Tag Archives: Leadership

Leadership Agility: What You Need to Know

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What is Leadership Agility?

In today's complex, turbulent, and competitive business and technology environment, leaders need to master the skills required to become more proactive, collaborative, creative, and agile. Leadership agility is the core competency of agile leaders to make effective decisions, inspire others, bring others along, build the best team, be proactive, develop a culture of teamwork, define objectives, and contribute to strategic initiatives for the enterprise.

 

Leading with agility is an ability to step back, retrospect, gain a deeper perspective, make smart decisions, and take effective action. Leadership agility is not one single skill such as making effective decisions or inspiring people. Rather, it is a combination of skills working together that allows leaders to create the best customer and colleague experiences. 

 

"Agility is fundamental to leading a team through times of change." - Sandra E. Peterson

 

What drives Leadership Agility?

Leaders' agility is the core reason behind the success of any enterprise or business. Some of the common behaviors that drive leadership agility are listed as below:

 

Being a change agent

With this fast-paced environment, leaders need to accept that change is inevitable and be prepared to embrace change. For an organizational change to be effective, leaders should initiate and respond to change quickly. If people believe in your decision-making skills, they will trust your ability to drive the change. 

 

Employees need leaders who are committed to their success, seek feedback, make tough decisions, and communicate openly. Leaders who show personal commitment to change and inspire others to accept change play a critical role as change agents for the organization.

 

"If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." - Jim Rohn

 

Leading with Purpose

The Covid-19 pandemic has created an economic crisis in the world and has disrupted supply chains. The pandemic led to a global labor shortage as people started to quit their jobs or resign early. The thought of returning to the office and the daily commute is discouraging for many people. People are willing to walk away from their jobs, switch employment, or take early retirement. Many businesses have now permanently embraced remote work while others are preparing for a hybrid model of working. During these times, it has become essentially important to encourage a sense of shared purpose that brings meaning to their work. 

 

Agile leaders lead with a purpose that inspires and brings people together. Their vision is manifested in their actions and their goals. Leading with purpose energizes people, attracts top talent, and builds a strong sense of community. 

 

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." - Jack Welch

 

Leaders should strongly believe in their vision. The vision should reflect organizational purpose, motivate colleagues, display the organization's values, and explain the WHYs.

 

Creating a culture of openness, collaboration, and trust

Every agile leader must foster an open environment of trust and collaboration where people can freely discuss their ideas, experiment with their designs, collaborate, have the freedom to make mistakes, and have fun together. 

 

The collaboration methods have changed tremendously due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, people could no longer have casual water-cooler conversations and thus started to explore available online tools that promote spontaneous ideation and collaboration. Most organizations adapted to new ways of working either remotely or in a hybrid environment. Some virtual collaboration tools that I found quite useful are Slack, Trello, Mural, WebEx Meetings, Zoom, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, One Drive, etc.  

 

"You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins." - Jim Stovall

 

Practicing faster decision-making

Faster decision-making is an important skill to make choices that have the best chance of leading to a favorable outcome. For making decisions faster, you need to set a deadline or block your calendar to help you focus on the problem while avoiding distractions. Second, stop being a perfectionist and try to be more realistic in your problem-solving approach. The truth is that you will most likely not have all information you think you need and will need to embrace uncertainty.

 

Next, you should understand when and which decisions can be decentralized to reduce unnecessary delays. Decentralized decisions reduce unnecessary delays and improve the flow of work. Agile leaders must understand when and which decisions they must decentralize. Frequent or time-critical decisions that need local context should be decentralized. Other decisions that are long-lasting and have a huge impact should remain centralized. 

 

Sometimes, the problem is having too much data or too many options to choose from. With so much data available at our fingertips, we tend to overthink and have analysis paralysis also called FOBO (Fear of Better Option). In his Ted Talk, Patrick McGinnis explains how to overcome FOBO and make faster decisions.

 

Embracing Lean-Agile Principles

The Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes of leaders who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking. Leadership agility requires leaders to embrace lean thinking and lean principles outlined by the House of Lean such as Kaizen (continuous improvement), respect for people, teamwork, innovation, sustainable flow, and Genchi Genbutsu (go and see). Lean thinking encourages leaders to embrace core values such as respect, integrity, empathy, collaboration, and teamwork. 

 

“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent." - Bill Gates

 

Agile leaders embrace the values written in the Agile Manifesto and promote the 12 Agile principles across their teams. If you are interested to read about 12 Agile Principles, check out this article on Medium.

 

Check out my published books on Agile and Lean:

 

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Scrum and Kanban

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Scrum and Kanban

What is the Agile Scrum Framework? How is it different from the Kanban approach. If you are applying the Scrum framework and leveraging the Kanban board, you might be thinking that Scrum and Kanban are the same. In addition, you might be wondering which methodology is a better fit for your work.

In this article, I have listed the core differences between Scrum and Kanban. Moreover, I also covered which framework is best suited with different type of work or teams.

 

Scrum in a nutshell

Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile process framework to build complex products of the highest possible value. In Scrum, the team always works on the highest priority items first. The work is performed in short, time-boxed iterations or sprints. Each sprint begins when the team commits to complete prioritized user-stories based on their available capacity in the sprint. An iteration ends when the team has delivered a potentially shippable product increment of the product. Therefore, the scrum development team delivers business value to users at the end of each sprint.

The three Scrum roles - Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Development Team - are defined below: 

  • A Product Owner decides what needs to be built and in what order.
  • A Scrum Master acts as a servant leader and coaches the team to follow Agile Scrum principles.
  • A Development Team is a group of self-organizing individuals who develop a high-quality product.

Scrum requires the below ceremonies to be conducted on a regular cadence:

  • Product Backlog Refinement
  • Sprint Planning
  • Daily Stand-Up
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Retrospective

Above all, Scrum is most suited for complex projects where things are more unpredictable than they are predictable. In complex domains, there is a need to collaborate with others, have an innovative mindset to investigate, experiment with different ideas, and adapt based on the learnings.

To learn more about Scrum, you may read my book, The Basics Of Scrum – A Simple Handbook to the Most Popular Agile Scrum Framework. 

 

Kanban in a nutshell

Kanban is the most popular Lean framework. This approach works best for teams that have a continuous flow of incoming requests with different priorities. In the Kanban approach, each request or a work item is represented by a Kanban card that flows from one stage of the workflow to another until it is complete.

Kanban is very flexible in nature. New work items can be added to the backlog at any time. Even the workflow can change anytime. If team capacity changes, WIP limits get recalibrated. In addition, Kanban does not prescribe any roles or ceremonies. It optimizes an existing process by eliminating waste and improving time to market.

To learn more about Kanban, you may read my other book, The Basics Of Kanban - A Popular Lean Framework

 

Compare Scrum and Kanban

Below section lists the core differences between Scrum and Kanban:

  • Scrum was formulated for complex product development to mitigate the limitations with the traditional Waterfall approach. Kanban, on the contrary, originated to manage work and control inventory at Toyota with Just-In-Time and Lean principles.

 

  • Scrum prescribes product teams to manage work within time-boxed, short, and consistent length iterations or sprints. However, Kanban specifies a continuous flow of work across different states.

 

  • With Scrum, development teams create a potentially shippable product increment at the end of every sprint. Therefore, teams can release code at the end of every sprint if approved by the product owner. With Kanban, teams can release code anytime or on-demand. 

 

  • Scrum requires three roles - Product Owner, Scrum Master, the Development Team. Kanban, on the other hand, does not prescribe any specific role.

 

  • In Scrum, the smallest piece of business value that a team delivers is a user story. Each user story may then be broken down into smaller tasks or sub-tasks. However, in Kanban, each work item is represented as a Kanban card.

 

  • Scrum is best suited for complex product development efforts that are unpredicatable in nature. Such complex efforts require research, experimentation, and an emergent design. Kanban, on the contrary, is best suited for simple and complicated efforts where things are more predictable than they are unpredictable.

 

  • With Scrum, sprint review and retrospective ceremonies are conducted at the end of every sprint to inspect and adapt. Though Kanban does not prescribe any ceremonies, teams may conduct a review meeting on a monthly or a quarterly cadence to review cycle time, flow efficiency, etc.

 

  • Scrum prescribes user stories to be estimated in terms of story points. However, Kanban does not require work items or Kanban cards to be estimated. In Kanban, estimation is optional. Some teams choose to estimate their work to have more predictability while others prefer to split their cards such that each of the cards is of the same size.

 

  • With Scrum, the most popular metrics are sprint burndown and velocity. Other useful metrics are release burndown, release burnup, and sprint burnup. The most popular Kanban metrics is cycle time. Metrics such as lead time, throughput, cummulative flow diagram (CFD), and control charts are also leveraged.

 

  • Kanban has more flexibility than Scrum as new work items can be added to the workflow at any time. 

 

  • Scrum prescribes ceremonies to be conducted on a regular cadence. For instance, the sprint planning ceremony must be conducted at the start of each sprint. Sprint review and retrospective ceremonies must be conducted at the end of each sprint. In addition, the daily stand-up must be conducted each day of the sprint. However, Kanban does not prescribe any cadence or ceremonies to be conducted. In Kanban, meetings are held as needed.

 

  • With Scrum, additional or new user stories should not be added to the active or an ongoing sprint. However, in Kanban, new work items or cards can be added anytime, provided the WIP (Work-In-Progress) limit hasn't reached yet.

 

  • In Scrum, the sprint backlog is reset after every sprint. However, the Kanban board is continuous.

 

  • To adopt Scrum, enterprises need to develop an agile mindset. Scrum requires a considerable change to the existing organizational structure and processes. As a result, leaders invest into Scrum training and create new roles or positions to build the best Scrum teams. On the contrary, Kanban does not require any significant changes to onboard onto this framework.

 

Now that you understand the differences between the two frameworks, you can decide which approach works best for your team. For more on Agile, Lean, Scrum, or Kanban, you may read below books:

5 Habits that Successful Leaders Have

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Whether you are a business leader, an engineering lead, an entrepreneur, or an individual contributor, you might have noticed some common behaviors in people who lead. In this article, I will list down the 5 habits that successful leaders have in common.

 

  • Having a Positive Mindset

Great leaders have a positive mindset and they radiate positive energy to others. They strongly believe that they are they are confident, successful, and loved. Successful leaders read inspirational books, listen to motivational speakers, attend personal development workshops, and surround themselves with positive like-minded people. They hire right people on their teams, who not only have the right skills but also possess a positive mindset. Such positive minded people are self-motivated to perform at their best.

Check out the inspirational book, Think Positive, Speak Positive, Act Positive - A 3 Step Strategy to Embrace Positivity and Change Your Life.

 

  • Communicating Effectively

Effective communication is vital to the success of an organization. In 1938, Chester Barnard, the author of pioneering work in management theory and organizational studies, concluded that effective communication is the most important responsibility of leaders. Leaders listen effectively and encourage their team members to provide feedback. They keep an open mind, encourage collaboration, and promote consensus.

 

  • Empowering Others

Great leaders with a positive mindset empower the team. They target to create more leaders than followers.

The best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution, Bill Gates stated, “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”

Leaders inspire their team, appreciate their work, help their team members to grow their visibility, connect them with right opportunities, and encourage them to fulfill their dreams. One of the richest American and successful industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, once said, “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.”

 

  • Continuous Learning

Great leaders always look forward to read inspirational books, listen to motivational speakers, read the autobiographies of other great leaders, and learn from successful self-development coaches. They often listen to audiobooks while driving to work. Leaders set aside some percentage of their earnings to invest in their learning. John F. Kennedy once stated, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”

 

  • Networking

Successful leaders spend their time and energy to build strong relationships with others. They like to connect with like-minded people. Leaders like to attend seminars, workshops, meetings, conferences, and any other public events not only to build their expertise but to meet new people who share their passion and purpose.

There’s a famous quote, “Birds of the same feather flock together.”

 

These are the 5 habits that successful leaders have. If you have noticed other such common habits, leave your comments below.

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