The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations

by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema

Overview

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive

To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.

The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving—they show you how it's really done.

• Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way
• Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose
• Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility
• Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules"
• Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever
• Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture

Great agile leaders aren't born that way—they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster.

"Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it."
—From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780137591510
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	07/05/2022
Series:	The Professional Scrum Series
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	7.03(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Ron Eringa is a Leadership Developer. His mission is to create organizations where people love to work and where real customer value is created. In the last 20 years he has built expertise on how to lead IT organizations that use Agile and Scrum. After an initial education in electrical engineering and software engineering he ended up in different leadership roles. In these roles he discovered the leadership capabilities that are essential to create autonomous teams with a high level of maturity and creativity. He believes that autonomous teams are the fundament of a modern organization that thrives in this complex and ever-changing world.

Kurt Bittner has been delivering working products in short, feedback-driven cycles for nearly 40 years, and has helped many organizations do the same. He is particularly interested in helping people form strong, self-organizing, high-performance teams that deliver solutions that customers love, and helping organizations use empirical feedback to achieve customer outcome-focused goals. He is an author or editor of many books on agile product development, including Mastering Professional Scrum, The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum, The Professional Scrum Team, and Professional Agile Leadership, as well as The Guide to Evidence-Based Management, and The Nexus Guide. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Laurens Bonnema is an Agile Trainer and Management Consultant and a mentor to leaders creating resilient organizations at any scale. He has a strong background in IT with experience in almost every role. As a Professional Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Certified Agile Master, Agile Master Assessor, IPMA Agile Assessor, and PRINCE2 Practitioner, Laurens strives to merge classic and agile management in the conviction that it is the future of professional management. As a Professional Scrum Trainer and SAFe Program Consultant, he helps to improve the profession of software delivery as well as marketing, human resources, and finance. Laurens brings his experience in enterprise IT since 1999 and on Scrum Teams since 2006 to his teaching, is a driving force in the agile community, and a sought-after speaker at conferences and events.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Preface xv

Introduction xvii

Acknowledgments xxv

About the Authors xxvii

Chapter 1 An Organization at a Crossroads 1

Complex Challenges Create Urgency for Agility 3

Reducing Dependencies Makes Change Possible 4

Not Everyone May Need to Change, at Least at First 6

Not Everyone Sees Complexity the Same Way 9

Organizational Change Requires Protective, Progressive Dictatorship 10

Two Paths, One Goal 12

Reflections on the Journey 15

Chapter 2 Forming Teams and Discovering Purpose 17

Changing the Organization, One Team at a Time 18

Finding the Right People 22

Empowering Teams 26

Placing the Customer at the Center of the Change 29

Turning Customer Needs into Team Purpose 33

Reflections on the Journey 35

Chapter 3 Shifting from Output to Impact 37

"What Gets Measured Gets Done" 38

Measurement Challenges 39

Goals Are the Solution, and Sometimes the Problem 41

Leadership, Measurement, and Engagement 44

Organizational Culture and Transparency 46

Balancing Internal and External Focus of Goals over Time 48

Goals and Measures at All Levels 50

Reflections on the Journey 53

Chapter 4 Learning to Let Go 55

Empowerment Doesn't Come for Free 56

Agile Leaders Help Teams to Grow Their Ability to Reach Audacious Goals 60

Achieving Balance Between the Visible and Invisible 63

Letting Go in Small Steps 65

Empowerment Strategies 67

Slow Decision-Making Kills Team Self-Management 69

When You Discover That You're the Bottleneck, Get Out of the Way 70

Decision Latency Can Be Caused by Cross-Team Dependencies 71

Teams Can Also Cause Their Own Decision Latency 72

Reflections on the Journey 73

Chapter 5 The Predictable Existential Crisis 75

New Ways of Working Threaten the Old System 76

Changing the System to Reward Empowering Others 80

Replacing Career Paths with Individual Skill Portfolios 89

Replacing False Certainty with True Transparency 92

Learning to Trust Bottom-Up Intelligence 94

Reflections on the Journey 97

Chapter 6 Leaders, Everywhere 99

Nurturing and Growing an Agile Organization 100

Organizational Silos Impede Agility and Productivity 106

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Productivity, but Still Need Support 107

Specialist "Downtime" Can Be Used to Improve Team Effectiveness 108

Specialists Work Primarily as Teachers, Coaches, and Mentors, Not "Doers" 110

Leadership Journeys: Developing Leaders Everywhere 110

Reward Building Teams and Leadership, Not Silos 114

Promotional Rewards Lock in Organizational Structures 117

Performance Reviews Don't Go Away, but They Do Change Dramatically 118

Collecting Feedback with a Questionnaire Through an App 119

Reflections on the Journey 122

Chapter 7 Aligning the Organization 123

Evolving the Operating Model 124

Be Direct and Clear About the Change 126

Growing Self-Managing Teams Organically 128

What to Do When Teams Become Too Large 129

Scale Agility by Removing Dependencies 131

Consolidating Support and Eliminating Opposition 132

Expect, Embrace, and Encourage Attrition 133

Be Mindful of Leadership Styles, and Act Accordingly 135

But Beware Unwanted Attrition 136

Sometimes Your Greatest Critic Can Become Your Biggest Ally 137

Silent Subversion Is Worse Than Open Opposition 138

What if Senior Executives Are the Problem? 139

Realign Compensation Plans 140

Realign Career Paths 141

Embrace Catalytic Leadership 142

Replace Status Meetings with Transparency 143

Be Realistic About How Long the Transition Will Take, and What It Means 146

Reflections on the Journey 147

Chapter 8 Aligning the Culture 149

What Makes Changing Culture Hard 150

Agile Leaders Must First Find Their Own Way 152

Build Bridges to the New Culture 153

Don't Criticize the Past, Just Move Ahead 155

Build Psychological Safety Through Radical Transparency 155

Share Success but Take the Blame When Necessary 158

Anticipate and Overcome Setbacks 159

Every Organization Carries Baggage; Moving Ahead Means Leaving It Behind 159

Recognize That High-Performing Teams Are Fragile, and Protect Them 161

Even the Best Teams Lose Their Focus, Sometimes 161

Use "Self-Sustenance" as a Measure of Success 162

Success: When the New Has Become the Default 163

Plan for Succession 164

Agile Journeys Never Really End 165

Looking Back at the Agile Leader's Journey 166

Reflections on the Journey 168

Appendix A Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Effective Leadership 169

Appendix B Doreen's Sketchnotes 171

Index 173