as a project management methodology within the software development industry to help teams adapt and respond to the rapidly changing industry. Agile leadership is founded on the three Cs: communication, collaboration, and commitment.
As it evolved, agile leadership took a more hands-off approach than traditional management methods. Now, the project manager communicates organizational goals and vision while the project team – led by a scrum master – self-organizes to deliver.
The team divides work into iterative sprints with frequent check-ins, facilitating early roadblock identification, improving workflows, and increasing productivity. This approach helps the group shift gears when faced with new data or evolving markets. With ample room to innovate, team members are encouraged to “fail fast,” adapting and learning quicker than workers within traditional project management frameworks.
Leaders who adopt agile principles at the organizational level have taken the first step to optimize work processes and remove roadblocks to success. The next step is that embraces change and provides the security employees need to experiment, learn from failure, and offer honest feedback.
With these practices in place, the corporate culture transforms to support skill development among individuals while promoting high-level team function and driving collective success.
Key principles of agile leadership
The agile leadership style is founded on nine core principles companies must incorporate into their corporate culture.
1. Be the change
Agile leaders don’t command and control. Instead, agile management practices require managers to operate with empathy, compassion, and humility. Leaders should inspire peers and subordinates to adopt the philosophy through positive examples and experiences.
2. Quality thinking
High-quality thinking leads to meaningful action. Agile managers lead by example, seeking diverse perspectives and input from those closest to the problem. They take their time, prioritizing decisions and ensuring solutions are realistic and evidence-based.
3. Value feedback
Agile prizes continuous improvement. However, growth can’t happen in a bubble. The agile leadership model demonstrates honesty and respect by encouraging meaningful, actionable, timely feedback that travels both ways. Most importantly, the practice asks leaders to act on their colleagues’ insights to close the feedback loop.
4. Focus and meaning bring fulfillment
An must understand what motivates their team and align those values with company goals and objectives. Shared understanding and purpose drive inspired action, making even the most routine tasks more fulfilling.
5. Emotion drives creativity and innovation
An agile leader would never say, “Let’s not get emotional.” They understand that passion and desire, even anger or frustration, are fuel needed to achieve one’s full potential. Emotion is part of the human experience, something a leader respects by being accessible, open, and transparent while expecting the same.
6. Anyone can lead
Investment in leadership potential accelerates an organization’s learning and adaptability. The agile approach expands the pool of future leaders by allowing team members to take the reins and expand their agile leadership skills. An agile manager also cultivates a favorable culture in the long term by mentoring future executives in servant leadership.
7. Delegation
Agile practices center around enabled, engaged, and energized individuals. Leadership must address the organization’s emerging needs and tensions while trusting team members with the power and authority to do their jobs. This balancing act poses an ongoing challenge that requires careful risk assessment and a consistent leadership style.
8. Collaborative achievement
An agile leader must foster a collaborative environment based on trust, respect, and meaningful relationships. Management provides everything the team needs to function autonomously within established boundaries – not just tools and materials but an ethos of forgiveness, positivity, generosity, and gratitude. By nurturing a healthy work community, agile managers encourage learning and professional development while delivering optimal performances and results.
9. Be open
An agile leader welcomes ideas from anyone, regardless of position. They recognize that colleagues closest to the problem likely have the best solutions, so they’ll stop, listen, and consider their input. These managers encourage creative thinking and provide feedback to help others identify and pursue valuable ideas.
Benefits of agile leadership
Leaders who practice business agility will see many organizational benefits they wouldn’t get from a traditional framework.
Iterative development: Agile leadership removes the fear of failure and encourages teams to iterate, learn, and adapt to changing audience requirements, thereby bringing solutions to market faster than the competition.
Timely resolution: Frequent check-ins help agile leaders identify concerns and challenges early. Management can quickly address issues and ensure progress flows uninterrupted.
Experimentation: Agile management doesn’t rely on traditional or legacy work processes; instead, it encourages an experimental approach. Team members can improve the product incrementally and drive additional customer value by quickly testing and refining new ideas.
Ownership: Employees feel more motivated when they know their work has an impact. Agile leadership encourages open communication between team members and management so everyone understands the criteria for organizational success and the value of their contribution.
Maximized potential: Motivated team members self-manage to find the most efficient, productive workflow. Once invested in team success, they’ll help others do the same and boost group performance to the next level.
Positive mindset: Agile leaders see change and failure as learning opportunities, spreading enthusiasm for experimentation to produce even better results.
How to implement agile leadership in your organization
The agile transformation is challenging, partly because it’s an ongoing process. Along with a strategic plan and effective implementation, the transition asks leaders to shepherd a cultural mindset shift to ensure agile principles take hold within the workplace.
A company must do these three things to support agile leadership development and drive success:
1. Foster continuous learning
Sustain motivation among team members and leadership by encouraging employees to learn from their challenges, successes, and failures. Break down departmental silos to facilitate cross-functional cooperation as well as knowledge, idea, and feedback sharing.
Human resources can support agile development by holding training workshops or lunch-and-learns and providing opportunities to upskill through continuing studies.
2. Promote feedback and adaptability
The agile approach requires iteration. Leaders should encourage teams to gather data and input from consumers, investors, colleagues, and other to improve existing products or develop new features. This information is also invaluable for driving evidence-based decision-making and innovation to build organizational value.
3. Establish autonomy
Agile leadership empowers project teams. Although management is accountable for outlining project objectives and providing the necessary materials, it’s up to Scrum teams to organize the work and achieve results. Leaders who encourage teams to self-manage and make collective decisions demonstrate trust, which increases the group’s sense of ownership over their efforts and improves the quality of the outcome.
Critical techniques for agile leaders
Agile management relies on more than just processes. Leaders must shift their thinking from a top-down chain of command to a bottom-up model in which teams and individuals make their own workflow decisions.
This doesn’t mean executives are no longer needed – quite the opposite. By giving up day-to-day control, management can focus on setting corporate strategy and driving profitability.
Fortunately, an agile leadership style relies on familiar soft skills applied in new ways. Agile leaders should focus on improving the following habits:
Open communication
Most leaders are comfortable managing teams with an “open door” policy, where employees seek them out for input or advice. Agile leadership takes an active approach to communication, encouraging members to express their thoughts, concerns, and ideas openly and regularly.
Employees must feel safe expressing their opinions for this strategy to succeed. Leaders can foster this sentiment with solid communication skills and feedback-gathering (e.g., anonymous surveys and regular check-ins). Employees must also see managers and executives acting on their input.
Active listening
A successful agile leader understands the value of listening. They conduct feedback conversations and one-on-one meetings. They also structure communication channels to ensure they actively listen and acknowledge team members’ contributions.
In addition, agile leaders practice empathy to understand opposing viewpoints and respond respectfully to others’ needs.
Observation
An agile team is attuned to one another. They also closely monitor external forces driving marketplace adjustments, such as customer preference, industry advances, or the overall economy. Based on these observations, leadership must consider and reassess organizational priorities while remaining grounded in agile principles of fast, innovative action and prioritization of customer needs.
Agile leadership training should include developing observational skills through mentoring, coaching, and industry guidance.
Agile leadership with Tempo
Whether your team works with Kanban or Scrum teams, Tempo has tools suited to any style of leadership that can help you build business agility into your organization. Our tool by representing strategies and priorities with intuitive project roadmaps. helps the team manage tasks and timelines while identifying optimizations.
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