THE AGILE HUMBLE EXECUTIVE

“Going agile” kind of became the buzzword in the area of Project Management throughout the last few years. Many organizations nowadays are switching to adopt agile methodologies. Unfortunately a lot of them are doing so without knowing well what “agile “actually means. Agile is a mindset, in other words, it is a set of values and principles that drives our core behavior.

Typical real story: TOP-DOWN Agile Transformations

As such, it could happen that some CEO or high ranking manager wakes up one morning and requires all his staff to practice Scrum from one day to the other. This is how the Agile Transformation becomes an official MUST.

HOW would you deal with such an Agile transition?

Now, how would you deal with such a transition? Being an agile coach my job is to daily help teams and organizations in their evolution into agility. I help on building up cultures conducive to growth. I enjoy sustaining happier workplaces, collaborative networks that lead to building innovative digital products, valuable in business worlds and beyond.

Based on numerous experiences: I have noticed, there is a considerable amount of directors that claim to have embraced the agile mindset, but they are still practicing the TOP DOWN authoritative approach to spread Agility throughout the organization. In the end, what they end up achieving is to cause harm to their people. This leads to a serious demotivation that naturally spread quickly among teams and their organization. As a result, adopting agile starts becoming a nightmare for few people.

A dogmatic approach to engage employees with agile is an anti-pattern. A “Servant Leadership” is essential key concept for agile to succeed.

The way to implement agile in an organization should be flexible and adaptive to the contextual needs of each team. In relation to this, aligning agile implementations, kills creativity. The assumption that one size fits to all is another observed anti-pattern.

Let’s put human in the center

“Human in the center”, is the key of all my success stories and are the words that come to my mind each time I face pressures to force authoritatively teams to be more agile. My clear message in this case is : please, stop focusing on Scrum and instead get back to the basics of agility. You may want to start right at the beginning with the agile manifesto: Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

As an executive: Are you ready to lead by exmaple and be part of the change?

In order to achieve successful transformation, we need coachable and flexible Executives. However, if they are rigid and not willing to switch their mindset, there is a difficult way to embed agility in an organization.

Coaching Executives to practice empathy with their employees to identify their pain points and solve them is essential. Human science and emotional intelligence are crucial skills that every good Executive should possess.

Simply care about your people and great things will happen

Based on many statistics about failed software projects, the failure is not of a technical nature. Technological problems can be solved technically but applying Scrum on sorting out the issues in your workplace is not going to work. My suggestion here is to stop considering this to be a technical issue. It’s not about Scrum, it’s not about daily stand ups, sprints, retrospectives or anything else like that. So, you need to find an effective way of working that satisfies your team, you , as well as, management.

Just let your teams decide what suit the best to their needs. If they are of the opinion that dailies are a bad idea, you should not try to convince them of the opposite. Try to find out why their view is different, and respect it. The funny thing about Scrum masters is that they are servants to their team – in some occasions you may well serve them best by abolishing Scrum altogether.

Simply, care about your people as you do care about yourself ! They will appreciate it and respond positively to satisfy your needs back and do great Job for your organization.

Managing for happiness

This is might be relevant to watch, to enrich your view about innovative management: Managing for Happiness | Jurgen Appelo | TEDxLille

If you want to talk about it in detail with our experts, contact us!

MORE YOU KNOW ABOUT AGILE, MORE YOU GROW :

Reading more ? Check out other interesting topics !