Agile Leadership Toolkit: Learning to Thrive with Self-Managing Teams

by Peter Koning

Overview

Practical, Proven Tools for Leading and Empowering High-Performing Agile Teams

A leader is like a farmer, who doesn’t grow crops by pulling them but instead creates the perfect environment for the crops to grow and thrive.

If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well.

In Agile Leadership Toolkit, longtime agile leader Peter Koning provides a practical and invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams. Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services. Koning thoughtfully explains how to lead agile teams at large scale and how team members fit into both the team and the wider organization.

• Architect environments that help teams learn, grow, and flourish for the long term
• Get timely feedback everyone can use to improve
• Co-create goals focused on the customer, not the internal organization
• Help teams brainstorm and visualize the value of their work to the customer
• Facilitate team ownership and accelerate team learning
• Support culture change, and design healthier team habits
• Make bigger changes faster

This actionable guide is for leaders at all levels—whether you’re supervising your first agile team, responsible for multiple teams, or lead the entire company.
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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780135225134
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	08/21/2019
Series:	The Professional Scrum Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Peter Koning is an author, speaker, and senior consultant who has more than fifteen years of experience as an agile leader. He has led several agile departments and improved the agile way of working at different companies. He has coached, mentored, and trained dozens of agile leadership teams. Through his work, he has developed and refined a concrete and cohesive toolkit for agile leaders. He also founded his own company: Re-Lead (https://re-lead.co/en/), where he works to refresh, redefine, and reinvent leadership.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxiii
About the Author xxv

Part 1: Co-Create Goals 1
1.1 How Do You Set the Right Goals? 3
1.2 How Do You Find the Right KVIs? 13
1.3 How to Visualize the Customer Impact? 23
Summary of Part 1–Co-Create Goals 31

Part 2: Facilitate Ownership 37
2.1 When Do Teams Take Ownership? 39
2.2 When Is Intervening the Best Strategy, and When Is Letting Go Better? 49
2.3 How Mature Is My Team? 57
2.4 How Do Typical Teams Grow? 63
2.5 How Can the Borders Be Aligned with the Maturity? 69
2.6 When Does the Ownership Model Work and When Does It Not? 77
Summary of Part 2–Facilitate Ownership 81

Part 3: Learn Faster 89
3.1 How Do You Know Your Teams Are Doing the Right Things? 91
3.2 How Quickly Do My Teams Learn from Users? 101
3.3 How Can the Learning Loop Be Put into Practice? 109
3.4 How Can Teams Implement Big Ideas in Small Steps? 117
3.5 Minimize the Blast Radius 127
Summary of Part 3–Learn Faster 131

Part 4: Design Healthy Habits 137
4.1 How Do You Stimulate an Agile Culture? 139
4.2 How Do You Design Healthy Habits? 153
4.3 Can You Anchor the Cultural Improvement? 165
4.4 What Is a Healthy Habit to Implement Improvements? 171
Summary of Part 4–Design Healthy Habits 187

The Agile Leader as Culture Leader 189
Concrete Questions 189
After Reading This Book 193
Why a New Toolkit? 194
Agile Leadership Toolkit 195

Index 199