Agile Leadership and Management

Agility and agile leadership includes everything that enables an organization to react faster and thus become more resilient. With knowledge workers, this has to be translated into cooperative work at eye level. This makes an agile mindset an indispensable part of the culture.

In principle, Agile leadership comprises different roles: Leader, manager, entrepreneur, based around agile leadership principles. 

Agile Leadership: Leader, Manager, Entrepreneur

Leadership operates in a field of tension between management, teams and the organization. In the age of digitalization, the ability to change, including disruptive change, is becoming increasingly important. This is the only way companies can operate in an uncertain environment, but it requires entrepreneurship at all levels.
Only management can create the structures necessary for success. These include environments of transparency and trust, motivated and self-organizing teams, a focus on value creation and flow, and a reduction of silos and other obstacles to collaboration.

Become a catalyst

Agile leaders know that they depend on the motivation and skills of their employees and do everything to strengthen them:
  • They understand and spread lean and agile and take responsibility for the success of the process. They do not act  with reference to a formal authority, but with conviction ("alignment" via "compliance"). 
  • They have knowledge and practical experience in continuous improvement techniques and also train their employees in problem solving and improvement. 
  • Their primary task is to motivate and develop people, not to solve the problems themselves.

Focus - Align - Enable - Empower

Motivating is one thing, but this is far from creating all the prerequisites for agility to work. Agile leadership means supporting people and teams in the success and development of their own skills:
  • Focus - Giving orientation - Self-organized teams do not usually have the autonomy in setting goals, which comes essentially from outside.
  • Align - Ensure everyone shares and pursues the same goals. 
  • Enable - providing information and imparting skills - and ensuring that team members "can". 
  • Empower - handing over responsibility - now a manager can give up responsibility: "will" and "ability" have been clarified, now you can talk about "allowed".
The use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), i.e. a form of "Management by Objectives" in which goals are not cascaded but negotiated between the levels, has emerged positively in the agile organization.

Work with opportunities and uncertainty

Agility means supporting changes in short cycles. This can lead to many people being pushed out of their comfort zone, feeling insecure and failing to recognize the opportunities arising from the changes.
Agile leadership also means taking on the role of a risk-averse and curious entrepreneur and communicating this attitude to colleagues and employees.

 

Consulting and training offerings

Training

Certified Agile Leader (CAL 1)

The course introduces the agile principles from a management perspective. It shows which role model, which values, principles and practices are suitable as prerequisites for this and guarantee the success of an agile approach in companies. The course serves as a qualification for the Certified Agile Leader.

Consulting

Agile Leadership

We coach your managers and project managers in agile leadership, agile planning and change management. We help you identify and remove the friction between agile and non-agile processes.

Objectives and Key Results

OKRs - Objectives and key results mean: a company and teams set goals and define measurable results.
Consistent transparency and alignment instead of cascading can become a central catalyst for the development of an agile corporate culture.

Training

Agile Mindset - Agile Foundations

You are a manager and are looking for an introduction to the topic of agility. You want to get an overview of Agile methods in order to decide which methods can be used profitably in your company.
The course provides the business case of Agil, the basics and general conditions for the use of agility and gives insights into methods such as Design Thinking, Scrum and Kanban.