Agile Consulting Experts, Zen Ex Machina, Discuss What it Means to be an Agile Leader in the 21st Century.
SYDNEY, July 31, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In the midst of the 21st century, businesses face an array of challenges: whether its disruptions at home or worldwide competition. Agile frameworks aim to drive innovation in complex environments to deliver greater value to customers and support executives to pivot to rapid changes in customers' needs, expectations, and market disruption.
What does it take to lead these agile ways of working? With the proper mindset, training, and actions to support cultural change, anyone can be a great agile leader.
Agile consulting experts, Zen Ex Machina, discuss what it means to be an Agile Leader in the 21st century:
You should lead by example. When looking at evolving toward a contemporary work environment focused on value and the customer, leadership must be central. Agile Leaders exemplify the actions and behaviours they expect in their teams by enacting it themselves. The higher the level of agile leadership, the stronger their organisation's capability to progress towards true business agility. Choosing a framework like Scrum to manage executive-level work – from risks and strategic impediments, to prioritising the commissioning future work – is key.
When the C-Suite employ agile ways of working their focus is on managing and relentlessly improving the system of work. This enables others to self-organise within those boundaries to optimise quality, delivery and adapt to change.
Focus on managing the system not the people involved. It is important for Agile Leaders not to micromanage and focus on the system as a whole. Agile Leaders should focus on the bigger picture rather than individual problems. You should be focusing on creating an open environment for your team, one that facilitates success. Your team should be able to understand your goals and be given the boundaries needed to produce outcomes that align to expectations. Although agile is meant to be self-organising, it is not meant to be self-managing. This means you must manage your environment so your team feels supported to succeed.
Understand the culture and create psychological safety. Agile often clashes with more traditional forms of management. These systems of work typically require people to wait to be told what to do, and tend to silence those who discover problems with the system. This behaviour stifles speaking up and people innovating to solve these issues themselves. These behaviours can be reversed, however, through creating psychological safety. Psychological safety in the workplace can be achieved through openness, conscientiousness and ethical leadership. An Agile Leader's goal is to create psychological safety so that workers feel safe to raise issues, safe to problem solve and innovate in the face of change.
Agile Leadership Coaching and Training. Zen Ex Machina has been coaching and training leaders in an executive Agile mindset for a decade. Experienced Agile trainers can help coach leaders through adopting systems thinking approach to their strategic initiatives and programs and how to make the best use of agile principles for executive decision-making.
About Zen Ex Machina:
Zen Ex Machina is a leading global agile transformation company in Canberra, Australia. Our entire purpose is to help executives transform the way their entire organisation operates, so they become more productive, and more responsive to changing market, customer and stakeholder needs though smarter ways of working. Combining unmatched practical agile experience that spans almost two decades, Zen Ex Machina's consultants work as catalysts to the cultural change that agile demands, combining executive mentoring, change leadership, and agile coaching and training, to embed helps teams, complex programs, and whole organisations, to nimbly adjust to and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
SOURCE Zen Ex Machina
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