What is agile leadership - and what does it mean for you as a leader?

Claus Elmholdt, Laust Søndertoft Pedersen and Mette Tange Vestergaard

Agile ways of organizing and working have become commonplace in most organizations. In some places as the primary form of organization and work, but in many places in conjunction with more classic hierarchical forms of organization. There are two major ideals and driving forces at play in this development. Roughly speaking, you could call them "the functionalist" and "the humanist". The functionalist ideal is about the fact that both private and public companies today face demands and expectations for a high rate of change and development in order to deliver products and services that are based on the needs and expectations of customers and citizens. The humanistic ideal is about well-being, psychological work environment and an increasing expectation of less hierarchy and more influence and flexibility in work (Grant & Russell, 2020). Agile ways of organizing and working have great potential to promote both functionalist and humanist ideals. There is a strong focus on working in new ways, embracing agile values and principles and implementing Scrum or SAFe - to name a few. Agile ways of working and practices are often in place, but agile leadership is lagging behind. What is agile leadership? And what does it mean for you as a leader? The research and practice literature provides little concrete guidance (Theobald et. al. 2020). Basically, agile leadership can be divided into three elements.

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1. Leading the agile values and principles

As a leader in an agile context, it's essential that you understand, promote and lead on agile values and principles. This means focusing more on collaboration, managing change and creating value early and continuously - and less on control, extensive documentation and sticking to a plan. To succeed as an agile leader, you also need to trust that the task will get done when employees and teams are given the right environment and mandates to get the job done (Theobald et. al. 2020).

The leader diagnoses the culture

One of the most useful tools for diagnosing an organizational culture is the OCAI, which stands for Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument. OCAI is based on the Competing Values Framework theory. So let's start with that.

The Competing Values Framework serves as a basic framework of understanding and points out that all organizations are faced with conflicting values and logics. Leadership therefore becomes a balancing act of navigating paradoxes and cross-pressures. Everyday life for leaders is not either-or, but always a balancing act between both-and. The theory helps to understand how to balance operations and development, relationships and results.

As a model, the Competing Values Framework is built around two axes. The vertical axis illustrates a continuum from 'Flexible' to 'Focused' and the horizontal axis from 'Inward-looking' to 'Outward-looking'. In total, there are four fields that are in opposition to each other in pairs, but at the same time, they are each other's prerequisites. As a leader, you need to meet organizational needs at both ends of the axes.

The way to deal with these conflicting demands is paradox management. Theoretically based on the Competing Values Framework, it's an approach where the leader navigates the competing values and needs that every organization holds. The goal is to become aware of what the organization assigns attention to and to develop a desired practice (and culture) for each of the four fields. By integrating conflicting considerations and consciously dialing up and down different categories of values and practices, leaders can increase the chances of developing a thriving culture.

Agile leadership is about constant value creation

Agile leadership includes different roles; some are responsible for process, others for product, deliverables or skills development. But how else can you understand what agile leadership is? If we look towards the agile manifesto - and especially the underlying agile principles, we see indications of what leaders need to succeed at: "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done."

Leadership is therefore about trusting that tasks will get done when employees and teams are given the right environment and mandates to do them. Leadership here is about supporting, engaging and motivating employees and teams. Often the focus is on doing agile, while being agile is often overlooked or washed out by the existing culture. The agile leader must focus on promoting an agile culture. This is done by strategically targeting the development of the following characteristics:

Create opportunities and remove obstacles for the team
Trust autonomous teams or networks of teams to deliver
Coordinate work through structured iterative processes based on the customer
Transparency and continuous improvement in products, services and working methods.

Agile leadership includes a high degree of distributed decision-making power to different roles, while all leaders are role models for living the agile principles and mindset. Leadership is very much about helping each other to perform together towards common goals that create value for the user or customer (Modi & Strode, 2020).

2. Agilely adapt your leadership to the circumstances

The second element of agile leadership is about adapting your leadership to the task at hand, which is a necessary skill to succeed as a leader. Today and in the future. As an agile leader, you need to adapt your approach to leadership quickly, easily and flexibly. You must also have the ability and courage to read and respond to changing circumstances with a broad action and leadership repertoire(E-book: Agile leadership - balancing the ability to both support and take control). You need to be able to use opposing leadership approaches, regardless of personal preferences. It is therefore important to be aware of your own leadership style and preferences, including how your leadership can support agile teams and how your own behavior can inhibit or promote trust and collaboration.

Both-and, not either-or!

In order to succeed with more agile ways of organizing and working, management literature has turned in a direction where the supportive and liberating leader is gaining ground. This type of leader has a clear ambition to unleash the power of innovation and leadership, use as little power and control as possible and generally distance themselves from the idea of the leader as micro-manager. The leadership style is often described as servant leadership or the leader's ability to build self-managing employees and self-organizing teams (Modi & Strode, 2020).

However, research suggests that just as the pure micro-manager creates toxic, unproductive and demotivating workplaces, the purely supportive leader can create ambiguity, a lack of direction and a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities. Research shows that effective leadership today is not about swinging the pendulum from the fully controlling to the fully supportive, but rather about mastering the ability to balance control with support, depending on the task and context. Research also shows that as the world becomes more complex, unpredictable and changeable, the demands on leaders to flexibly adjust their leadership to the context in which they lead increases (Kaiser & Overfield, 2011; Kaiser 2020).

The agile leader is able to adapt to the changing nature and needs of the environment, tasks and context of the organization. Agile leadership is about the ability to provide versatile and effective leadership with a well-developed awareness of personal preferences. The agile and versatile leader has the capacity to read what the situation calls for and adapts their leadership to the very different demands of the outside world and, not least, the task at hand in order to create value.

3. Leadership happens through direction, coordination and commitment

The final element of agile leadership is that leadership happens through direction, coordination and commitment. Leadership in an agile context is distributed across multiple formal and informal leaders (e.g. Scrum Masters and Product Owners) and largely distributed to the self-organized team. If you want to create leadership across all these actors, you as a leader have a special responsibility to ensure that direction, coordination and commitment are created. In other words, it's not about focusing on who is doing the leading, but rather on how leadership is produced together. In short, leadership in an agile context occurs when people working together in teams create direction, coordination and commitment. This may or may not include formal leaders (Drath et. al. 2008).

An organization filled with leadership

The traditional understanding of leadership as a trinity of leader, follower and shared goals is not applicable to understanding agile leadership. We must therefore look for other understandings of leadership. Drath et.al's (2008) understanding of direction, coordination and commitment suggests that leadership emerges in reciprocal social relationships where the group collectively creates leadership by ensuring that there is:

Course: create a common course and direction for the team, area or organization
Coordination: coordin ate the many efforts so that they all pull in the same direction
Commitment: create community and a committed practice among everyone in the organization.

Shared direction, coordination and commitment are agile values, and agile practice is characterized by jointly committing to shared priorities and plans within and between teams. Agile teams typically create new goals for each iteration, and in scaled agile frameworks, many teams plan together by holding big room planning ceremonies. The planning concludes with joint consensus sessions (often called confidence votes) where everyone commits to the plans and goals they have set themselves.

The traditional leadership role is based on the belief that one person (i.e. the leader) has the overview and is therefore in control. In the ideal agile world, that control is replaced by transparency. This is seen through, for example, shared systematized and prioritized task overviews (often called backlogs) within and between teams. When we are transparent together with prioritization of tasks and progress on tasks, we are in control together - and therefore have a shared responsibility for progress as well as managing risks. Leadership in an agile context is thus more about dialog and meaning-making. Leadership is therefore not something you are or have, but something you must continuously produce together in your organization to achieve results.

Agile leadership is about promoting and leading based on agile values and principles. This is the foundation, but it requires you to flexibly adapt your leadership style to the task at hand. Finally, you have a special responsibility to promote the possibility of collaborative leadership by creating direction, coordination and commitment.

Demand for the agile leader

Agile and quick adaptation to changing challenges is increasingly a competitive parameter. This has led many organizations to implement agile ways of organizing and working that create value by following customer needs. This means, among other things, that decision-making power and competence is pushed downwards and outwards in the organization to a much greater extent. However, most organizations are still hierarchically organized, but with areas or units that work according to agile values, methods and practices. In practice, this means that agile leaders must be able to navigate internally and across the hierarchical and agile organizational forms - with an eye towards adapting their own leadership style to the circumstances and creating a common direction, coordination and commitment. This places great demands on the development of the leader's reflexivity and self-awareness - you must be able to both read the landscape and be able to read and regulate your own emotions and behavior in relation to it.

Sources

Drath, W. H, Cynthia D., McCauley, C. J,. Palus, E. V.V. , Patricia M.G, O'Connor, J. B. M. (2008). Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership. Elvevier. Leadership Quarterly.
Grant, C. & Rusell, E. (2020). Agile Working and Well-Being in the Digital Age. Palgrave MacMillan.
Kaiser, R. B. (2020), "Leading in an unprecedented global crisis: the heightened importance of versatility". Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Vol. 72
Kaiser, R.B., &. Overfield, D. V. (2011). Strengths, strengths overused, and lopsided leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal Practice and Research.
Modi, S., & Strode, D. (2020). Leadership in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review. ACIS 2020 Proceedings. 55.
Theobald, S., Prenner, N., Krieg, A., Schneider, K. (2020). Agile Leadership and Agile Management on Organizational Level - A Systematic Literature Review. Springer Nature Switzerland.

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