Agile Leadership Flashcards
Agile leadership
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-agile-leadership/
What do agile leaders do?
In short, knowledge alone won’t be enough. Lean-Agile leaders must do more than simply support the transformation: they must actively lead the change, participating in and guiding the activities necessary to understand and continuously optimize the flow of value through the enterprise. Lean-Agile leaders:
- Organize and reorganize around value
- Identify queues and excess Work in Process (WIP)
- Continually focus on eliminating waste and delays
- Eliminate demotivating policies and procedures
- Inspire and motivate others
- Create a culture of relentless improvement
- Provide the space for teams to innovate
Agile leaders have
Growth mindset, lead by example, and lead the change.
Leading by example
Leaders gain earned authority by modeling the desired behaviors for others to follow, inspiring them to incorporate the leader’s example into their own personal development journey.
Authenticity, emotional intelligence, lifelong learning, growing others, decentralized decision-making
Authenticity
requires leaders to model desired professional and ethical behaviors. Acting with honesty, integrity, and transparency, they are true to themselves and their beliefs.
Emotional intelligence
describes how leaders identify and manage their emotions and those of others through self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
Lifelong learning
depicts how leaders engage in ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge and growth, and they encourage and support the same in others.
Growing others
encourages leaders to provide the personal, professional, and technical guidance and resources each employee needs to assume increasing levels of responsibility and decision-making.
Decentralized decision making
moves the authority for decisions to where the information is; prepares teams to make decentralized decisions by investing in their technical competence and by providing organizational clarity with decision guardrails. [3].
Lean-agile mindset
SAFe is firmly grounded in four bodies of knowledge: Lean, Agile, systems thinking, and DevOps. In fact, the genesis of SAFe was to develop guidance for enterprises on how to apply the principles and practices of Lean and Agile in the world’s largest organizations. A Lean-Agile Mindset requires leaders to learn, embrace, and model both Lean and Agile in their behaviors and support adoption by the enterprise.
House of lean
Value
Respect for people & culture
Flow
Innovation
Relentless improvement
Leadership
lean
Lean is a set of principles and practices for efficient manufacturing and operations that grew out of the Toyota Production System developed in post-WWII Japan. It focuses on problem-solving and continuous improvement to increase quality and eliminate waste. Adapted to product development by Leffingwell [5], Poppendieck [6], and others, the SAFe House of Lean illustrates the goal of delivering value through the pillars of respect for people and culture, flow, innovation, and relentless improvement. Leadership provides the foundation on which everything else stands.
agile
Agile was born from a collaboration of 17 thought leaders in software development who met in 2001 to seek alternatives to the documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes that were common at the time. It includes four values (shown in Figure 4) and twelve principles as reflected in the Agile Manifesto. Agile is known for delivering iterative and incremental value in the form of working software by promoting face-to-face interaction frequently between developers, customers, and cross-functional, self-organizing teams. Agile has since been adapted and embraced in many non-software development contexts.
SAFe Principles
- Take an economic view
- Apply systems thinking
- Assume variability; preserve options
- Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
- Visualize and limit WIP; reduce batch sizes, and manage que lengths
- Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
- unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
- Decentralize decision-making
- organize with value
Leading change
- Change vision occurs when leaders communicate why change is needed and do so in ways that inspire, motivate, and engage people.
- Change leadership is the ability to positively influence and motivate others to engage in the organizational change through the leader’s own personal advocacy and drive.
- A powerful coalition for change is formed when individuals from multiple levels and across silos are empowered and have the influence necessary to effectively lead the change.
- Psychological safety occurs when leaders create an environment for risk-taking that supports change without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.
- Training the new way of working ensures that everyone is trained in the values, principles, and practices of Lean and Agile, including a commitment by leaders to their own training so they can lead by example.
