Agile Leadership
By: Fredrik Lied Larsen
Tags: Leadership, Agile Leadership, Organizational Culture, Innovation Management, Agile

Agile Leadership

The Agile Manifesto for Software Development was written almost 20 years ago. Agile processes are prevalent in IT and gaining traction in other sectors, but leadership has not kept up the pace. Agile organizations need a new kind of leadership. Fredrik Lied Larsen Dec 2, 2020·5 min read

Image by Mango Matter from Pixabay

The origin of leadership

Throughout time, humans have learned, evolved, developed, and changed. Our ability to focus a collective effort on solving a common problem has led to enormous innovation. And the process seemingly is accelerating. Every day we are watching videos of new gadgets, hear about a breakthrough in vaccination, new clean energy solutions, the first commercial spacecraft to the international space station, and many more.

Human ingenuity, innovation, and collaboration is shaping the future every day.

Along with scientific breakthroughs in all disciplines, we are also developing better and better leadership and management practices. Traditionally a lot of management practices have been adapted from military leadership theory and practice. The titles used in most organizations like Chief Executive Officer, the language of fighting for market share, beachhead team for presidential transformation, and so on, all points to traditional military-based management and leadership.

Another aspect of military leadership is the hierarchy. Decisions trickle down from the top where the most powerful and wisest people tell everyone else what to do. We have this romantic and skewed impression of the lone genius. Tony Stark will come up with an idea, develop a solution, build it, and save the world. With barely any help at all. This is not how the real world works.

In the real world, collaboration is the name of the game. A group of people together, coming up with ideas, establishing hypotheses, building prototypes, testing products, and learning. From a team to complete organizations, we try to enable a startup mindset in every organization. But we still cling to old ways of leadership.

The rise of IT as a core business

The last thirty or so years have taken IT from the basement and into the board room.

“Every company is a software company. You have to start thinking and operating like a digital company. It’s no longer just about procuring one solution and deploying one. It’s not about one simple software solution. It’s really you yourself thinking of your own future as a digital company.” — Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft

IT used to be considered, in many cases rightly so, error-prone, costly, complex, and time-consuming. We have all heard stories of huge IT projects that fail, go over budget, or do not work as intended.

In 2001, a group of software developers got together and wrote one of the most important documents of modern software development, The Agile Manifesto for Software Development. They stated four values and twelve principles for software development. The values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

These values and the Twelve principles are focused on better ways of developing software. Until that point, most software development was done in a waterfall manner. With the Manifesto for Software Development new approaches for software development started to become mainstream. Pair programming, Extreme programming, Scrum, Kanban, Mob Programming, Lean Startup, and more, have gained popularity since the early 2000s.

Agile leadership

Agile software development or sometimes just Agile, has gained a lot of ground since 2001. Most software today is developed using agile methodologies rooted in the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. Software teams and projects have implemented agile software development processes through Kanban, Scrum, and other practices. In the startup sphere, a lot of companies swear by the principles of Lean Startup and Design Thinking.

However, there are a lot of other areas in a modern enterprise that could benefit from taking up agile practices. But for that to happen we need to see a new type of leadership emerge in businesses, Agile Leadership.

A new type of leader is necessary to bring us to the next level of employee engagement, performance, and innovation. A leader that creates a work environment where everyone can thrive and bring their best performance every day.

Traditionally, leaders focused on control and compliance. An agile leader must focus on motivating, empowering, collaboration, innovation, accountability, learning, experimentation, and purpose for the team or organization.

Leadership

In all kinds of popular culture, leadership is portrayed, from Mission Impossible to Paw Patrol. A typical depiction is a man, 30–60 years old, with a lot of wisdom and skill. He knows what everyone should do and they should all do what he says.

The real workplace does not work like that and the modern economy requires new principles for leadership.

In the book Drive author Dan Pink explores what it is that motivates people. Traditional leadership focuses primarily on one motivator, incentives. However, research has shown that paying someone more to perform tasks only works for very rudimentary jobs that do not require cognitive load. A lot of work today requires more and more innovation, problem-solving, and creativity. People do not become more creative because they are paid better.

Instead, we need to shift our leadership to focus on creating the best workplace possible through autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Humans want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Today’s organizations cannot merely provide people with a paycheck and expect everyone to be happy about that. The modern worker needs to align with the companies purpose. Each company must find its purpose that motivates its people.

The second thing that Dan Pink found as an intrinsic motivator is mastery. Simply, becoming better at something. When humans see the results of their efforts it motivates future effort and can result in a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Agile companies must continue to train their people to always improve and get better.

Lastly, an agile leader must trust her team to find solutions to challenges. Let people find their way of solving problems and implementing new solutions.

Final thoughts

The manifesto for agile software development was written less than twenty years ago. Gradually IT has embraced the values and principles outlined in the document and recently we have seen more and more industries and disciplines explore agile principles. However, leadership has not yet caught on in a significant way. Without a better way of leading organizations, we will not be able to harness the positive aspects of agile methodologies completely. The modern leader must find a way to motivate everyone in the organization to bring all of their creativity, innovation, and problem-solving every day at work. We can, and we must create a workplace that gives people working there a true sense of belonging to something worthwhile. Through collaboration, we can find the best solutions to the enormous problems facing society today.