Leadership And Management

How Does The Agile Manifesto Address Planning

by Ming Wei | Dec 9, 2021 | Leadership And Management

What is Agile Manifesto planning and how does that planning work?

Collaboration is the foundation of the Agile approach to product development. The well-planned Agile collaboration, which demands face-to-face contact between the product development team and product owners, can pivot and correct quickly no matter how customer needs or even markets shift. The plan is always flexible, always focused on the individuals and new possibilities for productive development collaboration. The highest priority is always the continuous iterative production of quality working software.

To secure the end user’s satisfaction and the customer’s competitive advantage, the Agile Manifesto sets forth twelve principles of Agile processes. Four main Agile values help focus that most productive mindset: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and response to change over following a plan.

Fundamental to Agile values and the Agile mindset is a commitment to distinct pivotal values in the software development process: responsiveness, flexibility, capability, and speed. Agile project management methodologies organize around fast production of usable software, with the needs of both the stakeholders and vital end users always in tandem.

The Agile Manifesto & Agile Principles

The origins of the agile manifesto came from 2001 where 17 software developers met at Snowbird resort, Utah, and drafted those 4 values and these 12 adaptive principles that would be codified in The Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

1. Provide early and continuous delivery of valuable software

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development

3. Deliver working software frequently (in weeks, not months)

4. Facilitate daily contact between stakeholders and developers

5. Organize projects around motivated and disciplined professionals, then trust them to do their jobs

6. Prioritize face-to-face conversation as the most efficient way to convey information to and within a development team

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress

8. Maintain a  development team in which developers and users can sustain a constant pace indefinitely

9. Focus continuous attention on technical excellence and good design

10. Remember that simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential

11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from interactions among self-organizing teams

12. The development team reflects regularly on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is a legal contract based upon management metrics that help reduce message confusion and quickly identify and address product weaknesses such as disconnects in communication or a work/product backlog. These metrics continually measure a team’s progress and efficiency. This flexible, people-centric approach to software development has proved and continues to prove both responsive and productive.

Agile project management

The lifecycle of a project organized within an Agile framework  begins with the initial project plan and continues to project completion. Note that in the initial stage of an Agile software project an inflexible plan is precisely what Agile rejects, and requires that stakeholders actively engage face-to-face with the development team from start to finish. The architecture of the project plan will define a start point and then move rapidly to produce working iterations of software ready to use and collaboratively revise, as needed.

Agile product development projects organize the work into increments in order to minimize the amount of time, up-front planning, and design required. These increments become the iterations of the product ready for the team to evaluate, change, and incorporate quickly and efficiently.

Agile project management methodology is characterized by short development cycles called sprints, performed in close collaboration among team members in the Scrum, the place where self-organizing Agile teams, in face-to-face conversation among programmers, developers, key management personnel, and stakeholders implement fast adoption of change, and continuous measurable improvement. These iterations are a project’s primary measure of progress. And a function of the customer collaboration is to evaluate that product iteration. For example, product owners or other stakeholders may find a problematic issue with a software iteration and add it to an issue tracker, assign priority, assign it to another member of the development team, and set a performance goal. The rest of the development team will evaluate the technical issue and reassess their approach as needed. The flexibility of the Agile team and its project management tools leave the development space needed to react and respond quickly to any changes needed to design or programming.

But does the Agile Manifesto scale?

That is, can scaled Agile be implemented to work for businesses with highly complex and expansive software requirements? Can it engage with hundreds of people and escape a catastrophe of scale where financial failure may be one of the risks? According to Agile users, with adjustments the Agile Manifesto does indeed scale. Agile, indeed.

How we can help your business moving forward?

From Scrum and Kanban training to agile methodology insight for your business, find out more about how it all can work for your business needs with online courses from Leadership Tribe today.

What Must Management Do for A Successful Agile Transformation?

by Ming Wei | Jun 1, 2021 | Leadership And Management, Leadership Tribe

Many stakeholders, leadership teams and management teams face this question when embarking on an agile transformation. By transformation, we mean a complete cultural change, a new operating model, an overhaul of previous ways of working, across the entire organization. Whilst Agile methodology was initially created to improve the efficiency of software development, it has now become a popular and effective operating model for an entire business.

The difference between traditional businesses and Agile organisations is quite apparent. The first, noticeable difference is the ’agile manifesto’, which promotes continuous improvement, inspection, and adaptation. Compared to traditional organisations, Agile organizations can inspect, adapt and change. In short, they can embrace change management, fulfil changing customer demands (and ultimately gain customer satisfaction), understand real-world conditions and take full advantage of unpredictable markets.  

Successful Agile transformation requires the buy-in of the entire organization. Agile values, agile principles and agile processes need to be accepted, adhered to and embraced by everyone from the top down, from leadership teams and management teams to development teams, project management teams and all team members in between. Instead of working in silos and hierarchies, agile teams work collaboratively and flexibly.

What are the key components of an agile transformation?

• Prioritise people over processes
• Fully functioning software over comprehensive documentation
• Collaboration over contract negotiation
• Ability to change over sticking to a plan.

What should management do before they start an agile transformation?

To successfully implement an agile transformation across an entire organization, rather than agile adoption in a single department, requires major changes.

Structural change – traditional hierarchies are out, replaced by self-organizing teams with the autonomy to respond to information. Agile leadership needs to be visible from the top down.

Process change – instead of the traditional project management approach of the waterfall method (working in one direction towards a set goal), Agile processes break projects into bitesize chunks (sprints). Agile practices include continuous improvements and regular, iterative releases rather than one final launch at the end of the project.

Cultural change – successful change management involves getting employee engagement in the process. The entire organization need to understand the benefits of agile, in order to change their working practices, behaviours and approaches. This aspect can be the most challenging part of Agile transformation and organizational change.

What type of management skills are needed to manage an agile transformation?

Leaders and managers need to shift from the traditional to a creative, agile mindset in order to adjust to the new way of working. This is not an easy thing to do. It requires a new focus, inner agility and reactive flexibility.

Creative thinking and exploration replace certainty and linear decision-making. Leaders need to encourage experimentation and risk-taking in product development and project management.

Collaboration is key. Leaders are no longer at the top of hierarchies with teams working in silos. Again, this can take a while to accept. Agile leadership teams need to trust team members to be self-organizing and to work autonomously.

Leaders and managers need to have effective communication skills to convey agile principles and cultural changes to their teams. This factor is important for all roles, especially the leadership team at the start of the transformation when an Agile mindset is at an early stage of the business roadmap. Subsequently, it’s vital for Scrum masters on a daily basis of implementation.

How to have a successful agile transformation through scaled agile?  

Scaled Agile Framework says that conventional agile teams work best in teams of 5-11 members. Leaders need to build these small, diverse, nimble and collaborative teams in the first instance. 

Lean scaled agile refers to translating the agile methods and implementing lean thinking such as Kanban and Scrum within the organisation on a broader level. Lean scaled agile requires several factors to contribute to the complete process including:

• Role specialisation
• Team size
• Role of product owner
• Iteration length
• Role of user
• Size of the batch
• Definition of release
• Definition of done/ Definition of reading.

Lean agile transformation for leaders, managers, and suppliers should be considered a large-scale transformation because of the involvement of cross-functional teams and the entire organization.  

Any large-scale agile transformation should include:  

• The transformation scope should have a specific set of roles, including leadership, teams, management, suppliers and support teams.
• A safe implementation roadmap including a timeline for a set of goals.
• Lean and Agile basic building blocks and lean-agile methodologies combined with Kanban and Scrum boards.
• Solid and robust metrics reflect the whole transformation process, value delivery, continuous improvement, and maturity.  

Lean scaled agile benefits  

Improves management capacity

Capacity management is one of the agile ways and is usually known for balancing availability and workload. With the scaled agile approach, capacity management aligns with the ARTs, teams and has retrospective assessments every quarter. This helps create value while allowing for flexibility and change, empowering enterprise leaders to balance out and reflect regularly with minimum disruption and lead time.

Engages employees

Scaling agile offers in-built freedom and creates trust in the team and at individual levels. When it comes to decision-making, every individual decides how they will deliver the work and how their contributions impact the business’ overall goals.  

Aligns work and strategy

With precise alignment between the top-level enterprise objectives and the employees, those involved will promote:  

• Encouraging transparency
• Fostering quick response times
• Enhancing agility
• Cross-team coordination

Enables visibility in organisation-wide transparency

Agile leaders and agile coaches help scale lean-agile, visualise and connect work for every team while enabling enterprise-wide transparency. Through this visibility, everyone can see, clearly and consistently, how everyone works in the organisation.  

In conclusion  

Successfully transacting from the traditional management system to agile management is complex. This modern problem requires a modern solution such as lean scaled agile scaling. In short, the readiness of management remains the key factor in the successful agile transformation. 

by Ming Wei | May 26 2023 | Leadership And Management, Leadership Tribe

Preparing for Enterprise Agility

by Ming Wei | Jun 1, 2021 | Leadership And Management, Leadership Tribe

Organizations have one common goal, to deliver higher returns to shareholders. To achieve this, they need to keep up with evolving customer needs and preferences. They also need to satisfy changing employee expectations. In this case, an enterprise looking to scale up needs to move quickly and easily in response to internal or external threats, challenges, and changes in the overall market.

Surviving and thriving in the modern economy will require companies to adapt to the increasing developments in technology and market demands. For this to work, a company will have to seize opportunities and speed up its business process, which can be achieved by engaging and empowering its employees.

Enterprise Agility not only works for companies in the IT and software development industry, but agile organizations from other sectors can also draw inspiration from the core values and principles of agile.

Preparing for Enterprise Agility is the best solution for organisations looking to compete and win in today’s world successfully. It seems through an organisation’s operating model and identifying areas where value can be unlocked. The Agile transformation, though a significant undertaking, yields excellent benefits such as:

• Productivity gains
• Rapid decision-making
• Reduced costs or Cost saving
• Operational performance
• Employee engagement
• Better financial performance
• Boosted customer satisfaction

What is Enterprise Agility?

Enterprise agility allows an organisation to adjust its forecasts and targets quickly and efficiently.

A few organisations have achieved full enterprise Agility. Most companies, depending on the competitive pressure they are facing, will pursue different outcomes. Some will aim to improve customer satisfaction, and others will try and develop employee engagement, while most of them will work towards reduced costs.

By applying Agile principles, small and large companies can identify and unlock value across the entire organisation. It is all about creating a new image for your company to productivity and more robust performance. To achieve and increase enterprise agility, companies need to change five dimensions in their operating-model, and these are:

• Structure
• People
• Process
• Technology
• Strategy

Business Structure

Here, you will be dealing with the allocation of responsibilities and how workflows in your organisation. In terms of Structure, Preparing for Enterprise Agility demands that you develop a flexible network of empowered employees or teams.

Your team members or employees need to operate in one language, ensuring that they work together with high standards of expertise, transparency, and accountability.  There should be a sense of proper alignment and collaboration throughout the entire organization that can benefit you across any potential market conditions.

The organisational structure should consist of a network of small cross-functional team levels of empowered employees with access to information, tools, and mechanisms to continue performing in a changing environment. Besides creating conducive work surroundings, companies can also empower individuals and teams by pushing decision-making downwards.

The quality of communication in an enterprise diminishes with the size of your employees. Your company’s strategic management goals should include breaking down your workforce into a collection of smaller teams (5-11 individuals).

As much as your employees need to be directed and managed, they will be highly engaged and deliver exceptional results if given clear responsibility and authority.  This requires creating a working environment that allows them to be at their best.  A high-trust environment attracts high-performing talent and enables individuals to achieve their full capabilities.

People

This dimension of your operating model focuses on your employee’s mindset.  In the end, you should come up with a dynamic model that ignites passion in them. To positively influence employee engagement and satisfaction, you must focus on the three aspects of human motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy can be achieved by creating small, cross-functional teams. On the other hand, mastery involves the application of knowledge across a wide range of situations. Purpose can be achieved through Concrete tools such as goals, missions, key performance indicators and objectives, and key results (OKRs).

Most Companies have achieved enterprise agility by fostering an ownership mentality and real-time accountability in employees. You will need a workforce that sees your vision, mission, and goals the way you see them. The Employee mentality and company culture can affect the health of your organisation.

Individuals who believe that they are paid to work until five or when there is something in it for them do not run Agile organisation is not run by individuals. It requires a workforce that sees the bigger picture. Employees with an ownership mentality understand that they only win or get rewarded when the company thrives. This calls for a paradigm shift in the ways they think and behave.

Preparing Enterprise Agility is a project on its own. Therefore you will need to work with an Agile team. This cross-functional team usually comprises experts from various fields of work with broad and diverse skills.

Working with highly skilled professionals will ensure that the product development through to end product meets the customer’s expectations and preferences. For agility to take root in an enterprise, there is a need to adapt to change in behaviours and culture—both inside and outside the company. There is also a need for Employee Engagement and Inclusion to ensure that your operations run smoothly.

Transforming the workforce requires a need to address talent and leadership gaps. Going the agile way of changing your workforce requires the anticipation of critical skills that are of great importance in the future.

It is not only about work ethic, responsiveness, teamwork, and how you organise and control your employees. The idea is to create a cohesive community without having to force rules and processes down their throat. Employees should collaborate well across functions.

Process                                                  

This methodology involves transforming your business process to foster rapid decision-making and learning cycles. A company can assess its current operations management

Changing your workplace culture to achieve enterprise Agility requires that you do away with working practices that hinder adaptation. On the other hand, you need to embed working cultures that allow your company to change with the rapidly changing world.

For companies to start moving, they need to go beyond traditional transformation. Such organizations should fully embrace an agile mindset. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it easy for multiple organizations to achieve remote working. This sudden change has made them attractive to a diverse workforce, including the younger talent.

According to McKinsey, the health of an entire organization is determined by its management practices and outcomes. Agile companies score high in this type of performance metrics and measures.

Practices that blend well with the agile approach include:

• Creating outcome-oriented job descriptions — focusing on outcome, customer impact and individual roles, and responsibilities
• Investing in customer or user feedback loop— requires taking qualitative and quantitative customer research, conducting usability testing, analysing user behaviour, collecting user feedback, and running experiments to build superior user experience and design
• Creating more generalist and fewer specialists—employee rotation to foster understanding of others’ roles. This helps in role clarity.
• Merging Co-creation and Perfectionist mindset—focusing on craftsmanship and attention to detail while ensuring that customer needs are met.
• Creating a more consensus-oriented work environment.
• Reducing waste—allocating time and resources to activities that add customer value.

 Learn more about the difference between Agile & Scrum training

The most successful organisations fully understand that work is changing.  With organizational agility, they also see the need for developing the workforce and maximising their full potential. This type of change should take place in a new environment, one that promotes the agile shift.

Therefore, preparing for Enterprise Agility to achieve business goals largely depend on how you redesign your workplace. There is also a need to integrate customers and other stakeholders into your operations management plan.

Technology

Technology can be a handy tool in achieving Enterprise Agility. It can transform your business process and systems to become faster, more convenient, and more efficient. It involves the integration of IT into the entire enterprise business model.

The advent of digital transformation and cloud technology has helped many businesses achieve flexibility and continuous improvement. Technological advancements that impact business management and operations management foster communication and interaction between employees, prospects, and customers.

Achieving enterprise agility requires that you analyse how trends impact the way work is done in your organisation. The Digital and Automation revolution should be used to foster simplicity, flexibility, and speed to respond to changes and challenges.

Besides operating models, organisations can also drive change that matters with data- and tech-enabled approaches. To remain competitive, there is a need to invest in innovation and technology to reduce operating costs and be up to date with market trends.

In a digital world, technology and innovation are best combined with operations management to boost an organisation’s performance. Companies can exploit digital capabilities by automating routine or repetitive tasks, creating room for productive human intervention. The digital solution applied in the management of operation frees more time, hence reducing unnecessary workloads.

Developing digital products and services is a way organization can achieve good customer experience and reducing costly manual processing. Redesigning the customer journey requires digitalising complex, manual processes to avoid wasting time for consumers, employees, and other stakeholders. Capturing the digital opportunity for operations management uncovers new ways for better performance.

Business Strategy

If you are planning for enterprise Agility, then you need to redefine your value proposition. A strategy should close the gap between the current business management trajectory and its aspirations. Reducing such traditional dependencies can help gain a competitive advantage for your team overall.

When it comes to strategy, the leadership team has a significant task of ensuring that all organisation members share a common purpose, vision, and decision; some call it the “North Star”.  This enterprise Agility dimension involves senior and top-management teams, who are expected to meet regularly and create a strategy within the surrounding constraints.

Enterprise Agility requires restructuring your strategic management goals to one that aligns budget and values. It comes as a result of shaping your workplace culture to foster change and drive productivity. The strategic management process should aim to keep costs low with best practices while maintaining quality standards.

Senior-management teams need to develop strategies that can beat the competition. There is also a need to evolve how strategic decisions are made. It involves increasing more time for your strategy journey. For some companies, they may need to integrate their financial-planning processes with the strategic-management process.

Strategy development does not end with making decisions. The parties involved need to commit themselves to the new direction. Making directional changes requires installing a rigorous and ongoing strategic management process that can also resolve outstanding critical issues and, at the same time, respond to fundamental environmental changes.

Commitment and discipline are required when converting strategies into actions incorporated into the business management and operations management plans. The leadership team should spend as much time on building strategies as on operating the business.

Find out more about building agile framework in your company

Customer satisfaction as a Strategy

When planning for Enterprise Agility, customer-centricity should be a priority. Customers should be placed at the core of your business. It entails providing a positive experience at every stage of the customer’s journey. Besides offering good support services, big brands are more focused on creating a culture around customers and their needs or preference.

Focusing on the customer requires collecting a wealth of data about them. Customer data should help you understand their interests, engagement, and buying behaviour. It would be best if you got an insight into what your customer needs and wants. There is also a need for a platform where customers can freely share their perspectives, views, opinions, and thoughts.

It is more about reading and responding to customer feedback, reviews, testimonials, or comments to gather more information for decision-making. Agile organisations rely on data obtained from the customer to employee communication networks or channels to identify problems as soon as they appear. There should also be a major shift in the organisation’s structure and culture for this to work.

Preparing for Enterprise Agility: Conclusion

Scaling a business aims to generate more revenue with low costs, but you may need Enterprise Agility to remain relevant in the market. Most organisations share the same goals, threats, and challenges; hence they all compete for limited opportunities and resources.

An agile organisation can respond fast to external forces making sure that business operations remain uninterrupted. The value of agility is captured by continuous experimentation and customisation. The conventional wisdom behind achieving Enterprise Agility is to improve the whole as supposed to the parts that link together business units and functions. An end-to-end operating model transformation enhances customer service, ensures continuous improvement, and increases capacity while reducing costs.

Contact Leadership Tribe to find out more about preparing for Enterprise Agility

Leadership Through Change

by Krishna Chodipilli | Mar 10, 2021 | Agile Coaching, Leadership And Management

In today’s world, change and chaos are inevitable, and there is no way around them. As a leader, you need to embrace the change and work your way out through all the mess!

“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency.” —Arnold Glasow

The world around us keeps changing rapidly, and we are forced to make massive changes these days. If you continue leading with the same old traditional ways that your company has always used, it will most likely fail to succeed. Leadership through change is the ultimate solution to it.

What Is Leadership Through Change?

Leadership through change requires simultaneously optimising an organisation’s culture and making investments to enhance business growth. It creates experiences for individuals who develop new possibilities while combining them to initiate strategies that exploit the resources to triumph in the marketplace.

However, those who lead through change in the wrong way can face swift and painful consequences. In this regard, Transformational leadership lets you refine the change leadership into bite-sized chunks for effective implementation.

The organisations that dominate the market possess leadership traits of knowing how to lead effectively through change than anyone else and bring out the best in their employees during such an uncertain changing environment.

“Change leadership is the art and then the science of influencing people to engage in change and then navigating a journey together from their current state to a desired future state.” – Hawkes

Key Strategies for Leadership through Change

·      Staying Purpose-Driven

If your company is facing turbulent times, you need to stay purpose-driven to lead through change successfully. If the organisational leadership lacks a sense of purpose, how will the employees stay on track? It is not just the company that depends on the executive leadership but its people as well.

It is acceptable not knowing what to do at the start; you might even end up being more stressed than you have ever been in your career. However, if you divert all your focus towards your purpose and creating a purpose-driven culture, all the “how’s” and “what-ifs” will eventually be answered.

·      Taking Communication Seriously

You already know how crucial communication is; everyone keeps emphasising effective communication. Many organisations undervalue the importance of communication, mostly during the period of significant change.

Communication, when done correctly, results in significant relationships, which is essential for organisational health. Communication of all the changes and situations must be shared among all the departments to ensure effectiveness. When all teams coordinate with each other, they can perform at a high level.

Leadership through change requires leaders to communicate from a technical aspect while reinforcing the need for inspiration and acknowledgement of their people. So, the next time any change hits your company, no matter how small or big, make it a priority to take communication seriously and give your 100%.

·      Consider Employees as an Asset and Invest in Them

Being a leader, you should know that your most significant assets are the people who work with you. These individuals are expected to carry out your objective and vision through each transition happening at your organisation due to change. It depends on them to make the transition successful or unsuccessful, so it is wise to invest in them.

Depending on your company’s size, try to invest in your people as much as you can. Successful organisations are passionate about building their people to attain a top position in the market.

The investment can be made in several different ways, like initiating team-building exercises, enhancing skill sets, bringing in experts, and much more. Adaptive leadership will help your company thrive through change and show your compassion towards your team.

·      Persistence is the Key!

Honestly, no one likes change, especially your employees. Change initiates a sense of uncertainty, and your people will be tempted to slow down, give up and eventually lose the focus of the overall goal. As a leader, it is you’re your job to instil persistence until you succeed.

There is no doubt that it gets tough to move forward when you feel like nothing is being accomplished or the results are not as you expected them to be. This is where persistence comes in and rescues you. It is one of the most important leadership traits that let your organisation thrive during the phase of extreme change.

Successful Change Efforts

Change breeds fear and uncertainty, which often leads to unsuccessful efforts!

When people are not sure and lack the courage to embrace the change and take the necessary efforts, the successful transition becomes a challenge.

Center for creative leadership researched to figure out the competencies needed for change-capable leaders. They divided them into three major categories and called them “The three C’s of change” for leading the process along with the people.

Let’s take a look at the Three C’s of Effective Change Leadership. When united, these three C’s bring effective change leadership.

1.    Communicate

As mentioned before, in every aspect, the most important factor is communication. But, a leader must know how to do it the correct way. Communicating the change, explaining the purpose and connecting it with your organisation’s values is the key to successful communication. When leaders explain the benefits of change, people tend to adapt to all the changes and stay motivated.

2.    Collaborate

All the dominating organisations have a collaborative culture where they make the most out of each person’s skills and ideas. For organisational leadership, it is crucial to bring people together for each phase, including planning, implementing and executing change. Leaders who work across boundaries and encourage their employees to come out of their caves and refuse any unhealthy competition will most definitely succeed. Thought leadership involves doing all sorts of collaborations rather than including your employees in the change process when 80% of the planning is done.

3.    Commit

Although change is difficult and no one enjoys it, the leaders who were able to negotiate it successfully were willing to step out of their comfort zone and become persistent and resilient towards the goals. Leadership skills include committing with beliefs and behaviours that supported the change. Along with that, they must devote most of their time to it and keep their focus on the big picture.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Leadership Through Change

Leadership through change might seem impossible as you don’t know where the next turn will take you. It is virtuous to learn from others’ experiences to know which road to take and which to avoid. We have gathered some dos and don’ts of leading through change to not repeat the same mistakes as others.

✔ Let Others Know What You Know

One common mistake among leaders is that they keep the bad news or critical information to themselves, and employees have no idea about it, making them even more anxious. They are an equal part of the organisation as you are; you are not the only person feeling confused and troubled at the sudden change. Try your best to engage them and fill them in on crucial details and deadlines. Keep them updated with everything as you find out new information. Keeping your people informed will take away some of their uncertainty, and they will be encouraged to cooperate.

✔ Outline the Action Plan

Once you know how to go, make an action plan and divide the work for each team member. Choose them wisely according to their skills and competencies, utilise each person’s unique talents to enhance the change process. Rather than sharing the broad picture or the expected results, take them through each step of the journey and let them give their input when needed. When they start offering their ideas, it will stir up ownership and boost their confidence.

✔ Reduce Conflicts

While talking about change, how can we forget the growing number of conflicts? When an organisation is going towards a new path, conflicts will arise. Your people might be frustrated at the idea of change or fail to understand their roles. No matter what reason, organisational leadership includes resolving conflicts positively and constructively. In this way, your company’s transition will be much smoother.

✔ Don’t forget to invest time for questions

Going through a transition might tempt you to accelerate through each process in which you forget to give enough time for essential questions from your team. It is necessary to leave the door open for all your people’s concerns and questions whenever they arise. Encourage everyone to share their worries, reserve some time from your schedule for questions and clearing out any queries. Employees usually fail to ask by themselves, so you can ask, “what can I do to help you?” to show them your concern and commitment.

✔ Don’t usher all the elements of change at once

Diving in headfirst into the transition or ripping off the Band-Aid is probably not a good idea, no matter how tempting it may seem at that time. Ushering in all the elements of change at once can be a destructive factor in your change process. Adaptive leadership includes gradually rolling out the change your people are supposed to make and giving them prior notice not to be caught off guard.

Imagine the following events happening at once; new daily schedule, reorganised office space, new riles, and management change. Now think how disruptive it seems to be unloaded at once. Therefore it is never wise to do all things at once and burden everyone, including yourself.

✔ Don’t Forget to Appreciate

Leaders can become so invested in the process of directing and managing that they fail to appreciate or thank their team members when they do good work. But it shouldn’t be like that; take out some time and reflect on the things your people are doing. Start the new day by appreciating them, it not only makes them happy, but they will be encouraged to perform much better in the future.

How to Overcome the Hurdles of Leadership

Leading change can be a lonely experience because you might be the only one with a different opinion. Convincing everyone to look in a new direction and doing something revolutionary has always been difficult. But during these times, you must be determined and not shy away from asking for help.

Being a leader doesn’t mean to figure out everything on your own; leave some room to learn from others who have been through a parallel transition. It will also help you realise how unique your team’s strengths are and how to avoid mistakes.

Staying motivated and resilient are two significant leadership traits. Once you have adopted these, hurdles will not seem that tough to you.

Leave a room for learning while being true to yourself!

Final Thoughts…

Change is constant, it always has been, and we can never be used to it. As a leader, your job is to set a transformational leadership tone in your organisation through change. These strategies will not only improve your organisation’s performance, but eventually, your company might become one of the leading companies in the marketplace.

Leadership in itself is a big task, and when you have to lead your way through change, it becomes even more significant. But a clear vision and determination will make your journey more comfortable!

How Mindfulness Enables Agile Leadership

by Ming Wei | Mar 8, 2021 | Agile Coaching, Leadership And Management

The Responsibility of building a thriving work culture and taking forward all aspects of an organisation together comes under strong leadership. Therefore, the recommendation is that one pay close attention to the leadership style he/she opts for conducting their business. There are different leadership styles like Adaptive Leadership, Servant Leadership, Situational Leadership, Thought Leadership, and Transformational Leadership. However, today’s progressive leaders choose to stress the value of being ‘Agile‘ in the modern business environment.

By taking inspiration from the tech world’s philosophy of ‘Agile development’, this management style allows leaders to be versatile, adaptable and swift in their decisions. The popularity of ‘Agile Leadership’ is seen clearly in its prevalent use in diverse fields. In uncertain environments, sectors such as the military, educational institutions, the automotive industry, and even marketers are all exploring the Agile approach and other alert frameworks for introducing innovative products in the market. The reason is Agile project management has benefitted many businesses, and it’s easy to set up.

Mindfulness: Secret Ingredient to Develop Effective Agile Leadership

Mindfulness is a state of being mindful and present at the moment without being judgmental. It enables one to cease amid the constant inflow of spurs and consciously decide how to act in a specific situation. Mindfulness is undoubtedly a fundamental skill for Agile Leadership for the core values it stresses. Let’s have a look at some of the key principles!

Mindfulness Principles

· Empathy Awareness

Regardless of how advanced technology gets, the human aspect will consistently fill in as a significant part of project management. The inability to adapt to changing circumstances is evident by depending too vigorously on process and tools.

· Focus Motivation

Mindfulness means to be completely present at the moment. Pay close attention to who you are with and what are you doing uninterruptedly. A project manager is in constant collaboration with other team members. They always address new ideas and creative ways to create the best solution while interacting with them. It is impossible for a good scrum master to afford to be anything but mindful. They never reserve themselves like communicating via email or discourage two-way communication. If this happens, there would be no collaboration, meaning no Agile environment.

· Non-judging Understanding

One of the essential assets of your business is your customer. Incorporating them throughout the procedure, whether internal or external customers, can ensure that the end product fits their requirements more effectively.

· Awareness Empathy

Mindfulness and thinking about the present moment and refer to one’s potential to recognise their mind begins to wander and stray. Pulling yourself back into focus and noticing your thought of trail drifting away is a form of awareness in itself. It would be best if you reminded yourself to listen actively and fully engaged in what is being said when you listen to someone. Sometimes, you find yourself judging or trying to think about your response.

Mindfulness Help Leaders Achieve Agile Team Success

For leaders trying to bring forward an Agile team, a few points of concern go a long way in creating their team’s ideal traits and characteristics.

· Purpose

Having a goal motivates members of the team to work tirelessly to achieve the objectives assigned. An Agile team is no better than any other team without a meaningful purpose, but the Agile coach is concerned with imparting this sense of purpose.

· Transparency

As an Agile team is a cross-functional entity with members from different departments working together to achieve the same objective, it is essential to be transparent when sharing information and brainstorming ideas. Sharing ideas and collaborating to generate solutions and improvements is critical to an Agile team.

· Stronger Communication

Efficient Agile teams display positive interactions without obstacles to behaviour. Teams with powerful communication skills can quickly resolve problems and surpass other teams in productivity and high performance. Before a problem develops, an Agile team expects to interact effectively and present challenges. Besides, Agile teams are, by design, built for iterative product creation, so communication is an integral feature of its very existence.

· Faith

Since transparency is vital for building an effective Agile team, trust is another aspect of a team that brings cohesion and dependency. A team will collapse into elements of doubt and anguish without confidence. Trust allows team members, irrespective of possible humiliation and disgrace, to come up with issues that bother them and seek help without any second considerations.

· Consistent Upgrade

To arrive at a fully deliverable product, Agile teams work on a continuous solution-finding cycle. However, precision cannot be achieved until the team can identify and accept deeply rooted insufficiencies and enhance them. The team continually needs room for improvement, even though it has everyone on board.

To cut the story short, Agile, at its core, refers to a set of principles that require a leader to collaborate, show flexibility while trusting others. These principles subsequently lead to deliver something valuable to the whole organisation. Mindfulness helps an Agile leader to create a highly collaborative work environment, and this achievement occurs when you are aware of your emotions, thoughts, and actions. Similarly, a self-aware team capable of efficiently communicating can better support each other in times of change and stress. Not only this, Agile teams can always come up with something creative in times of need.

In other words, Agile is a mindset. Without correct mindfulness, all the different parts of Agile operating can’t be in one place. When teams and their leaders have a strong Agile mindset, a strong aspiration alone is usually enough for a fruitful operating model of Agile to emerge.

Mindfulness- Improving Your Focus, using Agile Methodology 

· Project Strategy

Your team should be clear about its end objective, the worth it holds for the organisation, and how to measure success before any project. You can create a project scope here, but realise that the Agile project management goal is to resolve project changes and add-ons, making it clear that the scope is changeable.

· Product Brainstorming

Your awareness helps you map a complete overview of characteristics that can help you create the result. Consider this as an essential element of the Agile Leadership arrangement phase as, during each sprint, your work squad will form the unique features of the product. At this stage, you will create a complete product backlog, a list of all the deliverables and features that will help form the final product. Later on, when you plan the sprints, your team will easily pull out the backlog.

· Releasing Plan

One implementation date in conventional waterfall project management comes when the whole project has completed. However, when using Agile leadership management in your project, shorter development cycles are used towards each cycle’s end. So, before initiating the project, you will make plans for releases of features, and at the start of every sprint, you will review and revisit the release strategy for that feature.

· Sprint Planning

Before the beginning of each sprint, the investors/stakeholders usually do a sprint planning meeting to know what each individual will accomplish during that sprint period, achieve, and evaluate the tasks according to the sprint. However, it is vital to share the equal load between the team members, enabling them to perform the tasks effectively during the sprint. Also, you will need to note or document your workflow visually for transparency of the team, mutual understanding of the group, and then identification to remove the obstacles.

· Daily Meetups

To help your team achieve their tasks throughout the sprint, call the short-form regular stand-up meetings and measure whether any modifications are needed. Throughout these meetings, every team member will shortly talk about what they have attained before the day and their workable task. Since they are short meetings, these regular meetings’ period shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes. Prolonged problem-solving sessions or an opportunity to discuss general news items are to be part of these sessions.

The Power of Mindfulness Allows Agility

The ability to manage interactions between stakeholders is the power of agility to allow fully engaged clients to deliver products and services that meet their needs, even in the face of volatility, the complexity of uncertainty, and ambiguity.

With its collaborative, service-based approach based on mindfulness and the enhanced intelligence mindfulness allows, an Agile approach needs Agile leadership to be successful. The Agile approach will likely be ineffective without this kind of leadership – either too rigidly adhering to an impractical set of rules or not applying the correct level of discipline.

Perks of Using Agile Leadership

· Higher Productivity

With greater participation and simpler decision-making processes, you can ensure maximum productivity.

· Reduced Risk

In creating a knowledge-sharing learning environment, you are also reducing the risk of operational bottlenecks.

· Focused

Clear direction and focus on the organisation’s business goals and focusing more on the most valuable activities.

· Efficient

To create smarter and more effective teams in terms of gender, nationality, background, and personality, you have to encourage diversity. Managing and understanding the cultural blocks of self-organisation, such as the culture of blaming, the anxiety of being accountable, losing position, unconsciousness, personal agendas; guidance vs command should be a part of guided and practical exercises.

· Help Cope with Uncertainty

Agile leadership helps organisations deal with uncertain situations. Not to mention, change is the only constant in the business world. This belief requires business leaders to adapt to changes quickly, creating an opportunity for a leader’s agility to come to the rescue. Agile team with mindfulness bring new and innovative solutions to embrace the transition successfully.

Mindfulness Fuels Agile Habits

· Upgrade Your Game by Putting Efforts

In some businesses, leaders may also be product owners and play a crucial role in shaping the product. Such leaders must make a product’s development, and success should be their highest priority. They must have some understanding of technology and how industries are transformed. They must have a strong sense of the product characteristics and market needs that would be most valuable for the customers and consumers. Also, leaders/product owners can combine the market knowledge with the engineer’s feedback on the product’s specific features’ technical viability to make a clear development plan.

· Shaping the Product

Under traditional approaches, IT leaders interview the business unit leaders for product development to collect the business requirements, like what new features are needed to develop new software/application? And on which platform the new application will run/work? Product developers need to understand better the technology and how to transform their respective industries.

· Motivate Your Team

For team motivation, we can take the examples of the C-suite and business leaders. They play an essential role as a missionary for the software products they co-develop. They usually hold product owners responsible for the successful rollout of any new announcement/release and its effect on the company. Also, they encourage the IT engineers and product owners to educate their colleagues about the reasons for and benefits of software adoption.

· Think Like A User/Consumer

The product owners must know the needs of the user/consumer, which helps in creating the products/ software. This assists in changing the way the company functions or attracts clients. Senior executives can inspire product developers/owners by asking relevant questions about the product during the product review.

· Test and Learn Approach

Unlike traditional project management, in Agile, you don’t need to do multiple check-ins of the product. Agile project management emphasises a test and learns approach like the release of the minimum feasible product that offers the consumers short term value but can change their concept about the product.

In the last, if you are a product developer or manager, you must have seen organisations embracing Agile values successfully. These values motivate them to do better in their roles.

If you want to change your team members’ mindset, perfect their work practices, not pay attention to the outcomes or result, then adopt Agile leadership management.

How are you going to apply Agile leadership in your team?