Summary: The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader’s Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series) by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema

• Step into the world of agile leadership with “The Professional Agile Leader,” and learn how to guide your teams toward maturity and innovation.
• Embrace the journey of becoming an agile leader and transform your organization—continue reading to master the skills and mindsets needed for success.

Recommendation

Companies need agility to manage today’s latest challenges. In this entry from the Professional Scrum Series by Scrum.org, experienced agility authors and consultants Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema provide business leaders with strategies and an eight-step game plan for introducing agility and developing agile teams. Their informative manual, which incorporates an extended, illustrative, fictional case history, will help business leaders avoid common missteps that can interfere with an effective transition to agile management.

Take-Aways

• Traditional companies now need agile leaders, teams and cultures.
• The flawed idea that employees aren’t intrinsically trying to excel leads to demotivating micromanagement.
• “Catalytic” leaders foster teams that can make proactive decisions based on goals and values.
• Warning: Agile teams are relatively fragile. Changing a member can throw your team back to its pre-agile days.
• Agile leaders build bridges.
• Companies are their culture, so changing your culture can be slow, choppy and laborious.
• Organizations can launch their transition to agile management in eight steps.
• Reducing complexity and managing an agile transformation requires the right leaders
• Expect resistance from those who may lose internal status when agile transformation empowers self-managed teams.

Summary

Traditional companies now need agile leaders, teams and cultures.

Companies that have been managed the same way for decades may require serious rethinking of their basic management principles to survive and succeed in today’s complex business environment. Meeting modern organizational challenges requires agile leadership, teamwork and corporate culture.

“One of the hallmarks of an agile organization is a minimum of hierarchy, coupled with autonomy for teams to do whatever it takes to deliver value for customers.”

Agility is not “a state of being.” It’s a system for constant learning and adapting, an essential configuration for a contemporary organization. Agile leadership is a learned response to the business world’s demands. As such, agility is something leaders can achieve and teach. When this occurs on a company-wide, ongoing basis, leader by leader and team by team, your overall culture becomes more agile, more responsive. Companies need to master agility to deal with change and disruption as markets shift, customer needs multiply, external circumstances exert unexpected pressure, and competitors expand, contract or disappear.

The flawed idea that employees aren’t intrinsically trying to excel leads to demotivating micromanagement.

To remain viable, many older companies must alter their practices and attitudes. Conventional management often has an embedded, “self-fulfilling flaw”: the assumption that employees aren’t motivated to excel. This leads to the defensive corporate decision that such supposedly demotivated workers must be micromanaged, an approach that creates further demotivation.

Management tends to cling to the status quo, maintaining the current order even if it is outdated. But the status quo is no longer sufficient. Agile leaders must help their organizations evolve so they can deal with disruption.

“Leadership is fundamentally about confronting the unknown and growing the organization’s ability to deal with it.”

However, while your company may well need to change, trying to shift abruptly to a new corporate model is never a good idea. While you may feel compelled to change to remain competitive and draw new clients, you must do so without dislodging your current customers. Abrupt, dramatic movement can be as dangerous as sticking placidly with the status quo.

“Catalytic” leaders foster teams that can make proactive decisions based on goals and values.

“Catalytic” agile leaders stimulate their employees and teams to be more proactive and decisive. As your firm adopts agility, you want your employees to become champions of “goal/value-driven decision making.” However, no one becomes a catalytic leader overnight. The more a leader is stuck in old methods, the longer this leadership transformation will take.

“When things go well, catalytic leaders give credit to the people doing the work itself, the team members who are closest to customers…when teams are performing well, they need to feel that their good results are recognized.”

Catalytic leaders don’t focus on their company’s “outputs” of products or services. Instead, they heed “impacts” – the benefits their products or services provide to customers. With this strategic approach, leaders prioritize the goals, such as client satisfaction, they want their agile teams to achieve. Then, they empower self-managing teams to figure out the best ways to reach those objectives, often in stages defined by intermediate goals.

By emphasizing benefits, agile leaders orient their employees to produce the best products and services to serve their customers. Agile leaders don’t blame or make excuses. When they get supposed bad news, they weaponize it as a tool for improvement.

Warning: Agile teams are relatively fragile. Changing a member can throw your team back to its pre-agile days.

High-performing teams coalesce when employees unite in an agile work group that can achieve more than the individual members could achieve independently. Managers who operate with the mistaken belief that employees are interchangeable and teams are relatively easy to create are heading for trouble. Agile teams take time to develop, and they are exceptionally fragile regarding personnel changes. Bringing in a new team member can revert a vulnerable, agile team back to its team-building, formative stages.

Agile leaders build bridges.

True agility means faster delivery, less waste and more efficiency. But agility also requires responsiveness and flexibility, which calls for significant, often difficult, cultural change. Leaders can be highly instrumental in establishing their company’s culture by modeling agile behavior.

“Leaders are best when people barely know they exist. When their work is done, their aim fulfilled, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves’.” (Lao Tzu)

Corporate transformation is an agile leader’s biggest opportunity and challenge, but it requires leaders to set aside self-interest and focus exclusively on what’s most crucial for the company. Most agile leaders build bridges by modeling the “new norms” they want the people to embrace. They provide psychological safety that enables their people to accept these new norms without feeling endangered because they know they can make mistakes without being afraid of retribution. Bridge-building leaders reward teams that accept change and deliver value while hewing to the firm’s values and goals.

Companies are their culture, so changing your culture can be slow, choppy and laborious.

How important is culture to your organization? Culture, “the way we do things around here,” is everything. Culture is a gyroscope that helps your organization stay on course, navigating in the right direction. Companies face constant disruptions that push them off course. The right culture gives a company the resilience to advance despite interruptions.

“Every agile leader’s journey is different…Yet each shares a singular goal: to help their organization achieve resilience and flexibility while seeking success.”

Employees need faith that agility works and benefits not just the firm but themselves personally. Show them that becoming agile isn’t just another passing “management fad,” but is something concrete and lasting that improves everyone’s work. As an agile leader, help your team members develop this belief based on their own experiences. Agile leaders and teams strive to achieve a culture without any tension between teams and individual employees. Leaders must accept that, for the most part, their employees are well-intentioned and prefer to do good work. In any organization, internal flux taxes the culture, so leaders must start there to effectuate an agile transformation.

Getting employees to see change positively is hard. Instituting a new culture is a time-consuming process and seldom smooth. It takes transparency, communication, labor and patience. And, it works only if most employees enthusiastically accept the concept of change. To win that acceptance, present the agile framework as the “natural way to work.” Remain patient as your culture slowly shifts, but never falter in your devotion to improving customer outcomes.

Organizations can launch their transition to agile management in eight steps.

Agile transformation is a continuing, unending process. Unfortunately, many leaders regard such a transformation as moving “from one steady state” (the old-style organization) to a different “steady state” (the agile company). They believe that once this is accomplished, everything will automatically revert to a new but predictable state.

“As organizations grow their agility, team by team, product by product, they come to a point where they must either fully commit to continuing their agile journey, or they will fall back to the old ways of working.”

That’s seldom the case. Newly agile firms must stay alert to respond to fresh challenges and opportunities. To succeed with your organization’s agile transformation, follow eight steps:

1. “Choose a complex problem” – To establish agility, begin by experimenting to see what works best in your company. For the best results, define a complex situation for your test and experiment iteratively to see what generates the best results. If agility helps your firm solve its toughest issue, you can make it work anywhere.
2. “Create a cell” – Develop an “agile cell,” a safe space to support new agile teams as they learn and to shield them from resistance to “new power dynamics.”
3. “Start with culture” – Agile leaders must define the desired culture, lead the way to change, empower others, set an example, and change the reward system that confers internal status.
4. “Invite participants” – Ask employees to volunteer for a pioneering “agile initiative.” Choose people with leadership talents and cultural skills.
5. “Refresh your leadership” – Recruit outsiders who can bring helpful new insights.
6. “Create a great vision” – Take a fresh look and develop a new mission and vision for your organization’s future.
7. “Involve the teams” – Ask your teams to “self-select” where they feel they can best contribute to that vision.
8. “Have trust” – Developing agility is complex and requires trust, time and patience.

Reducing complexity and managing an agile transformation requires the right leaders.

Moving from a traditionally managed organization to an agile organization is a dramatic transformation that calls on employees to collaborate and manage themselves more effectively. This is a heady challenge for any workforce.

“As organizations make the shift toward self-managing teams, siloed career paths become an impediment to growth; they reflect skills and promotional models that no longer reflect the direction in which the organization is heading.”

Agile leaders must provide safe spaces, “protected environments” for innovation where employees can experiment with small, fast actions and learn how to implement agile practices. Their goal is to tackle and reduce complexity.

Moving forward with this transition requires a forward-looking, leader with internal political heft who sets an ambitious mission for the company. This leader and his or her team must make resources available for the required changes, empower “diversity, equality and inclusion,” and protect employees from the nay-sayers, skeptics, and critics who can’t stand the idea of any change, agile or otherwise.

Expect resistance from those who may lose internal status when agile transformation empowers self-managed teams.

Agile leaders know their companies are “complex social networks” that compensate executives and employees with status – “recognition, reputation and influence” – as well as wages. The introduction of an agile system can devalue status-related rewards, usually to the detriment of those who benefitted most from the old ways, so “everyone loves agility until it starts to undermine their own perceived authority.” Such changes have seriously upended powerful people throughout history.

Niccolò Machiavelli addressed this in The Prince more than 500 years ago. He wrote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

“In every change, some people will benefit and thrive, and others will experience loss of influence.”

Agility requires empowering employees in new ways, as well as abandoning some old reward systems. Thus, as an agile leader, you must expect resistance, often severe, from turf-protecting managers who may see self-managing teams – an agility basic – as a severe challenge to their authority. And they’re right, at least in part, since managers must step up in new ways if their teams run themselves.

As an agile leader, plan and prepare for such resistance. Encourage hierarchical managers to join the transformation process while realizing that achieving an ongoing agile transformation is often complicated and has a price. To embrace it, be flexible, ambitious, positive, and secure in the understanding that attaining agility is the best way to serve your customers and achieve a sustainable future for your company.

About the Authors

Consultant Ron Eringa, an expert in leading IT companies in using agile and Scrum, founded the Agile Leadership School and co-founded Evolutionary Leadership. Kurt Bittner is also the co-author or editor of Mastering Professional Scrum, The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum, The Professional Scrum Team, and other books. Frequent conference speaker and consultant Laurens Bonnema, a Professional Scrum Trainer among other titles, is the co-author of Inspirerend projectmanagement met Agile (in Dutch).

Genres

Business, Management, Leadership, Agile, Scrum, Organizational Change, Professional Development, Team Building, Innovation, Strategy

Review

“The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader’s Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations” is a practical guide for leaders seeking to foster mature agile organizations. Written by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, and Laurens Bonnema, the book shares collective experiences and lessons structured around a case study, drawing from decades of helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. It emphasizes the need for agile leaders to support, inspire, and encourage teams, moving away from traditional management skills of directing and monitoring.

The authors, Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, and Laurens Bonnema, bring their vast experience in agile leadership and product development to the table, offering readers insights into forming strong, self-organizing, high-performance teams that deliver customer-focused solutions. The book addresses the challenges of organizational change, the importance of cross-functional teams, and the ultimate goal of changing culture within an organization.

Reviewers have praised the book for its realistic approach and actionable advice, making it a valuable resource for leaders at all levels who are involved in or considering an agile transformation. The book has been rated highly for its practical tips and patterns for good leadership.