Agile Leadership

In our recent research “Agile at Scale – four ways to gain enterprise-wide agility” (2019), Agile frontrunners pointed to the challenge of ingraining an understanding and adoption of a culture of “fail fast” among leaders. Often, the Agile values of transparency and trust are at odds with traditional command-and-control styles of project management. Organizations need to address these mindset issues well before they begin to scale Agile and start with leadership.

Obviously, this requires a tremendous change in leadership style and mindset. Something a lot of organizations struggle with. Our research shows that 82% of Agile frontrunners state that culture and mindset are the biggest obstacles in scaling Agile. At this point senior leadership is vital in tackling this challenge, but senior leadership needs a change in mindset as well! This has proved to be an entirely new challenge in itself. We have discovered through the research that 53% of senior leadership still expects traditional ways of reporting and risk management. This is definitely not helping in the transition and internalization of the Agile mindset.

Therefore, leadership also needs to be Agile, not just do Agile. To help you support the Agile mindset in the organization instead of hindering it, we have 5 actions to help internalize, live and carry out this mindset in the organization. Read all about these actions in our Agile Leadership Point of View.