What is Lean-Agile Leadership
Introduction
Agile Leadership, Agile Methodology has been the go-to solution banishing the traditional outdated ideologies that failed to cope up with the cumbersome demands. With this skyrocketing boom of Agile in the market, the door for many professionals bestowed with Agile knowledge has opened to an ocean full of organizations.
Among the many Agile frameworks that MNCs use like Scrum, Kanban, Scaled Agile, Scrum is the single most popular Agile frameworks. SAFe is yet another framework that is used predominantly along with Scrum in all of the top organizations you may name!
- Agile and Scrum are basically more or less based on the same ideology in layman language with a few key differences.
- Both agile and scrum helps teams to split work into various smaller chunks and work on it for further improvements.
Nearly every company has adopted the agile way of working. This boom magnified during the pandemic which needed to work teams in a more agile, flexible, adaptive way.
Agile leaders are packed with the skills of providing flexibility, facility, coaching, motivation, collaboration, and a clear vision to achieve the organization’s goal. Leadership quality is a very important deciding factor for the company’s growth and development.
The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile drives and sustain organizations and companies and train agile teams to achieve their highest potential. They do this by learning through example and SAFe’s principles, mindsets and values.
Agile teams are trained to cope up through any situations, find solutions and adapt to the same as and when needed. A team of such value to the company, does require skilled agile leaders bestowed with all the qualities.
Lean-Agile Leadership is one of the seven competencies of the Lean Enterprise, essential for agility in the organization.
How Lean-Agile Leaders Function?
Unlike traditional leadership qualities which involve democratic ways of leading, lean-agile leaders facilitate agile team training by allowing free flow of thoughts and expressions of ideas all across the team. It should not be a distinction based on which only a product manager or head can speak.
A change in the whole structure of the functioning of a company doesn’t happen overnight. Massively skillful and trained agile coaches are required to instill the agile ideas inside the time.
To achieve this feat, lean-agile leaders must actively lead the change instead of just mere worded instructions to continuously flow the ideas.
Leaders:
- Organise and reorganise values
- Inspire and motivate others
- Creates an environment for improvement
Some of the important principles underlying Lean-Agile Leadership
- Leading by Example –
There’s a proverb that goes, “be the change that you want to see in others”. Agile coaches must lead their team by their actions and words. They need to work exactly in front of their juniors in order to incept the way of working the future needs.
- Continuous Constructive Feedback
- Mindset and Principles –
A mindset is a psychological medium through which a person sees the world. Agile teams need to grow the Lean and Agile principles through their coaches and leaders which requires the latter to think in accordance with the same principle of fixed mindset to growth mindset.
- Leading changes expecting to be enforced
Conclusion
Agile leadership is a key quality of any individual and companies are always laying down eyes in search of such leaders and coaches who can break the traditional stereotypical way of working and bring in the agile way of working.
SAFe certificates training also includes Lean-Agile Leadership programmed.
