The essence of agile leadership

creating the right environment for selfmanaging teams

1. Co-create the goals
2. Facilitate Ownership
3. Learn faster
4. Design the culture

Co-create the goals – instead of giving instructions, rather make sure that the goals are clear. So teams know what to achieve, and if their actions are bringing them any closer to their goal.

Facilitate Ownership – create an environment in which agile teams can grow and thrive. Teams can’t be forced to take Ownership, leaders can only create those circumstances in which teams take ownership. This is a balancing between stepping in and letting go. Finding the sweetspot where teams have the right amount of freedom aligned with their level of maturity.

Learn faster – being fit and ready for the future is not about being the best, it’s about learning faster. Self-managing teams need to get fast feedback on their actions and their decisions. Preferably from users and customers. It’s the leaders role to promote learning from experiments and failures.

Design the culture – The agile leader has to envision, design and improve the culture of the organisation.

Agile leader responsibilities

• Ensuring inspiring goals;
• Maximizing team ownership;
• The speed with which teams learn from customer and user feedback;
• Creating a culture of trust, collaboration, honest feedback and focus on the customer