Unleash Your Agile Leadership Potential andGuide Your Entire Organization Toward Agility
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The Agile Leader
Leveraging the Power ofInfluence

Zuzana Šochováe LeaderliAg

Boston • Columbus • New York • San Francisco • Amsterdam • Cape Town
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Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products areclaimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher wasaware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters orin all capitals.
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C O N TENTS

xi
xv
xxi
xxiii

Forewords
PrefaceAcknowledgments
About the Author

Part I. Agile Leader—Unleash Your
Leadership Potential
1. How It All Started

1
3
6

The Need for Change

2. Leadership Is a State of Mind
What Is Agile?
Why Agile?
What Is Agile Leadership About?
What Is the Difference between Leader and Manager?
Why Is It Important to Be an Agile Leader?

3. Organizational Evolution
Organization 1.0: Traditional
Organization 2.0: Knowledge

9
9
13
20
21
22
25
25
28

v

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vi • • • Contents

Organization 3.0: Agile
Reflect on Your Organization

4.

The Agile Leader
The Servant Leader
The Leader-Leader
The Leadership Agility: From Expert to Catalyst
The Expert
The Achiever
The Catalyst
The Agile Leader Journey
Positivity
Listening

5.

The Agile Leadership Model
Get Awareness
Embrace It
Act UponIntegrate It in a Circle

6.

Competencies
Vision and Purpose
Three Levels of Reality
High Dream and Low Dream
Bringing Down the Vision
Motivation
Theory X and Theory Y
Engagement
Super-chickens
Feedback
Giving Feedback
Learn from Feedback
Decision
Sociocracy
Power and Control Cycles

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31
34
37
40
44
48
49
50
51
57
62
65
75
77
78
80
80
87
88
92
94
95
100
103
107
109
113
116
119
122
124
126

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Contents • • • v i i

Collaboration
Facilitation
Four-Player Model
Coaching
ChangeThe Change Dynamic
Force Fields
Competencies Self-Evaluation

7. Meta-skills
The Me Domain
The We Domain
The World Domain

8. Building an Agile Organization
Inside Out
Evolutionary Purpose
Emergent Leadership
Culture“We” Culture
Competing Values
Network Structure
Smart versus Healthy
Reinventing Organizations

Part II. The Different Parts of an Agile
Organization
9. Business Agility
Agile at the Executive Level
The CEO in an Agile Organization
Agile Board of Directors
Team over Individuals and Hierarchy
Flexibility over Fixed Plans and Budgets
Strategic over Operational

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128
132
134
139
141
142
145
148
153
154
155
156
161
162
166
168
172
183
194
200
202
205

211
213
216
220
223
224
224
225

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viii • • • Contents

10.

Agile HR and FinanceAgile HR
Supporting the Culture Shift
Recruiting
The Interview Process
Evaluations and Performance Reviews
Coaching for Growth
Retrospectives and Peer Feedback
Career Paths and Salaries
What You Can Do in More Agile Environments
What to Do in an Agile Organization
Leadership and Self-Deception
Leadership, System Coaching, and LargeGroups Facilitation
Agile Finance11.

Tools and Practices
System Coaching and Facilitation
Open Space
Diversity of Roles
What You Need to Prepare
Where Organizations Can Use Open Space
How to Start
World Café
Systems Thinking
Radical Transparency
Experiment, Inspect, and Adapt
Be Inclusive
Have Courage
Growing TrustTeam Building
Personal Maps
Assessment

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229
229
230
231
234
238
239
241
243
244
247
249
250
253
257
257
259
262
264
265
267
270
274
277
285
286
288
290
291
292
295

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Contents • • • i x

12.

Teamwork
Building Communities

296
298

Summary

303
304
307
310

Organizational Perspective
Agile Leader Perspective
What’s Next

Bibliography
Index

9780136660422_web.indb 9

313
321

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F O R E WOR D S

Foreword by Johanna Rothman
We hear a lot about agile leadership these days. The good news isthat everyone realizes they need some agility in their organizations.
The bad news is that too few people understand how to change their
behaviors to become agile leaders.
What does agile leadership really mean?
In Agile Leadership, Zuzana Šochová explains—clearly andwith examples—how each of us might think about agile leadership.
She helps us navigate agile leadership by explaining the variousorganizational structures, how agile leadership might work, and theoverall agile leadership journey.
As you read, she encourages you to take notes and experiment.
Do so. You might learn about yourself—an excellent idea for any
leader. You might select some experiments to try for yourself, yourteam, and your organization.
You will learn to look for feedback at every opportunity, to consider how transparent you can be, and how to try new things.
I particularly like that every chapter offers suggestions forbooks to read. And there’s an extensive bibliography at the back.
When I read books like this, I sometimes want to investigate a topic
more fully. This book encourages us to do so.
xi

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xii • • • Forewords

Are you ready to be an agile leader? You can lead from anywhere in the organization. And if you want your organization to
become an agile organization, you must lead. When leaders change
themselves, the rest of the organization will follow.
I hope you enjoy this book. I did.
—Johanna Rothman,author of Modern Management Made Easy and other books

Foreword by Evan Leybourn
Never before in the history of humanity has there been such ademand for business leaders to be truly agile. Leaders who createalignment in the people around them when all is changing. Leaders who face volatility and ambiguity with confidence in theirown—and their team’s—ability to adapt. And leaders who see, andembrace, the complexity in the systems around them. Throughout
history, there have always been visionary and agile leaders—thegreat architects, generals, and explorers who have seen opportunity
in adversity and found innovation to be the key to achieving theirgoals.
At the turn of the century, something changed. The drive forpredictability, efficiency, and scale drove a new kind of leadership.
Systems such as scientific management emerged to help leadersplan, repeat, and grow. And for a while it seemed like we were bringing order to our chaotic world, but we only hid the chaos under alayer of process and bureaucracy.
You can hide for only so long. In the hundred years between
1900 to 2000, the world population grew by 275 percent from 1.6
to more than 6 billion, while global total gross domestic product(GDP; also known as gross world product [GWP]) increased bymore than 3,600 percent (from $1.1 trillion to $41 trillion in 1900
US dollars). Complexity grew. Today, we find ourselves needing
leaders who are more visionary than scientific, who see the systems
for what they are and not what we want them to be.

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Forewords • • • x i i iGiven the scale of growth, leadership is no longer for the
exclusive few who, by luck or circumstance, find themselves in aposition to inspire and lead. Today, there are hundreds of thousandsof companies in need of such leadership.
And so, the leader of today must be developed and grown, notfound. Which brings us, very neatly, to agile leadership.
—Evan Leybourn,founder of the Business Agility Institute9780136660422_web.indb 13

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P R EFAC E

In the last two decades, a powerful movement has revolutionized
the world of work.
Agility is the idea that we can put people before processes,
focus on creating value, work in self-organizing teams, and cooperate directly with our customers to iteratively build increasingly
useful and valuable products. Various organizations have grown tosupport this movement, including the Scrum Alliance, which offers
training on the agile mindset and best practices. The movement has
grown so popular so quickly that agile is now recognized as a key
requirement for managing the modern workplace
I was fortunate to get into agile and Scrum in the early days.
After completing my studies in computer science, I earned increasingly responsible roles. Becoming a manager of others opened myeyes to the reality of the modern work world and how agile couldchange everything, given proper leadership.
I became a sort of evangelist, introducing agile practices tocompanies, and a Scrum trainer, organizing and speaking at conferences, eventually being elected to the Scrum Alliance Board of
Directors.
How did a young woman with colorful hair from a little-known
country in the center of Europe achieve this? Certainly not by luckor wishful thinking. It’s been hard and often uncomfortable work,xv

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xvi • • • Preface

constantly questioning conventional wisdom, stretching and challenging myself and others.
I’ve already written blogs, articles, and books about agile,including The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay, where I
present my ideas and experiences with servant leadership and how
to guide teams on their journey to agility.
In all this time, I’ve increasingly been called an “agile leader.”And yet, I’ve repeatedly had to ask myself: What does being a leader
in agile really mean? Is it an oxymoron, when we are supposed to be
self-organizing, to even seek leadership? Who is an agile leader, andwhat does an agile leader do?
Answering these questions eventually led to the creation of theCertified Agile Leadership program at the Scrum Alliance.
Over the years, I’ve collected so much information about leadership, most of it common sense, some of it contradictory or counterintuitive, that it became obvious I had to write it all down and put
it into some sort of order. The result is this book.
This book is not a collection of recipes that, if followed, cantransform anyone, step by step, into an agile leader ready to change
the world. Rather, you may consider this to be more like a tastingmenu or buffet where you can sample the various concepts and principles of agile leadership, so you can build your own set of tools andskills that works for you. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Your
leadership style must suit your unique personality, circumstances,and constraints. This book aims to help you find the ideas that will
guide you in your own personal journey.
So, feel free to skip around, browse this book, and take whatworks for you. Maybe when you’re feeling stumped, or in a rut,needing a bit of inspiration, this book can help. I’ve included exercises, assessments, examples, and real-world stories of agile transformation. Take what works for you, and feel free to skip over what
doesn’t.

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Preface • • • x v i i

In the end, leadership is about providing a shared vision andchanging organizations and cultures to achieve this vision. You willfind a wealth of ideas, techniques, and hopefully inspiration so thatyou know you are not alone in your agile leadership journey.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK
This book is intended for anyone who has the courage to challenge
the status quo of traditional organizational design and become
an agile leader.
It’s for managers, directors, executives, entrepreneurs, and anyone who is willing to take over the responsibility and ownership andbecome a leader. It’s for anyone who has a passion to change things
and anyone who cares about improving the agility at the organizational level. Leadership is a state of the mind; you don’t need tohave any positional power to become an agile leader.
This book guides you through your very first steps on the agile
leadership journey, bringing the tasting menu of the relevant agile
leadership concepts to help you decide where you would like togrow as a leader and how you can help your organization to achievea higher level of the business agility.
Each chapter contains several assessments, exercises, andpractical examples that will help you to connect the theory withyour day-to-day life and reflect on your personal leadership style andorganizational agility. If you don’t like to write directly in the book,you can always use Post-it Notes for the exercises and assessments.
The book doesn’t explain what agile, Scrum, and Kanban areor how to scale agile. It’s not about frameworks, practices, or tools.
It’s also not for people who are confident that their way of working
doesn’t need any significant change.
The book summarizes my experience from leadership
positions—entrepreneur, managing director, director of engineering, HR director, director of the board, and from one additionalrole that people often miss when speaking about leadership: a

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xviii • • • Preface

ScrumMaster, which is a great example of servant leadership. It alsobuilds on top of my coaching experience helping organizations on
their agile journey and coaching executives on their agile leadership
journey. Last but not least, it builds on top of my experience fromrunning the Certified Agile Leadership program (Scrum Alliance),
which is an almost year-long program where I work with a variety ofleaders across the world and across different industries on their agile
leadership transformation.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
This book is divided into two parts. The first part, The Agile
Leader—Unleash Your Leadership Potential, guides you throughthe steps of becoming an agile leader, and the second part, The Different Parts of an Agile Organization, shows practical cases of how
different parts of agile organization works.
Part I: The Agile Leader—Unleash Your Leadership Potential
Chapter 1, How It All Started: I share my story about the beginning of my agile leadership journey, changing one organization to a flat structure based on self-organized teams.
Chapter 2, Leadership Is a State of Mind: We cover the basic
reasons for agile leadership, implementing agile at the organizational level, the difference between leader and manager,
and why being an agile leader is important for the success of
agile at the organizational level.
Chapter 3, Organizational Evolution: We look into the organizational development from a traditional Organization 1.0 to aknowledge Organization 2.0 to an agile Organization 3.0.
Chapter 4, The Agile Leader: We talk about different models
and types of leaders so you can reflect on your style and preferences.

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Preface • • • x i x

Chapter 5, The Agile Leadership Model: We describe the keymodel for agile leadership based on seeing an organization asa system.
Chapter 6, Competencies: We focus on agile leader competencies. This chapter, and especially the self-evaluation at theend, shows you nice opportunities to grow as an agile leader.
Chapter 7, Meta-skills: We look at high-level cognitive skills
and abilities through the Me, We, and World domains.
Chapter 8, Agile Organization: We focus on agile organizational design, structure, and culture.
Part II: The Different Parts of an Agile Organization
Chapter 9, Business Agility: We describe how the executive
team, the board of directors, and the CEO roles can change inan agile organization.
Chapter 10, Agile HR and Finance: We go deeper to the practical agile application in HR, covering the typical HR functions of recruiting, evaluations and performance review, career
paths, and salaries and describe how agile changes the budgeting processes.
Chapter 11, Tools and Practices: We look into the practical tips,
tools, and practices that are common in an agile organization,such as large-group facilitation, systems coaching, building
trust, enhancing transparency, and forming great teams andcommunities.
Chapter 12, Summary: We put together an overview of different concepts mentioned in the book and show them all
together in context.
Let me invite you to join this degustation of a variety of concepts, carefully designed by me, as chef, to inspire agile leaders.
Taste different chapters as courses, feel the mixture of ideas as various flavors, let the assessments and exercises become the aroma

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xx • • • Preface

sensed in your nose, enjoy the real-life stories as a secret spice. Having a great meal is a unique experience, and I hope this book brings
you a unique experience of becoming an agile leader.
—Zuzana (Zuzi) Šochová

Register your copy of The Agile Leader on the InformIT site
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AC K N OW LED GMENTS

Special thanks to my family for their support; without them I would
not have been able to finish this book.

xxi

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A B OU T T H E AU TH OR

Zuzana Šochová, Agile Coach, Certified
Scrum Trainer (CST), and Certified Agile
Leadership Educator (CALE), has morethan 20 years of experience in the IT industry. She led one of the very first agile international projects in the Czech Republic,
focusing on distributed Scrum teams, working in different time zones between Europe
and the United States. Now she is a leading
expert on agile and Scrum practices in both startups and big corporations. She has experience with agile adoption in telco, finance,
health care, automotive, mobile, and high-tech software companies.
She’s been helping companies with agile and Scrum across Europe,
India, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
Zuzi has worked in various positions, starting as a softwaredeveloper for life- and mission-critical systems, continuing as a
ScrumMaster and director of engineering and director of HR. She
has been working as an independent agile coach and trainer since2010, specializing in leadership, organizational and team coaching,facilitations, and culture change using agile and Scrum.
Zuzi is a well-known international speaker. She is a founderof the Czech Agile Community, which organizes the annual Agilexxiii

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xxiv • • • About the Author

Prague Conference. She is a CST and CTC with the Scrum Alliance. She received her MBA from Sheffield Hallam University(Great Britain) and her master’s in computer science and computer
graphics from the Czech Technical University. She is the authorof the book The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay (AddisonWesley, 2017) and coauthor of Agile Methods Project Management(Computer Press, 2014), written in the Czech language. She is amember of the Board of Directors of the Scrum Alliance (USA), wasrecognized as one the Top 130 Project Management Influencers in
2019, and is included in the Lean In Agile 100 (LIA 100), an initiative to identify women making significant contributions in lean andagile spaces across the globe.
twitter: @zuzuzka
web: sochova.com
blog: agile-scrum.com

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2
• • •

LE A D E R S H I P I S A S TATE OF MI ND

Many books focus on leadership, but not that many
Agile
focus on agile leadership.
LeaderWhy does that matter?
Because leadership haschanged significantly overthe past few decades. What
used to be an effective leadership style in a traditionalorganization might be counterproductive in agile environments.
The most effective leaders, who had been great working with individuals in traditional structures, might be struggling or completely
failing to work with teams and systems. But let’s answer some questions before we deep-dive into the change.

W H AT I S AG I L E ?
What does agile mean in the first place? Let’s first clear up some of
the most common misconceptions and misunderstandings. Agile is99780136660422_web.indb 9

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10 • • • CHAPTER 2

L eadership I s a S tate of M ind

a mindset, a philosophy, a different way of working. It changes theway you think and how you approach tasks, team mates, and workin general. It’s not a process, method, or framework to be implemented, which makes it very flexible. It’s all about culture andchanging the way you think about business. It’s based on transparency, team collaboration, a higher level of the autonomy, and creating impact through frequent value delivery.
When I first heard about agile and Scrum, I didn’t like them.
It felt like a process overkill. We were putting too much focus on
the practices and not much on the mindset and culture, which isactually a very common mistake. I still remember when, as a new
ScrumMaster, I introduced agile to the team and my only argument was that we have to use it because our customer required it.
I could not have cared less about being agile. Just get the work done
and move on, I thought. However, it turned out that even “technical agile”—before we understood the mindset and instead took it
as only a set of practices, processes, and rules—helped us in areas
where we thought we were already great. It was a big surprise for us.
A few years later, when I had some experience in building
agile organizations, I was a managing director of a small web studio, and we used agile not only to deliver our products and services
and build relationships with customers but also as an overall way todesign strategy and inspect and adapt our business model. Interestingly, though the delivery process improvement was outstanding—we shortened the time to market from a couple of months to justa few days—the business impact was not relevant until we fully
embraced agility at all levels and started experimenting with thebusiness model and strategic decision-making process. Agility at asingle-team level can create a huge impact on team members’ motivation and efficiency, but the business impact is usually limited.
Agility at the organizational level has much bigger potential.

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 1 1

Experiment&
Learn

Make People
AwesomeModernAgile
Deliver
Value
SafetyIs
Prerequisite

In one word, agile stands for “adaptiveness.” Although agile
started in the software development, it’s widely applicable anywhere
you can imagine. Over the years, agile has spread from IT toward
other parts of the business: agile HR, agile finance, agile marketing, business agility, and agile leadership, where the Modern Agile[Kerievsky19] concept created by Joshua Kerievsky is more relevant
than the original Agile Manifesto.1
Modern Agile has four principles: make people awesome,experiment and learn rapidly, deliver value continuously, andmake safety a prerequisite. Making people awesome is a starting point for the mindset change. It’s all about relationships.
1. Agile was popularized by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development: http://
agilemanifesto.org.

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12 • • • CHAPTER 2

L eadership I s a S tate of M ind

Let’s make people successful, happy, and content and make theirlives better—this applies to everyone in the organizational ecosystem, including customers, employees, and shareholders. The next
two principles are about helping people to collaborate and to learn
about the business and their way of working through small experiments in how to deliver the right value. All three groups are supporting one other and building on top of each other. The fourthprinciple is a precondition. Safety is a prerequisite for any agility.
If you don’t have a high level of trust, agile will not work. People
will feel far from awesome, they will be afraid to experiment andto come up with innovative and creative solutions, and the value
delivered will suffer. Agile needs a “safe to fail” culture where
people take failure as an opportunity to learn and improve, not toblame, judge, or punish.
Good agile needs all four segments. Imagine your organization. How
agile are you according to the four Modern Agile principles? On a scale
1 to 10, where do you see your organization?
1

10People are taken as
resources who do
the job.

We care about making
people awesome.

We follow processes
and guidelines.

We experiment andlearn rapidly.

We focus on task
efficiency.

We focus on deliveringvalue continuously.

Failure is only an
opportunity to blame.

We make safety a prerequisite, and we learn
from failures.

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W h at I s Ag i l e ? • • • 1 3

What makes your team or organization Agile? What are theaspects you are missing?

Your
notes ...

Why A gile?

Agile is a response to new business realities and challenges. It brings
flexible business models and allows organizations to succeed intoday’s constantly changing world. Most of the modern management and organizational design traces its roots back to the early
1900s [Kotter12], when the problems organizations were solving
were very different. If you look at how business has changed in justthe past twenty years and how many originally successful organizations failed to keep up and consequently went out of business,
you cannot doubt that organizational change is a requirement forsuccess.

M02_Sochova_C02_p009-024.indd 13

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14 • • • CHAPTER 2

L eadership I s a S tate of M ind

Internet Era

Globalization Era

ity

Industry Era

ex
pl

m

Co

Individual Era

Let’s take a step back and look at how the world has changed overthe past centuries. Hundreds of years ago, in the individual era, theworld was quite stable and simple. Every family had its own field. Most
towns had only one restaurant, one shop, one hotel. People were lessdependent on each other. The businesses were local, people worked
as individuals. And then the world changed: the Industrial Revolution
made impossible things possible, faster, and more complicated. People
didn’t like the change at first, but it didn’t matter—the world was notasking their opinions, and the change happened anyway. Sabotaging
machines in the factories didn’t prevent it; trying to preserve the oldworld by using horses instead of cars didn’t stop it either. The old way of
doing business became too slow and was not competitive. The pressure
was unstoppable, and companies either kept up to speed and survived
or disappeared forever.
The Industrial Age gave birth to management as we know it
now. Taylorism was born. All the management practices oriented
toward task optimization, planning, and control have their roots inthis period. But the world was not static and continued changing

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 1 5even faster. The new era ushered in by globalization and followedby the Internet completely changed not only the business world
but our lives. It doesn’t matter anymore where your company office
is. You don’t even need one. Instant communication and accessibility have redesigned everything. Companies such as Google andFacebook created the new virtual business, which companies suchas Uber and Airbnb took to the next level. None of that would bepossible without the Internet. Similar to the public resistance seenat the beginning of the industrial era, we may not like this change,
we may try to fight with it and block Uber and Airbnb from runningtheir services, but the trend is not stoppable. These exact companies may disappear, but the world is not going back. Day after day
it becomes faster and increasingly complex. We not only can’t stop
the upcoming new eras, but we can’t predict them either. We don’tknow what’s next.
I still remember when my friend asked me during my computer science studies (in the mid-1990s) if I wanted an email address.
Why would I need an email? I asked him. You have to have it, hesaid. And now, can you imagine a life without it? It has become an
integral part of our lives. It’s the same with globalization. When our
teachers at the MBA program were talking about globalization asa critically important trend, I didn’t believe them. It would affecta few companies, yes. But would it be a major game changer? Not
really. And now, we might not like it, but it is our current reality.
The real power of globalization is when you combine it with the
speed of information over the Internet. It allows anyone, no matter
where they are located, even hidden in a small village somewherein the mountains, to connect and completely change your business,with just one click. It’s as simple as that, as fast as you can imagine.
There is no extra cost for traveling and opening an office. The worldis global, it’s even more global than we think, and no borders or regulations can stop it.
Day by day, the world is changing faster and faster and becomes
more and more complex.

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When I ask participants at my leadership classes what’s next,
they often say “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” and a
return to “individualism.” But here is the point: when we talk about
it, it’s already here, and while we might not see it yet, it’s alreadyhappening. The truth is, we don’t know what’s next. But whatever it
is, it’s going to redesign the game—it will make the impossible possible and will redraw the map of the business world and our lives. No
one knows what that is yet. But so far, the trend has always been thesame: significantly faster changes and more complexity. The transformation is so fast that products you used five years ago are old now,the lives we lived ten years ago were very different, and everything ischanging, which makes planning almost impossible.
It’s time to change. Stop creating plans. Inspect and adapt.

All we can do is accept that we don’t know what’s next. And
this time, the change won’t be for the next generation—it will happen within the next year or two. In this rapidly evolving world, weneed to change the way we work, right now, when there is still time
to do it, and we need to inspect and adapt because the traditional
plans are changing so fast that it makes no sense to create them.
The world is so different now, and yet we are still trying to use
the same way of working as was practiced in the early 1900s. Interesting, right?
Currently, we speak aboutliving in the VUCA world [Bennett14]—the world with highvolatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The worldthat is unpredictable. Now is the
VUCtime for a change. Agility offers
A W o rld
the answer to the current complex problems and allows us to9780136660422_web.indb 16

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 1 7

be more adaptive and responsive to change. Inspection and adaptation rather than creating fixed plans seem to be a better fit for our
dynamic world.
Companies change not because there is a new method orframework. They change because they have to. Agile is not yourgoal—it’s a necessity to survive and to succeed in today’s complex
and constantly changing world.
I do an exercise with executives and senior managers who areinterested in implementing agile in their organization. I ask them
how complex, unpredictable, and fast-changing their business is.
Their answers always vary widely, but there are hardly any organizations where the majority of the group would classify the business as
predictable. They have different reasons behind the unpredictability: business model disrupters, customers expecting flexibility thatis hard to achieve with classical structures, or significant changes inregulations. And most of them are saying, “If we don’t start changing
now, we might not make it at all.”Example of the VUCA exercise

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Do this exercise in your organization:
How complex is your business? On a scale of 1 to 10,2 where do you see
your organization?
1

10

Simple, Predictable

VUCA World

If the overall results in your organization are• 1 to 4, there is no need for agility in your business.
• 5 or 6, you should start experimenting with agility; the situation is not
yet urgent but might soon be.
• 7 or more, it’s high time to change the way you work and become agile
now, or you might never make it.
Think about your business. What makes your business model sustainable? What do you need to change so you can address the
VUCA challenges?

Yournotes ...

2. In most of the assessments in this book, we use the scale of 1 to 10. There is no hardmeasure for the numbers—the numbers are based on your feelings and are subjective, relative to your expectations and circumstances. The scale is often used withcoaching questions because, by considering your response along a continuum, yougain new insights (i.e., if your answer is 5, what would 6 look like?).

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 1 9

In our company, when we changed our way of working and started ouragile journey, most of our competitors were operating on year plans
and fixed budget and scope, and it usually took them a few months tobuild an up-to-speed team for the customer. We were very well awareof the growing influence of the VUCA challenges, which created a hugepressure for the entire information and communication technology (ICT)business, so we turned the whole business model around. We offered highflexibility as the key differentiator, allowing our customers to add a newteam in less than a week, and we allowed flexibility on a Sprint3 basis
in our contracts. In a simple way, with every Sprint, the customers had achance to experience what we had finished at the Sprint Review,4 theygave us feedback, and based on the overall value delivered, they could
choose to continue investing in the next Sprint or not. Teams were learning new skills much faster as a result of intensive collaboration, and we
got an up-to-speed team in less than three Sprints.
I remember one meeting with a new client where we were discussing how we were going to work together. We asked the client if the company had ever outsourced anything. “Yes,” the manager said. “So how
did it go?” I asked. Long story short, it turned out they were just finalizing one project with a vendor, and literally nothing had gone well. The
product was late, it didn’t work as they expected, there were many misunderstandings and miscommunications that resulted in a number of bugs
being claimed as change requests and therefore cost extra . . . the list
went on. We listened carefully to the client’s story, and when she finished,
all I needed to say was, “Sorry to hear that. It must have been very stressful for you. But that’s the reason why we work differently.” You could see
the surprise in her eyes. “What do you mean by that? Tell us more about
it,” she said. We got her interest, and linking our way of working to thepains her company had just experienced only increased her curiosity andwillingness to give our way a try. But she was still quite hesitant to say yes.
“It all sounds very interesting, but can you give us a reference, some company of our size that has worked this way with you?” she asked. We gave
her the reference and also offered to start with a low-risk trial project forthem to experience how it would be to work this way.
3. Sprint is a fixed timebox iteration during which the increment of the product iscreated. It’s part of the Scrum framework. https://www.scrumguides.org
4. Sprint Review is an event in Scrum that allows teams to get feedback from thecustomers on the value delivered during the Sprint.

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It took a while to convince our clients that our way of working was
better than what they were used to, but in the long term, we were successful. Interestingly, our flexibility and our radically different approachwere tempting enough, so our clients always gave it a try. And once theyexperienced it, the partnership we built, the transparency we provided,
and the working product increments we delivered in every short iteration
built high levels of trust in our cooperation. Step by step, we grew ourteams at the expense of the competitors, who were pushed to the margins.

Wha t Is Agile Leadership About?

As the world becomes steadily more dynamic and complex, organizations have to change to stay competitive. They must become
more flexible, team-oriented, and self-organized. And as a consequence, leaders need to adopt another approach to motivate people
and lead the organizations to keep up the speed. We speak aboutknowledge management, creativity, the need for innovations—andin the past few years about agile leadership—which help leaders tounderstand the nature of the change that is happening in businessright now and prepare them to react effectively to the challenges
modern organizations have brought on in all their complexity. The
less predictable the business is, the more organizations are failingwith traditional leadership approaches, which optimize for repetitive tasks and consistency.
Agile leadership is the leadership of tomorrow.

Agile leadership is not about how to implement agile, Scrum,
Kanban, eXtreme Programming, or lean principles. You have people in your organization who can do that. Being an agile leader is astate of mind. We build a world where 1 + 1 = more_than_two, aworld that is not divided between winners and losers but where both
can win and creativity can make a difference in the equation.

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 2 1

Wha t Is the Dif f er ence between Leader and Mana ger?

First, all managers are leaders; however, leaders don’t necessarilyneed to be managers. Being a leader is not a position. No one canbe promoted to be a leader. It’s only your own choice if you decide
to become one.
Everyone can become a leader, it’s only your own decision.

In an agile organization, where hierarchy becomes less important, we put more focus on leadership than on management. Thereis no positional authority given to a leader. Leaders gain their influence from their actions and behaviors and from their service to thepeople around them, and their power grows through the respect ofothers. Traditional managers, on the other hand, are often associated with decision making and certain positional power that mustbe given to them. Having said that, leadership is a state of mind.
Everyone can be a leader. Some of us just might be kind of sleeping,afraid to take over the responsibility and start an initiative. However,there is nothing other than yourself preventing you from becoming
a leader.
Leadership is a state of mind, not a position.

You are the leader, so don’t wait for anyone else. Agile is notabout practices, rules, or processes. Agile is about a different way of
thinking, a different way of approaching things, a different mindset.
And it’s all in your hands. You are the leader, and the only obstacle
between the leadership state of mind and the traditional hierarchical mindset are your own mindset and your own habits.
On my agile journey, the most difficult task was to be consistent with thechange I intended to create and to be a role model of an agile leader.
When I took over the department of 120 people and human resources,
I had a vision to build a flexible and fast-learning environment based on
the network of the self-organized teams without management. The mostimportant job I had in front of me was to grow leaders who would leverage the power of influence over positional power. Easier to say than do.

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I already had my experience with it as a Scrum Master and agile
coach, but doing the same at the director level is different. You are fighting not only against your own habits but against the tempting positional
power you have, which, if you use it, can temporarily make everythingmuch more efficient and faster. If I could have just told the team what to
do on day-to-day tasks, I wouldn’t have had to spend hours helping people around me to understand the situation and make their own decisions.
It was super time consuming. I spent all my time at work talking to people and helping them to collaborate and take over the initiatives. I spentevenings at home catching up with my work. Telling them exactly what
to do was so very tempting. But shortcuts never work well. If I had given
up then, they never would have made it. And I would have been stuck as
the central decisionmaker and advisor forever—they would never havegotten a chance to come up with innovative and creative solutions, andwe would still have been just another ordinary company unable to make adifference for our clients.
Persistence was key. In a few months, it paid off, and I was able tostep back and enjoy the power of self-organization. The department was
running by itself toward the mission of added-value solutions.

Why Is It Impor tant to Be an Agile L eader?

Agile leaders are key to any agile organization. The more agile leadership exists in the organization, the more likely the overall mindset
changes and the agile transformation will be successful. Having a
critical mass of agile leadership is crucial for any agile environment;
without it, we are only creating another process and adding terminology, and all we get is “fake agile,” not business results.
Leaders need to change first. The organization will follow.

Being an agile leader is more important than ever. Nearly
every corporation is willing to experiment with at least one agile
project. As organizational agility grows, the gap between traditional
management and the agile way of working is getting bigger and creates frustration on both sides. The teams are frustrated because management is not supporting them and the organization is not helping
them on their agile journey. Management is frustrated because it

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W hat I s Agile ? • • • 2 3

doesn’t know how to produce agile leaders and grow the collaborative team-oriented environment. “When we speak with leaders
about this kind of system, most agree intellectually that power, decision making, and resource allocation should be distributed. But
making that happen is another matter. Their great fear is that theorganization will fall into chaos” [Kerievsky19]. Though that is acommon concern, I would argue that agile brings harmony. The
well-functioning teams deliver value to the customers regularly,
effortlessly, and with joy, which in turn provides motivation andenergy within the organization to create innovative solutions andaddress the day-to-day business challenges.
Agile leadership helps you to face the challenges of the VUCA
world.

It’s not an easy or a short process—agile is a journey. However,even after just a few iterations, you will see the results. Given the
dynamics and complexity of the world today, there is no other way.

A

li e Leaderg

Agile leadership helps you to face the challenges of the VUCA
world. “Nobody has really recommended command-and-control
leadership for a long time. But no fully formed alternative has
emerged, either. That’s partly because high-level executives areambivalent about changing their own behavior” [Ancona19].
This book is a great opportunity for change. It brings all the usefulagile leadership concepts on a plateau for leaders to sample and decide

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24 • • • CHAPTER 2

L eadership I s a S tate of M ind

how they can get closer to becoming agile leaders. Start growing agile
leaders today, and the organizational agility will grow along.

Books to Read

• The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming

the Way Work Gets Done, Stephen Denning (New York:AMACOM, 2018).
• Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to
Motivate Any Team, Jurgen Appelo (New York: Wiley,2016).
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,
Jeff Sutherland and J. J. Sutherland (London: Random
House, 2014).
• Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile
Process, Kenneth S. Rubin (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Addison-Wesley, 2017).

In a Nutshell◽◽ Agile is a response to new business realities and challenges of a VUCA world.
◽◽ Agile brings flexible business models and allows organizations to succeed in today’s constantly changing world.
◽◽ Being agile is focusing on making people awesome, learning through experiments, delivering value, and making
safety a prerequisite.
◽◽ Leadership is a state of mind, not a position.
◽◽ Leaders need to change first. The organization will follow.
◽◽ Agile organizations need a different style of leadership.
Agile leaders need to focus on building flexible systems
and growing other leaders.
◽◽ Agile leaders don’t need to use power but to leverage thepower of influence.

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Unleash Your Agile Leadership Potential andGuide Your Entire Organization Toward Agility
In today’s complex, fast-changing, and unpredictableworld, radically agile organizations thrive when they
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