The Instant Leader Myth
If a team or company has a systemic problem, solving that problem will likely require the team or company leader gain more leadership skill rather than just simply adopting a new process in hopes that it will be a “quick win” or more accurately a “quick fix.”
This article is about the cumulative attributes of a leader that enable her to be a change agent and influence the people in her team or organizations toward adopting better and better agile behaviors.
Reading this article will NOT provide you the instant solution to your personal or corporate Agile Leadership problems. A quick fix is a fantasy. Transformation of self and organization takes effort and time. However, the ideas in this article and future installments can accelerate personal and corporate Agile Leadership goals.
Cornerstones of Agile Leadership
There are numerous definitions of what it means to be an Agile Leader. In this article, I’ll explore my definition which is systematic and useful as a guide for agile practitioners to refine Agile Leadership skills and grow new skills.
Knowledge
Agile leadership develops through learning and experience. Learning can be accelerated through diligent study, mentoring and focused practice.
The specific knowledge areas needed for the agile leader include:
- themes and practices of agile
- the agile mindset
- leadership principles
- working knowledge of the business domain
Despite the fact that experience takes time to develop, Agile Leaders can accelerate experience, to a certain degree, by taking on difficult challenges that stretch them beyond their current capabilities.
Agile
Effective Agile Leaders need sufficient knowledge of agile principles, the history of agile, and Agile processes that are industry standards.
Agile methodologies include
- Scrum,
- XP (eXtreme Programming),
- Lean,
- SAFe™,
- DSDM,
- Kanban,
- FDD,
- Crystal.
The history of Agile dates back to Demming and the introduction of manufacturing processes in Japan. The follow-on to these processes where
- Kanban,
- the 5-Why,
- The Toyota Production System (TPS),
- Six-Sigma,
- the Agile Manifesto
…and the rest is recent history.
Business
Agile leaders must be students of their business domain. Understanding the business environment is part of what makes a leader more capable than a non-leader.
A leader can be more effective when she is aware of what people want at 1 or 2 levels above the current operating level where she contributes or even up to the CEO. In other words, the adept agile leader will understand the currency of the leaderships that are receiving the product or services.
Technology
There may be some debate on how much technical knowledge an Agile leader must possess.
In the Information Age, it’s clear that companies who can adopt new business capabilities by way of leveraging technology will have the advantage.
Technical knowledge is also critical for the Agile Leader because software and systems development are a key entry point for agile leaders to provide influence to a project or company.
Mindset
To gain an Agile Mindset the Agile Leader needs
- to be a learner
- to possess or acquire self-knowledge and perhaps spend time reflecting
- engage in focused practice
The Abundance Mindset
First is the abundance mindset which incorporates a view that there are more opportunities in the world than can be tapped. The abundance mindset doesn’t covet success of others but celebrates the achievements of peers and family. The abundance mindset is attuned to the reality that there are unlimited opportunities that are open to the creative and ambitious person.
The Growth Mindset
Second, the Growth mindset represents the willingness to try new things without the expectation of being successful on the first try. For some individuals, trying something that is outside their core area of expertise can be very intimidating. And in many cases, the failure in some aspect of work or personal initiative might be so daunting that they interpret the failure as a personal flaw. For example, if they failed to win a new card game, they might say, “I’m just not talented in this area.” In fact, the reality is they are smart, logical and capable of winning the game if they just learned the tricks.
Shu-Ha-Ri
The third mindset is Shu-Ha-Ri which is founded on the knowledge that you will progress through stages of understanding and learning before you become an expert. In other words, you will not find a quick fix, and you must learn through experience.
Without the proper mindset, an Agile Leader’s practices will remain empty of understanding and implementing processes will be void of meaning.
An Agile Leader learns to operate from an Agile mindset and discards paradigms of non-agile Leaders.
Examples of non-Agile Leadership would be
- Micro-manager
- Passive-Aggressive
- Intimidator
These poorer leadership styles have adverse side effects that hamper the ability of a team to perform at its maximum potential.
Inferior leadership styles rely on the strengths and weakness of the leader’s personality or character rather than harnessing the knowledge, intuition, and diversity that a team brings to the table.
The mindset or world view of a leader is a defining characteristic that significantly influences a leaders behavior.
If the mind is not seeing the world in a way that is compatible with Agile execution and effective inter-personal skills, it will be difficult to get notable performance out of agile teams and also highly improbable that a leader can train others to adopt and behave according to Agile principles.
Skill
Agile Leaders need to develop skills to provide on-the-fly and pre-planned assistance to agile teams, individuals, supervisor and business leadership.
Facilitation
By far the best skill I’ve seen in group interactions and for maximizing collaboration is Facilitation Skills.
Facilitation is a class of competencies for running meetings, conducting brainstorming sessions and managing highly charged interactions between oppositional teams or people.
Facilitation is not just throwing a bunch of sticky notes on a wall or writing madly on a whiteboard. Real facilitation includes prior-planning of a collaborative event which has the desired outcome and a structured approach to reach the goal which is managed real-time during the event.
Communication
Excellent written and verbal communications skills are critical for the Agile Leader. When speaking to a team, the leader must provide a clear message. Ideally, the clear message is one that inspires the team toward innovation and productive work rather than discouraging the team or leaving too much ambiguity which will be filled in later with rumors.
Writing good messages in e-mail is probably one of the hardest skills to master. The speed that you can communicate in e-mail provides a double edged sword which can be used to cut away inefficiency and provide quality information. Or it can be a dangerous tool that has too much emotion or blaming and instead of inspiration a message with too much candor will cause a revolution.
A working definition of good verbal communication is this, The ability to effectively convey information in face-to-face communications and understand information that is provided by another person.
Interpersonal
In addition to effective interpersonal communication, there it is essential to have the interpersonal relationship skills as well. How are these different?
The interpersonal relationships skills include perceiving and self-knowledge. In a conference room where your team is presenting to senior leadership, you notice the CTO is starting to fidget. Fidgeting is a sign that your team may be missing the area that he’s interested in or perhaps the information has gotten way too technical and he’s starting to disengage.
You as the leader need to step in and clarify. You need to be perceptive about the audience. Many non-leaders spend their time focusing on the message they want to convey rather than what the audience needs. The Agile Leader must learn to watch and listen and engage with the target audience rather than with the agenda.
Another key aspect of interpersonal relationship skills in one-on-one interaction. The leader must be able to listen more she speaks in one to one interactions, and she must seek to learn even more than she seeks to teach.
Influencing through questions is sometimes more useful than through providing direction or education.
The Agile Leader must be a student of human relations and especially of the people that she is working with on a daily basis.
Character
The foundation of leadership and execution is character.
Integrity
Integrity is the primary key because it’s the trait that says, “When I make a commitment, I keep it.”
The most profound area where character is both invisible and most fundamental is when a person makes a commitment to himself. As it turns out the strength of one’s integrity determines how often he follows through after he initially tells himself, “I will do such and such.”
The public version of Integrity, the way a person behaviors in the board room or church or the community, can be strengthened or weakened by private integrity which few or perhaps no one else sees.
Consistent exercise of integrity reinforces this character trait in both public and private environments. Weakness seeps in first when a person breaks private pledges which then sets a precedence for a person to break public promises. Usually, this starts with breaking small commitments and increases to breaking larger commitments slowly over time unless a person takes corrective action.
Productive Agile behaviors based on Leadership cornerstones required tenacity to practice and to achieve.
Tenacity
The character trait of tenacity is fundamental for the Agile Leader in both personal development and execution of Agile transformations or running agile teams.
Giving up easy is the antithesis of the term leader because the leader by nature is one who challenges the status-quo, casts a vision for the future and then does everything possible to achieve the goal. But the Agile Leader must apply this same Tenacity to his self-education, self-mastery, and self-knowledge.
Humility
Strangely the Agile Leader must also be humble.
While the Agile Leaders educates herself and sees the necessary changes that need to occur for transformation, this insight and a higher level of education cannot create a superior mindset for the Leader.
When superiority seeps into the soul, it reduces the effectiveness of the Agile Leader because the goal of Agile Leader is to uncork the potential of others, not to create a one person superhuman intellect to rule the world.