What is an Agile Leader?

What skills should an agile leader possess?

Agile Leaders are also aware that there is no one-size-fits-all leadership style. One can be in a traditional leadership role i.e. have people and teams reporting to them. One can also be in a non-traditional leadership role such as a Scrum Master or a Product Owner. Hence they constantly grow their leadership toolkit and practice the application so that they can demonstrate leadership agility in various contexts.

In addition to many traditional leadership skills such as being a good communicator, problem solver, and conflict navigator, Agile Leaders need to possess a lot of self- and situational awareness so that they realize and know when to apply what type of leadership.

Further, they also need to embrace uncertainty and with that a growth mindset in order to continuously grow as leaders and continuously grow other people within the organization.

In addition to skills, they tend to demonstrate the following characteristics:

• Care about their people and the organization
• Commitment to their organization, but also commitment to specific initiatives
• Curiosity to learn new things about customers, markets, and their own organization
• Creativity i.e. the ability to come up with new ideas in terms of what to do and how to do it
• Courage to follow their curiosity and try new things
• Competence as leaders, and in various fields that they might be responsible for
• Clarity in terms of where to go as an organization or a team and in terms of how they communicate that clarity to others
• Consistency in the way they act especially according to the values they want to establish within the organization

What is NOT an Agile Leader?

Putting Agile Leader on their business card or their LinkedIn profile does not make someone an Agile Leader. As with other skills in life leadership - and with that also Agile Leadership - needs to be practiced, needs to be learned.

A leader that has no clarity on where the organization should go, hence changes their mind all the time, can call themselves “agile”, but that is not what we mean with agile leadership.

A leader that uses a command-and-control approach to demonstrate their own decisiveness and vision is not necessarily an agile leader, because they do not allow for other leaders to grow within their organization.

A leader that delegates everything and considers themselves to just be a coach, hence is not willing to take responsibility for the important initiatives within the organization, is a coach, but not an agile leader.

We guess, you get the point. Rather than focusing on what agile leadership is not, we’d like to focus on what agile leadership is.

Without clarity most probably all of their well-intentioned decisions will be wrong. Second, teams need to be trusted to make decisions so that they can build things faster and learn faster. An agile leader gives trust and helps the team to win other stakeholders’ trust as well. Last but not least, an agile leader helps to remove impediments.

For the organization, agile leaders constantly work on making the organization not only fit for the future but also fit for today. They challenge existing structures, policies, and metrics and through that help refine and reinvent the organization’s operating system so that it allows the organization to deliver better products and services in continuously better ways.