Agility Leadership Quotes

Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare.

Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.

The pace and ability at which an organization is able to effectively innovate will be the determining factor of competitiveness in the future. The future is now.

There is an absolute need for organizations to innovate, grow, transform, and reinvent themselves faster than ever before.

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

The problem with most strategic planning processes is they are not designed to create strategy. They are designed to create consistency and predictability.

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

If you don’t collect any metrics, you’re flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view.

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

In an era of predictable unpredictability and untamed algorithms, agility allows us to emerge in the here and now, without sacrificing our longer-term vision.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

Don't let your tools become your process.

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Overactive ego chakras kill objectivity, but mindfulness activates the win-win leadership chakras and brings collective and shared leadership.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

By empowering employees and distributing decision-making, organizations can significantly enhance their agility, responsiveness, and ability to adapt to change.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

The sword doesn't change. So you have to adapt to the sword. You can't change your surroundings. They only change once you have changed.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

Cyber resilience is much more than a matter of technology. Agility, balance and high level view are indispensable...

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

The Future of work is all about CREAM. More Consciousness, Relationships, Empathy, AdaptAgility, and Meaning. We must be building a more human-centered context for stakeholders, as opposed to JUST MORE profits for shareholders".

restructuring the organization to embrace more agile and adaptive models is a critical step in building resilience. By moving beyond traditional hierarchies, designing effective information flows, empowering employees, and cultivating a culture of experimentation and learning, organizations can create the foundation for long-term success in a dynamic and unpredictable environment.

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

It is time to euthanize change management.

Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

Risk is managed not through cautious planning but through bold experiments combined with frequent inspection, feedback, and adaptation.

High Performance Teams and Execution Speed, has no value, if you are going in the wrong direction!

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team’s health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste.

AI scales operations, let humans scale compassion.

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.

While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.

Your first investment should be in yourself. Learn new skills. The market can go up or down but you’ll never lose your skills. This is more true today than ever before. Diversify your skills.

USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges: (a) Feel the emotion in its purest form (b) Get the message behind the emotion (c) Change something in response to the message (d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don’t hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations -- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine

Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a solution. Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.

Situational leadership articulates that effective leaders are the ones able to change their behavior according to the situation at hand. It identifies leadership styles relevant to specific situations.

Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.

Consciously Constructive Human Capital Development, Perpetual Reinvention: innovation & Creativity, Adaptability, Resilience and Agility, are not only CORE DRIVERS, but also the DEFINING features of economic success in the 4IR.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

The function of leadership – the number-one responsibility of a leader – is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the organization and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.  This is a universal requirement of leadership.”[11] Jim Collins

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.

high performance starts with organizations whose leadership focuses on building an environment where people from different backgrounds and with different identities, experiences, and perspectives can feel psychologically safe working together, and where teams are given the necessary resources, capacity, and encouragement to experiment and learn together in a safe and systematic way.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

A value-added step in a process is defined by three characteristics. First, the step must be something that the customer is willing to pay for. Second, the step must directly change the form, fit, or function of something to produce a product or service. The final characteristic of a value-added step is that it is so important that it must be done right every time to successfully produce the intended product or service.

It is not loyalty or internal motivation that drives us programmers forward. We must write our code when the road to our personal success is absolutely clear for us and writing high quality code obviously helps us move forward on this road. To make this happen, the management has to define the rules of the game, also known as "process", and make sure they are strictly enforced, which is much more difficult than "being agile".

Saying that “the business is IT’s customer, and the customer is always right” seems like a good idea when there is deep dissatisfaction with IT that stems from a long history of unreliable service. But over the long term, this value trap sets up the IT unit for failure because customers are often wrong (especially about matters in which they are not experts), and calling colleagues “customers” puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.9

The most important element of leadership effectiveness is authentically living the Vision of the company.  The values and ambitions of a company are not instilled entirely by what leaders say; they’re instilled primarily by what leaders do.  In a healthy company, there are no inconsistencies between what is said and what is believed deep down – the values come from within the leaders and imprint themselves on the organization through day-to-day activity.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

Heracles was the strongest man who ever lived. No human, and almost no immortal creature, ever subdued him physically. With uncomplaining patience he bore the trials and catastrophes that were heaped upon him in his turbulent lifetime. With his strength came, as we have seen, a clumsiness which, allied to his apocalyptic bursts of temper, could cause death or injury to anyone who got in the way. Where others were cunning and clever, he was direct and simple. Where they planned ahead he blundered in, swinging his club and roaring like a bull. Mostly these shortcomings were more endearing than alienating. He was not, as the duping Atlas and the manipulation of Hades showed, entirely without that quality of sense, gumption and practical imagination that the Greeks called 'nous'. He possessed saving graces that more than made up for his exasperating faults. His sympathy for others and willingness to help those in distress was bottomless, as were the sorrow and shame that overcame him when he made mistakes and people got hurt. He proved himself prepared to sacrifice his own happiness for years at a stretch in order to make amends for the (usually unintentional) harm he caused. His childishness, therefore, was offset by a childlike lack of guile or pretence as well as a quality that is often overlooked when we catalogue the virtues: fortitude -the capacity to endure without complaint. For all his life he was persecuted, plagued and tormented by a cruel, malicious and remorseless deity pursuing a vendetta which punished him for a crime for which he could be in no way held responsible- his birth. No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles. In his uncomplaining life of pain and persistence, in his compassion and desire to do the right thing, he showed, as the American classicist and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it, 'greatness of soul'. Heracles may not have possessed the pert agility and charm of Perseus and Bellerophon, the intellect of Oedipus, the talent for leadership of Jason or the wit and imagination of Theseus, but he had a feeling heart that was stronger and warmer than any of theirs.

SEVEN CHANGE MASTERY SHIFTS • Change Mastery Shift 1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to innovate on the opportunities inherent in change. • Change Mastery Shift 2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of change. • Change Mastery Shift 3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose, value, and meaning to rise above immediate circumstances. • Change Mastery Shift 4: From Control Focus to Agility Focus. Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results. However, agility, flexibility, and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul. • Change Mastery Shift 5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress. • Change Mastery Shift 6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions. • Change Mastery Shift 7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus. Effective leaders are more secure in themselves; they possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way; their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change.

Companies should utilize the CSIPP™ framework whenever they face crises. The 12 elements of CSIPP™, or Crisis Solution Internal Philosophy and Practice, include: 1. Immunity (Immune Systems): Organizations, akin to living organisms, possess inherent vulnerabilities. The CSIPP™ framework advocates for the establishment of proactive and self-regulating systems within an organization which autonomously identify, respond to, and mitigate threats, thereby enhancing the organization's resilience and adaptability. 2. Surveillance: Organizations need to cultivate a culture of informed awareness. This entails the implementation of judicious surveillance mechanisms to gather both internal and external intelligence. Such insights empower organizations to preemptively identify potential risks and opportunities, enabling more agile and effective decision-making. Data serves as the lifeblood of CSIPP™. It is imperative that organizations prioritize the collection, analysis, and interpretation of relevant data. This data-driven approach facilitates evidence-based decision-making, informed risk assessments, and the optimization of crisis response strategies. 3. Decisiveness: Decisiveness is particularly important during times of crisis. Leaders must be able to gather and synthesize the data, and make quick and definite decisions to move the organization forward. 4. Capital Reserves/Liquidity: Financial preparedness is a cornerstone of crisis management. Organizations must maintain adequate reserves of liquid capital to navigate unforeseen challenges. Moreover, they should proactively identify internal assets, both tangible and intangible, that can be readily redeployed in times of crisis. 5. Communication: Effective communication is pivotal during a crisis. Organizations should establish a comprehensive communication plan encompassing all stakeholders - employees, customers, investors, and the community at large. This plan should ensure timely, transparent, and accurate information dissemination, fostering trust and mitigating the spread of misinformation. 6. Response: The ability to respond swiftly and decisively is critical in crisis situations. Organizations must develop well-defined response protocols that outline roles, responsibilities, and escalation procedures. Regular drills and simulations can enhance preparedness and ensure a coordinated response. 7. Risk Evaluation: A continuous process of risk evaluation and assessment is essential. Organizations need to proactively identify, analyze, and prioritize potential risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. This enables the development of targeted mitigation strategies and contingency plans. 8. Leadership: Strong and decisive leadership is indispensable during a crisis. Leaders must be able to make difficult decisions under pressure, communicate effectively, and inspire confidence in their teams. A clear chain of command and delegation of authority are vital for effective crisis management. 9. Readiness (Drills/Training): All individuals likely to be involved in crisis response should receive comprehensive training and participate in regular drills. This ensures that they are familiar with their roles, responsibilities, and the organization's crisis management protocols. 10. Post-Crisis Analysis: Following a crisis, it is crucial to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis. This involves evaluating the organization's response, identifying lessons learned, and implementing corrective actions to improve future crisis management efforts. 11. Nuanced Adjustment: Crisis management is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Organizations need to be adaptable and flexible, adjusting their strategies and tactics as the situation evolves. 12. Protocol: Clear and well-defined protocols are the backbone of effective crisis management. Organizations should establish a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline the steps to be taken in various crisis scenarios.

The IT leader must have the courage to own outcomes.

Agile Methodology: Learn from how terror networks work. AGILE methodology is about being able to iterate and reiterate till you get it right. You are always at the start and the end at the same time till the launch. You are more nimble than the waterfall method and more resourceful than the lean method.

Building emotional agility: 1. “Label your thoughts and emotions” My coworker is wrong—he makes me so angry becomes I’m having the thought that my coworker is wrong, and I’m feeling anger. 2. Accept them “The anger was a signal that something important was at stake and that he needed to take productive action. Instead of yelling at people, he could make a clear request of a colleague or move swiftly on a pressing issue. The more Jeffrey accepted his anger and brought his curiosity to it, the more it seemed to support rather than undermine his leadership.” 3. Act on your values “We encourage leaders to focus on the concept of workability: Is your response going to serve you and your organization in the long term as well as the short term? Will it help you steer others in a direction that furthers your collective purpose? Are you taking a step toward being the leader you most want to be and living the life you most want to live?

Surprisingly, this divergence continues despite the deep influence of Agile and Lean thinking on general—that is, non-IT—management. The disciplines continue to evolve separately even though corporate strategy is increasingly about both agility and IT strategy. The two worlds do not converge, even though IT leadership books advise CIOs to pull themselves closer to strategy formulation and claim a “seat at the table.” But while the other C-level executives around the table are discussing the need for agility, senior IT leaders, eager to gain or retain a seat at the strategy table, are pursuing the path of demonstrating the value of IT ... by locking in old-school practices that encourage rigidity.

In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.

In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.

After considering what gets covered, you will need to turn your attention to who is involved in the performance management cycle. Traditional performance management models are typically formal and hierarchical—and often involve only the senior management or leadership team. When you're setting up performance management for the ecosystem economy, you need a less hierarchical, more project-oriented, more results-oriented model. You need to involve not just senior management, but also people from all levels within your agile model (e.g., tribes, chapters, and squads). Involving more of the team not only creates a more streamlined and efficient process, but also facilitates an unfiltered flow of information. Management gets an opportunity to hear an unfiltered report straight from the team members who will be best equipped to give it. And the team members get an opportunity to receive feedback and instruction straight from management, without anything getting lost in translation as the information passed through two or three levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The GAP, or divide, between... Knowing and Doing, is only crossed by people who can effectively, and positively, manage their emotional state, and their inner RESPONSES to the outside world.

1 Minute Wisdom for Success: To Succeed in the world of business, requires one to create the most RELEVANT, and meaningful, value, and promote it, effectively, to those who have the need/interest, and capacity, to transact.

We can list more than 20 dimensions we’ve found in successful leaders: the ability to create a vision, thinking strategically, building influential internal and external networks, courage to make tough decisions, and so on. Successful leadership is multidimensional for sure. But most of the traits of successful leaders can be distilled down to two elements. They know how to: bring multiple teams together make great decisions And these two elements have a lot to do with whether organizations are agile.

Most people's BIG PICTURE focus, is still way too small to understand reality, make intelligent decisions, and take SWIFT Actions, that ENSURE long-term Success.

Thinking of small tiny improvements would be exhausting if not impossible from the leadership team. Hence it has to happen at micro level, at each team level to control their own product & their own destiny. They are the closest, they know more about it.

Faithful leadership isn’t about sticking to your plans when you should abandon them. Instead, it’s about being willing to question them and be questioned in pursuit of them, then course correct where necessary. 

Unmanaged” deconstructs the discipline of management and makes the compelling case that knowledge workers perform much more effectively for “Humble Gardeners” than “Angry Ranchers.” With decades of experience working with hundreds of professional service firms, Jack Skeels presents a convincing case for how the chronically misunderstood agile framework can produce transformational results.

High Performance teams disrupt themselves to be future future and increase AdaptAgility. Fear based teams driven by greed protect the status quo, to be safe....but it's clearly not a safe smart approach to retain the status quo.

Agile is not your goal—it’s only the best way to achieve your goals.

Educate your team on the usefulness of conflict as a signal for change and normalize conflict as part of change and evolution. Examples of language for this might be: “Conflicts in teams are normal. They are signals for change, and they indicate that something new wants to emerge. They point us to the need to innovate.” This softens the emotional field and creates openness for exploration.

Are you a ‘Listening Organization?’ Organizations that execute constant feedback loops from customers, vendors, and employees will have a competitive advantage in staying agile and evolving. Building systems to ensure that your firm is empathetic and open-minded is critical to your survival and growth.

One of Amazon’s leadership principles applies here: Disagree, then commit. The notion of disagreeing, and then committing, can be a pragmatic approach for causing an honest dialogue because with this notion, you are explicitly stating the expectation that there will be disagreement.

If I have to motivate you, I’m spending too much leadership time and leadership energy on the raw materials. Each employee needs to bring the raw materials: the energy, the enthusiasm, the professionalism, the drive. The leader creates an environment where people can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. This environment includes projects that are meaningful and valuable. The leader brings the work to the right people.

Let’s consider changing the word “motivated” to “inspired.” Here’s why: if your challenge as the leader is to motivate people, I would argue that you’ve got the wrong people. People who need daily motivating require a cheerleader; your role as the leader is not to lead cheers. Your role is to create an environment where each individual can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader have and can articulate a compelling vision of the future and a compelling vision of the value of the work that you’re asking your team to do. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader can articulate the value that each person on the team brings to that team. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader understand what “value” means to each person on your team, how they define it, how they view it, where they see it, and where they don’t see it. You as the leader need to know, and enable, each person on your team to connect themselves to the value of the work in front of them. That’s inspirational leadership.

stories. It is unimportant, disregard

It has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk. Listening is an art form, and asking questions is a tool to active listening. Yet, asking

Leadership – inborn or learnt? The case for situational leadership

Leaders facilitating team responsibilities must link accountability to motivation in order to be highly effective.

Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it’s frustratingly neglected by many teams.

Non-functional requirements” not sounding cool isn’t a reason to neglect them.

organisations often tend to see software architecture as a rank rather than a role too

As a noun then, architecture can be summarised as being about structure. It’s about the decomposition of a product into a collection of components/modules and interactions.

As a verb, architecture (i.e. the process, architecting) is about understanding what you need to build, creating a vision for building it and making the appropriate design decisions. All of this needs to be based upon requirements because requirements drive architecture.

a software architect who codes is a more effective and happier architect

You don’t need to be the best coder on the team

developers are likely to ignore your coding experience if you’re not programming on the project

Unlike the medieval building industry though, the software development industry lacks an explicit way for people to progress from being junior developers through to software architects. We don’t have a common apprenticeship model.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

In our highly disjointed world at VeraComm, where functions don’t communicate well and don’t significantly collaborate, we fail to improve as a whole. Everybody seeks opportunities for improvement, but because we’re separated from each other, the best we can do is improve our individual step in the process and no more. We fail to understand that problems at one step can be caused by fundamental issues at another. And with learning cycles as slow as ours–pretty much equal to the frequency of releasing, every eight or ten months–we just can’t learn. Cause and effect are so widely separated from each other on the timeline that we simply cannot connect the dots. •

It has been said that because we have been given two ears and only one mouth, we should listen twice as much as we talk. Listening is an art form, and asking questions is a tool to active listening.

Learning the personality styles of others will further heighten your awareness of differences to enhance your social agility. When you gain clarity on what is important to others and why they act as they do, you will be better able to engage confidently with their energies and personalities to thrive in most any situation.

must have the awareness to notice what is needed in the moment and the agility to respond from a wide palette of creative choices rather than from an entrenched system of patterned and predictable reactions.

DevOps simply adds the idea that small, cross-functional teams should own the entire delivery process from concept through user feedback and production monitoring.

cumulative flow diagrams help us pinpoint process flaws;

the enablers of situational leadership are empathy, active listening and a propensity to understand complex human and team interactions. The challenge in leadership is all about applying the proper situational behavior. We have to analyze the situation and shift from our incumbent approach towards a situation, to the style which the situation warrants and which leads to the optimal outcome. By integrating and implementing ideas of situational leadership in our work place we can become better leaders.

According to the findings, the most effective team building practices in creation of virtual networks of practice are: ‘(1) recruitment and selection; (2) training and development; (3) rewards and recognition; (4) supervisory support; (5) rules regarding knowledge disclosure; (6) time pressure; and (7) collaborative programs and projects (Jolinka and Dankbaar

The clearer and more simply the vision is stated, the easier it is for team members to buy into it.

Exhibiting vulnerabilities requires being confident in yourself and being able to laugh at your own mistakes. People who have to appear perfect often feel that way because they lack self-confidence. Yet, being willing to open up and be vulnerable can do more to make a team come together than standing aloof.

has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk.

High power high interest stakeholders – manage closely; High power low interest stakeholders – keep satisfied; Low power high interest stakeholders – keep informed; Low power low interest stakeholders – monitor with minimal effort.

Leaders usually need to be directive and supportive during the forming stage,

Ask team members to share a favorite travel photo, but not name the place. Team members ask questions and try to figure out where the photo was taken. Ask team members to share their favorite photo and

Try masks the intent and carries an element of implicit failure within the message. As Yoda said, you either do it or you don’t, there is no try.

Many times people use should instead of ‘I want’, this is the case with parents and children. The admonition of: “you should be nice” is actually saying: “I want you to be nice”.

Thomas Alva Edison, the great American inventor, once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Edison knew the power of failure in giving us a feedback, on what we are doing wrong, and how we can improve ourselves. Many people we know are afraid of taking the first step, taking a risk and moving away from their comfort zone. They are afraid of the difficulty that the first step poises. Of

The word ‘why’ carries guilt and finger-pointing into our team communications. It is better that we leave it out of our messages as it doesn’t have any positive impact on what we are saying. Rather, it is clearer to state what we want to achieve or alternatively ask information gathering questions using the word ‘how’. For example Ashley might ask: “Tina, can you please explain how these figures impact the transfer to operations?” Notice that while ‘why’ structures a closed ended question, ‘how’ questions are open-ended and investigate as to the process that led to a certain consequence.

Describe the behavior you would like to see, rather than the behavior you don’t want to see.

three mortal leadership sins (i.e. not walking the talk, leading from power and not authority and assuming agreement) that can derail even the most adept and agile of leaders. 

According to research by Korn/Ferry International, “Learning agility is a leading predictor of leadership success today—more reliable than IQ, EQ [emotional intelligence] or even leadership competencies.

Creative leadership can be described as “adaptability meets agility,” and “innovation meets principles.

A positive environment can’t happen if team members are negative toward one another. It’s the team leader’s place to put an end to this as soon as it starts.

A positive environment can’t happen if team members are negative toward one another.

global virtual high performance teams revolve around four concepts: (1) relationships, (2) accountability, (3) networking, and (4) leadership.

Relationships are of keen interest to successful team managers

Through collaborative problem-solving approaches, human capital is turned into an individual sense of ownership.

leaders are also representatives of company policies, processes, and procedures.

It doesn’t take much leadership ability to understand why mutual trust and competence are important. The next two aspects of this organizational climate for operational success may be less familiar. Both the concepts of mission and focus allow a superior to make sure that the intent of his subordinates harmonizes with his own, without stifling the subordinates’ initiative and in consequence, without slowing down the organization’s OODA loops. Between individuals, the device the Germans came up with is the mission, which we can consider as a contract, or Auftrag, between superior and subordinate. Back in chapter III, on agility, I described how this works in war. In today’s chaotic, ruthlessly competitive commercial environment, business needs such a device, and a little experimenting should convince

Ownership means that team members acknowledge responsibility for work and its results as a facilitator or strategist joined in collaboration.

A Board can be harmonized through leadership humility, insightful business understanding, trustful culture, and learning agility.

Eliciting the user stories is a dynamic collaborative endeavor which supports the concept of value. Essentially, just gathering requirements will populate the backlog with unnecessary user stories that do not contribute value.

For a law enforcement organization to run smoothly it needs positive leadership. Positive leadership is when a leader interacts with the frontline. Interaction is not just getting to know those a leader works with and serves, although knowing your people is an important component to leading. Interaction is as well to continually develop and train and develop not only ourselves but those the leader serves in an effort to build a common outlook. In the end positive leader understands that a strong common outlook between the top and frontline establishes trust, or even better mutual trust. The leader's true work: Be worthy of his or her constituents' trust. Positive leaders know the side with the stronger group feeling has a great advantage.2 Strong trust encourages delegation and reduces the amount of information and tactical direction needed at the top or strategic level. With less information to process and a greater focus on strategic issues, the decision making cycle at the top accelerates and the need for policies and procedures diminishes, creating a more fluid and agile organization. Mutual trust, unity and cohesion underlie everything.

Leadership’s role is to develop individuals who understand and practice integrity, courage, initiative, decisiveness, mental agility and personal accountability. These fundamental qualities must be aggressively cultivated which in turn allows for an atmosphere of adaptability at the lowest level, on the street. “I am here now in the situation that requires a decision…”  I AM EMPOWERED, SUPERENPOWERED TO DECIDE and ACT!

The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We

Learning agility,” as they define it, “is the ability to reflect on experience and then engage in new behaviors based on those reflections.

Donald Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

Kanban is David Anderson’s

Impact

Jeff Patton in User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product,

Limitless Leaders focus on 1. Consciously Constructive development of their people's ADAPTAGILITY capacity... to thrive in uncertainty, ever-changing, challenging, complexities, AND opportunities 2. Teamworking, connection, communication trust and collaboration 3. Limitless Leadership skills and mindsets on ALL levels of the organisation 4. A High Performance Culture, context and climate, that unleashes and engages fullest potentials and possibilities.

An ADAPTAGILITY High Performance coach can reveal options and choices that you did not see, and then set you up with accountability and rewards, to follow through fully, to take SWIFT action, on your best choices.

Lean-Agile Leadership describes how Lean-Agile leaders drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Strategic focus on disruption or exponential leadership, will be constrained by the consciousness, capacity, capability, and commitment, of staff and teams, to EXECUTE effectively with excellence

When you decide to take a step to the right, you expect all parts of your body to work in unity to take that step. Actually, you do not even expect it; it is just as natural a feature of our existence as drawing breath. You would be dumbfounded if not outright terrorized if your left leg suddenly moved in the opposite direction. While this is an everyday occurrence in the corporate world, with organizations aimlessly ambling about like zombies, the problem of moving in unity becomes even more urgent if we truly aim to achieve business agility. It is only when we can harmonize the decentralized decision making in the teams with the intent of senior leadership that we can achieve real business agility. Imagine your organization moved like your body: If there is an unexpected noise in your environment, your whole body turns in that direction to assess the situation and address possible threats that might come towards you. How great would it be if your organization did the same? Flexibly reacting to changes in the environment without friction, discussion, or delay, just a seamless and natural response — would that not be true agility?

Security is not the guys in the dark glasses with impenetrable network diagrams on their huge computer screens. It is your grandmother telling you that you’d better brush your teeth.

Leaders have to understand the principles and practices of change leadership and organizational change management. They must become curators, caretakers, and defenders of the new way of working.

As the panel elaborated on their 12 principles of Management 2.0, I realized that this new management model was powerfully grounded in social and collaborative principles that unleash the collective brainpower of an organization to drive innovation and success in an agile manner. This can be viewed as the new incarnation of the participatory style of management. Andrew Carusone's presentation, "Beyond the Water Cooler: Using Collaborative Technology to Drive Business" shared an implementation of this model at Lowe's. Carusone pointed out that workforce development today was all about developing awareness, creating engagement, and promoting commitment. In his model, management continues to have decision and approval authority, but all employees have the power to recommend, provide input, and perform their duties to the best of their abilities.

Future success will be determined by organizations’ ability to be more innovative, agile, purposeful and resilient.

#ADAPTAGILITY is the CORE quality, skill, and mindset required of leaders today, in these tough, uncertain, ever-changing mega waves of change, challenge, and OPPORTUNITY.

Given the importance of digital technology, and given which companies now serve as role models for executive leadership, it might be that instead of CIOs learning to wear suits, the rest of the executive team should be ready to start dressing down. Or perhaps the business should be learning how to align with IT, rather than the other way around.

Organisational, or Team, Culture is a foundation, and primary factor for enabling greater people performance and exponential results. To fully enable, and unleash, people potentials, consciously constructive leaders cultivate the heads, hearts, minds, and Souls. in their organisation

Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous Cycle Sketching out feedback loops is very useful when approaching a systems thinking model. For example, I often see the cycle occurring in Figure 20.1. Figure 20.1 The vicious cycle of distrust This vicious cycle increases distrust between management and development as each side games the other to protect itself. Less work gets done, and quality suffers. A significant role of leadership is to identify these vicious cycles and find ways to turn them into virtuous cycles. We do this by changing the vicious cycle of distrust into a virtuous cycle of trust. The greatest opportunity to begin this is in the Sprint Planning and Review meetings and to reinforce it during the Sprint.

This new normal proves work no longer a place, it's an activity and performance, based on trust, truth, and relationships, and not hierarchies, micro-managing, and bureaucracy. It's a mindset that values and enables performance, and protection, of people, planet AND profits, more than property, greedership, and exploitation.

There should just be a team working together to figure out how to maximize business value.

Agile, like a leader, aims at people-first approach; putting people above things.

Being a mum fuels my creativity, grounds my leadership, and sharpens my agility. As a digital entrepreneur, I don’t just lead—I create, nurture, and adapt, just like I do at home.

We are all in the business of hospitality.

A vision is a picture of where you want to get to, not the path to get there.

Cohesiveness is defined as a strong sense of connectedness among team members that causes them to work together to attain an objective.

There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.

a way, the Agile community is suffering from the same insecurity as the CIO community. While CIOs feel that they need to justify their existence and claim a seat at the table, the Agile community is stuck on the idea that it has no place until dramatic cultural and organizational changes happen.†

My fellow IT leaders, we must use these new Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices as a lever for changing the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.

In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service-providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered new projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and has been for many years.25

Obsessed with proving that it deserves a seat at the table, IT leadership continues to frame its problems in the same old ways—oblivious to the deep changes brought on by the Agile revolution—while the Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.

There is my CIO role in a nutshell: establish the goal, learn from the team, and render their ideas in rules that apply to future teams as a form of institutional memory. There must be a feedback cycle from the teams’ learning to leadership’s context-setting and rule-making.

A slight shift in perspective changes everything.

Try” masks the intent and carries an element of implicit failure in the message.

Thinking Alert: Drop the “try.” It does not add anything to the communication.

The second word often used without understanding the implication is “should.” ‘Should” has a flavor of admonition, guilt, and manipulation, especially when other people are using it by blurting out-loud a general statement with the word “should.” For example: “You should always finish what you’re eating and never leave anything on the plate.” Also: “This should have been completed by now.” And yet another: “You should not get up before the manager has left.” For example, Tina writes: Tina answers, “We should focus on production levels because this is what is driving the transfer to production; trust me, I’ve been here and have seen these projects many times.” In this case, Tina is using “should” to reprimand the team and also to have it her way by defining an imaginary rule and enforcing it upon the team.

Actually, what Tina is saying is, “I want to focus on production levels.” Many times, people use “should” instead of “I want”; this is the case with parents and children. The admonition of, “You should be nice” is actually saying, “I want you to be nice.

People use the word “should” to mask their wish or need. Instead of directly stating what they want, they construct a stipulation without naming a person responsible for carrying it out.

Thinking Alert: Monitor the “shoulds” in your teams. They are barriers to effective communication and reduce the potential power of the team.

Leadership presence is the aggregate of these three things: what you believe, how you communicate, and the energy you express to others.

To mentally condition your Signature Voice, you need to continually update your assumption of what you bring to the table. Being clear on your value proposition...is a key component of mental confidence

She let her team know she was working on this and gave them permission to offer feedback on her nonverbal cues

Pick a place where you can take your whole self to work.

strive for mastery and the self-fulfillment that comes along with it. That purpose will certainly guide you through the change that is inevitable in your role and organization

One of the biggest lessons I'm learning now is having a better feel for when to step out of a situation and when to step in. I do think that is actually one of the hardest things to balance correctly.

All leaders need three core communication techniques in their toolkit to support Signature Voice: framing, advocacy, and listening and engagement

Leaders need to provide context to align people and resources around a mission, vision, and execution to get jobs done. If they don't people make up their own frames and stories, increasing the risk of misalignment.