Five Traits of Agile Leaders

Scrum and other agility frameworks thrive on self-organising / self-managing teams. Organisational agility implies that the whole organisation is an interdependent network of self-managing teams; organisations such as these require different types of leadership at various levels.

My favourite line in the Agile Manifesto is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"; this implies that leaders need to create an environment for teams to collaborate within and across teams.

In this article, I describe five traits of leaders who succeed in creating an enabling environment for agile teams to thrive.

Leaders that empower teams: These leaders demonstrate to teams that they can and should make decisions that affect their teams. They ensure their teams are appropriately skilled and continuously empowered with information that allows them to self-manage.

Empowered teams have the authority to make decisions that affect how they work and the product they create. They also have permission to experiment and fail (learn).

Leaders who trust their teams: Trust is a fundamental requirement for agility to thrive. Leaders with little trust in their teams tend to micro-manage them, which frustrates the team members. An overly restrictive governance process could indicate a lack of trust that the team will do the right thing. Controls are good, but when they get in the way of value being delivered, leaders should ask themselves the trust question.

Leaders that capture, track, and improve value metrics: The type of leaders that support agility are interested in metrics such as:

• Current Value in the product.

• Unrealised value in the product

• The team's ability to innovate

• Time to market

[Source: EBM Metrics]

This contrasts leaders interested in metrics such as how much work the team is doing, resource utilisation, and many other metrics that do not align with being agile. Leaders who focus on and work with their teams to improve the value metrics build robust teams and organisations well-positioned to deliver value to their customers.

Leaders that focus on outcomes over output: We have supported leaders who were overly focused on outputs such as lines of code written, communication articles written, social media articles posted, etc., as these are easy to capture. We coach these leaders to support their teams define outcomes, only then would these leaders have a higher chance of building self-managed teams. These leaders co-create goals with their teams and support the teams to achieve these goals. Some examples could be improving the net promoter score by 20% or improving customer retention year on year by 30%. Once the goals are set, leaders should allow their teams to come up with ideas that could help them deliver on these goals and how they would measure progress.

Leaders that coach their teams: An agile organisation is one in which every leader is a coach, i.e., helping their team members to be better versions of themselves. These leaders are cheerleaders for their team; they do not get in the way of work being done, and they deploy autonomy, mastery and purpose to motivate their team. These leaders delegate as much as possible to their team and would “reveal not resolve” when their teams face challenges.

Our work has seen far too many organisations kick off their agile journey by training their team while the leaders are usually too busy to train. Leaders cannot lead change efforts that they aren’t a part of, so you are invited to join other leaders in a 2days immersive agile leadership workshop where we explore what it takes to support and build an environment where agile can thrive.

Please register for our next Professional Agile Leadership workshop today.