Tips for Agile Leadership
Welcome to Tips for Agile Leadership, designed to help you accelerate your Leader, Manager or Project Manager’s career.
These Agile Leadership Tips help managers apply and adopt Agile Principles, reducing stress, improving throughput, and positively impacting your organization’s results.
These Agile leadership tips come directly from what we have learned while delivering our 6-Month Agile Delivery Accelerator Team and Managers Program.
The Tips are designed to be relevant, practical, and actionable, we suggest you apply one Tip in your work each week, allowing you to understand and refine the Tip and the associated principle.
Agile Leadership Focus
The core idea behind the Tips is to focus on Agile Principle Base Leadership over practices. Once learned, principles will equip you and your Team to make decisions quickly and with lower leadership involvement. It will also allow decisions to be made by people closer to the problem or situation involved, reducing friction and accelerating decision-making and time to market.
Decisions are consistent with Lean-Agile principles. Once you and your Team learn these principles, decision-making based on the agile principle becomes repeatable.
There are five Lean Principles
- Deliver Value
- Just In Time
- Build in Quality
- Respect for People
- Standardization and Stability
52 Agile Leadership Tips Index
Agile Leadership Lesson #1 - Agile Leadership Is About Being Principle Based
Change is difficult
Agile Leadership Lesson #2 - Five Things To Improve Time To Market
Leveraging your leadership to be working and thinking in an Agile approach can increase your time to market, and it’s not that difficult. Over the years of consulting, we have boiled how into “Do these five things to increase time to market.” Of course, we likely should say “time to value,” but that is another conversation!
Tip #3 - Small Batches Improve Flow And Time To Market
This Lesson explains why small batch size is a fundamental concept to accelerating delivery and explains the quote: “Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control “– Dr. Eli Goldratt.
Tip #4 - How Small Batch Size Accelerate Delivery
This Agile Leadership Tip explains why small batch size is fundamental to accelerating delivery. It explains the quote: “Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control “– Dr. Eli Goldratt.
Tip #5 - Minimum Business Increment, How Its Different Than MVP
The concept of the Minimal Business Increment is powerful in Agile Project Management in that it helps to prioritize the highest value delivered in the fastest time.
Tip #6 - Minimum Business Increment Template
This weeks lesson continues from last weeks MBI or Minium Business Increment session and provides a template to practice in your environment.
An MBI is the minimum business value that can be created and delivered to the business, its purpose is to speed up time to market.
Tip #7 - Collaborative Leadership
Effective Agile Leaders are collaborative by nature or work hard to support collaboration and, therefore, align with the Agile Manifesto. This Tip was inspired by Pollyanna Pixton’s book “Collaborative Leadership” and ties to two principles of the Agile Manifesto.
Tip #8 - You must have a Cross-functional Team
For agile to work at all you have to have a cross-functional collaborative Team. Without that you are really going to struggle.
Tip #9 - Respect and Support the Team
Agile Leadership is based on Servant Leader, which means providing the Team with what they need to be successful. Yes, you need to provide direction, particularly during Sprint Planning, but after that, your role is one of supporting and removing organizational obstacles. Your focus needs to be on helping the Team succeed. It’s not about you. It’s about the Team.
Click here to read Agile Leadership Tip #9 – Respect the Team.
Tip #10 - Internal and External Customer Engagement
Agile Project Management and Leadership is a lot about managing Stakeholders or in agile what we call customers. This Lesson and Case Study is about how to use Internal Customer (Stakeholder) management to accelerate time to market.
Click here to read Agile Leadership Tip #10 – Internal and External Customer Engagement
Tip #11 - Continuous Improvement to Accelerate Delivery
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet is about how one of our customers used the Agile Manifesto to design their own version of Scrum to accelerate delivery.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #11 – Continuous Improvement to Accelerate Delivery
Tip #12 - Three Characteristics of High-Performance Teams
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet looks at the three important pieces of data you can encourage to build high-performing Teams.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #12 – Three Characteristic of High-Performance Teams
Tip #13 - Respect the Team
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet discusses the need to respect the Team enough to pass decision-making authority to them. Basically, trust them, manage the flow of work and don’t be the bottleneck.
Tip #14 - Leaders role in Definition of Ready
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet is about the leader’s role in the definition of ready. The Team owns the DoR, we all understand that, but your role is to help and ensure they have one.
Once the Definition of Ready has been established, you need to help the Team achieve the ready state.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #14 – Your Role in Definition of Ready
Tip #15 - How Psychological Safety helps accelerate Time to Market
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet discusses psychological safety and its role in accelerating time to market, revenue and profit.
In some ways, it is counterintuitive that backing off and not micro-managing would help, but in fact, according to a study from Google which is referenced in this Tip, it does. Mistakes that are small and allowed build the Team’s confidence and skill set, which leads to engagement and ultimately innovation. It starts with the principle of psychological safety.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #15 – Psychological Safety
Tip #16 - If you don't complete the Storming Phase, maybe it is time to reconfigure the Team
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet was very controversial for our consulting Team, and we got in the weeds about the Tuckman Model, whether was it still valid etc.
But the core idea is if the Team doesn’t really agree, then they will never be a “Team,” and performance will suffer.
I was in a meeting with one of our clients who said, “if you don’t believe in this project you should not be on it”, harsh words, but then said, “there are a lot of other things you can be doing here”. So, their jobs were not at risk, but he wanted people who were interested in success to be involved.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #16 – If the Team does not agree it won’t be Team.
Tip #17 - How Servant Leadership helps accelerate time to market
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet discusses the need for Servant Leadership and how if done properly this one skill can accelerate time to market.
You need to be a Servant Leader. You can’t scale without it.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #17 – Servant Leadership
Tip #18 - Servant Lead Case Study
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet follows Tip #17 with an interesting case study on Servant Leadership in action and how it impacted an organization’s time to market. This example cut the time to market from 18 months to 6.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #18 – Servant Leadership case study
Tip #19 - Servant Leadership to boost your career or bust it?
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet discusses the career impact of two managers, one who was a servant leader and the other who was not. The point of this tip is to show the impact being a servant leader can have on your career.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #19 – Servant Leader – Career Booter or Buster?
Tip #20 - Value Streams!
This Agile Leadership Course Snippet is about the trendy topic of Value Streams and Management.
No doubt a controversial idea to put the word “management” in the Value Stream description when some agilist say that Value Streams should be “self-managed”.
This Tip is a basic introduction to the leader’s role in the Value Stream with a link to how to do Value Stream Mapping.
Tip #21 - How Agile Executives Should Engage Their Teams
As an Agile Executive, you will face what may seem like many issues. This Tip is a case study from a client of ours who lost half of their Team because they forced a new toxic team member to join their Team.
Notice we called it ‘their team; this Tip gives ideas on how to handle adding or replacing Team members from an executive perspective.
Click here to read Agile Leader Tip #21 – Executive Agile Leadership Team Engagement.