In these rapidly changing business environments, agility has been the key to success. An organization with more agility can adapt better to market changes and offer value faster to customers while building a culture of innovation.

From a viewpoint of planning and execution, building an agile organization from the ground up means first assessing the current state, defining a vision and roadmap, fostering an agile culture, implementing agile practices, and continuous measurement and adaptation.

Agile leadership serves as the backbone for such a transformation—a leadership style with flexibility, collaboration, and adaptability placed at its center.

(Source: agile leadership journey)

According to a McKinsey study, if agile transformation is completed successfully, companies can boost their financial performance by up to 20-30%.

Here, in this blog, we outline how an organization could be made agile right from its root and how it could bridge the gap between agile managament and execution in reality: from assessing the present state to implementing agile practices and measuring progress.

Do You Know? The term “agile leadership” first emerged in Jurgen Appelo’s book titled “Management 3.0,” back in the year 2011.

Agile Leadership: Defining the Future of Management

Agile stewardship is thus a management style based on flexibility, collaboration, and adaptability. It is derived from agile methodologies that emanated first from the software development industry but later found applications in many other industries.

Agile Leaders Focus on

• Empower your teams to make decisions and own their work.
• Removing Obstacles to Progress and Productivity
• Building a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

(Source: businessman)

DO YOU KNOW? A study has shown that 75% of today’s S&P 500 companies will no longer exist by the year 2027 if they do not use agile practices and make relevant changes in their business markets.

Step-by-Step Creating an Agile Organization from the Ground Up

Step 1: Assess Your Current State

You must understand the current state with respect to all these facets before getting into this agility journey. In other words, you need to have a clear understanding regarding the current state of:

(Source: McKinsey)

Organizations that accurately assess their current state before the implementation of agile practices are 40% more likely to succeed in their transformation efforts.

• Leadership Style Assessment: You need to identify which of the current leadership practices are, as of now, aligned with the principles of agility. You can use Agile Leadership Assessment to find out how ready your leadership team is to enable this transition.
• Analyze Team Dynamics: Understand how teams are working now in terms of their practices in collaboration and decision-making. This is a source of what you should be trying to change.
• Collecting Feedback: Reception via surveys or interviews to acquire knowledge from employees about their past and present experiences and impressions aligned with the current organizational culture.

Step 2: Set Your Vision and Goals

An important element in starting or planning to lead an agile transformation is a clear vision. This includes articulation of the following points:

(Source: Hbr)

• Purpose: Be clear on why agile practices must be adopted. This can be related to being more responsive to the customers, bringing more innovation, or improving the activity of teams.
• Set Goal: Clearly define intent-aligned specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. For example, achieve a 30% reduction in project delivery time using this initiative within the next year.

Step 3: Form an Agile Mentorship Team

For the leadership to fully take on board the work, and for them to be at par with the principles of agility, there needs to be an Agile Organization with a wanted result. This can be carried forward by

(Source: esparkinfo)

• Selection of Agile Leaders: Primarily, this is to look for individuals within the organization possessing agile mindset abilities and a commitment towards making the organizational culture go agile.
• Training: There should be applicable investment in training and developmental programs that equip the individual with agile management as a way of arming the individual. This may come through workshops and coaching that equip leaders with agile practices and metrics.
• Encourage Collaboration: Create such a platform by the leadership team where they can share their best practices with one another and learn through each other’s experiences. 

Step 4: Practices to be followed to build Agile Organizations

Building an agile organization is about practice. Some of the common practices can be enlisted as follows:

(Source: hbr)

• Introduce Agile Frameworks: Any framework related to supporting agility that can be introduced are Scrum, Kanban, and Lean principles that give structure to the way of working and increase collaboration within the teams.
• Cross-Functional Teams: Create teams with cross-functional representation; having people from various departments can bring divergent points of view and enrich problem solutions.
• Iterative Development: Foster the delivery of results in small phases; “sprints” is the term. That way, one can get feedback with greater frequency.

Step 5: Foster an Agile Culture

Culture is the heartbeat of a lasting transformation. It encompasses:

(Source: Gallup)

• Encourage open communication: Make sure that there is enough space for open communication through the lines where your workforce can share its ideas, feedback, and concerns without fearing the suppression of these.
• Improving continuous learning: Create a culture of experimentation and, therefore, failures in learning. Such moments should be articulated during normal reflection times, ideally during a retrospective when a team is reflecting on processes and the outcome generated. 
• Celebrate successes: Recognize and reward where a team or an individual has become successful in contributing to the changed practice—making behavior stick

Step 6: Measure Agile Success

One has to define the metrics that would finally be used to measure or monitor progress in agile practices. These will include the definition of agile leadership metrics, identification of leading KPIs depicting success in agile efforts, usually lead time, cycle time, team velocity, and customer satisfaction scores.

• Review of metrics: should take place periodically so that progress toward goals can be traced and course correction done in strategies.
• Feedback Collection: Feedback from team members and stakeholders will still be required to be understood, which has an impact due to agile practices and also for knowing the areas of improvement.

Step 7: Scale Agile Continuous Practices

After the agile practices had been well rooted, the next step was to continue and spread agile practices across the organization. Establish an Agile Leadership Network; an agile network of leaders has to be set up to share with one another the insights, challenges, and successes they should foster a community of practice.

(Source: scrumalliance)

DO YOU KNOW? Such companies can bring down their time to market by as much as 50% if they just focus on continuous improvement with agile methodologies.

• Scale Agile Across the Organization: Agile practices are incorporated into other teams and departments one by one; approaches are tailored as necessary to suit varying contexts.
• Continually Improving: Acquire a mindset whereby agility in itself is a continuous journey toward the vision, not an endpoint. Agile practices are reassessed and readapted continuously to improve based on a changing context.

By adopting an agile mindset, organizations will become more adaptable, responsive, and effective in this dynamic business environment with a step-by-step approach.

Björn Röber’s “Agile Transformation Report” reveals that half of the German companies are in the process of Agile transformation but only a few reach high agility. Most use SCRUM and SAFe frameworks, yet adherences are low and experienced practitioners are few, which makes high agility difficult.

Our Solution

Agile Leadership in Action with AITD

An agile organization demands a fundamental transformation in leadership style. It calls for a different set of skills and behaviors for agile leaders, who are supposed to steer efficiently through all the intricacies of a modern business environment.

Studies indicate that organizations with strong agile governance witness a 30% growth in project success rates and a 25% boost in employee satisfaction. From creating an agile culture to implementing agile practices and measuring progress, agile leaders help drive organizational success.

Want to grow in agile leadership skills? Let Amity Institute of Training and Development (AITD) help you with this. AITD conducts various programs and workshops for individuals and organizations to develop those competencies and mindsets that forecast success in the Agile world.

How can AITD help in developing your Agile Leadership skills?

1. Agile Leadership Assessment

AITD provides a comprehensive assessment that helps individuals and organizations recognize their strengths and areas for improvement in forward-thinking leadership.

2. Agile Leadership Coaching

AITD offers one-to-one coaching in developing leadership skills of individuals and working through their challenges.

3. Agile Leadership Workshops

AITD delivers interactive workshops covering a whole range of topics, such as agile metrics, agile leadership practices, and behaviors.

4. Agile Leadership Development Programs

In its comprehensive development programs, AITD will help individuals and organizations develop a strong foundation of agile management, right from defining down to developing an agile mindset.

Through investment in Agile Leadership Development by AITD, organizations can do the following:

• Sharpen their focus and accelerate responsiveness in complex and uncertain environments.
• To create a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, flexibility, and creativity among all levels of the organization.
• Enhance accomplishment and satisfaction for both the customer and the team by practicing leading agile practices.

Together with AITD, an organization could accelerate its Agile transformation and gain a culture of innovativeness and responsiveness. Through experience and guidance, leaders will foster the competencies and mindset to guide organizations to success in the ever-changing business world.