Part of me was hesitant to write this as there are as many versions of an Agile leadership model (both capital and small a) as there are ways to implement Agile development or operations. These also vary in quality and meaningfulness, and some seem to be a new cover to old theory.
However, recently I saw the following infographic on LinkedIn and it got me thinking:
When I think about how I am and how I want to be as a leader and as a professional, many of my core behaviors and philosophies align closely with this model. I would say to overlook the quotes as some of them I find a bit problematic, but let’s look for a minute at the content.
- Quick Thinking Mastery
- Diverse-Decision-Making
- Continuous Learning
- Collaborative Action
- Strategic Problem-Solving
- Emotional Intelligence
- Reflective Leadership
I see these as critical for my leadership, and also for any leadership for whom I am to work. They are remarkably descriptive of my own long term approach. However I also see these as as qualities to develop within your teams at all levels. As I think about my most recent positions, I can see points where I, my partners, and my managers used some if not all of these as unspoken core values and worked to teach and value practices that allowed, encouraged, and empowered these.
I want to explore each of these items in future posts, but my first thought is that leadership needs to model these adaptive traits, but then also imbue these into your teams as values, skills, behaviors. If we as leaders are folowing a leadership agility model, but we are not also valuing it in our team than several things are going on: 1) diverse decision making will be less effective because people with important perspectives will not know how to engage, 2) you run the risk of building a non-adaptive org where only the leader can drive agility, which wastes talent. 3) we’re not adopting the spirit of agility and facile, adaptive organizations, we’re only valuing, centering, and developing ourselves. And this will lead to failure.
Your team – your partners, the org under you, your peers – are your success and you are a big piece of theirs. If you have read more here or on social media, you have heard this before – it’s our responsibility to create an environment where there are strong, growing professionals. These concepts let us do that while also creating maximum ability to deliver and succeed in our own orgs. People who can model the behaviors listed above will be better partners to business, better technologists, and better at successful execution — all in a place where they know they are trusted to succeed — and to make learning mistakes while being supported.