In this post, we turn to take a close look at the importance of strong change leadership in developing and delivering on Agile promises and ambitions in your organisation.
With so much being redefined across our economic and political landscapes, delivering Agile is more of a target range than an end state. It’s about:
Delivering Agile is really about preparing for the unknown – gearing up to be as responsive as possible to significant levels of disruption, which are already upon us, but also the future of which will continue to be highly uncertain. It is this, all- encompassing, nature of Agile which means it can no longer be the sole preserve of a select band of specialists in the organisation. Agile Change is everyone’s business, and its style, pace and expectations are best modelled and legitimised at the C-suite level to permeate all aspects of an organisation or change initiative. Organisations are increasingly seeking people with adaptive capabilities, but it takes adaptive change leadership to:
This is best illustrated by giving consideration to a change leadership example in practice.
A few years ago, Marc Benioff showed how this heightened collaboration could be achieved using social media at Salesforce. Employees had already been using Chatter extensively and many of the people with critical connections to customer knowledge were adding the most value but were not even known to the leadership team.
Benioff was keen on leading cultural change and for leaders to craft a new leadership style and cultural approach that would loosen control but meant they wouldn’t lose control. He built this around 4 key thrusts that are recurring themes in any analysis of successful Agile change approaches:
This is just one of a myriad of change leadership examples we could have selected but we feel it highlights some of the key issues at play.
Agile Change Leaders are the ones who can adapt – although we should caveat the fact that there are many good leaders in organizations who struggle to adapt and learn (especially from the failures) - and be ready for the next challenge.
And this is where agile with a small “a” and Agile with a big “A” collide: being agile is about taking decisions with (often) limited information but with a desire to experiment; expecting to use feedback from a varied audience; getting it wrong quickly and early, rather than failing spectacularly at the end.
These are the beliefs and the mindset that allow practice Agile change leadership behaviors to flourish.
Data from the Changefirst database highlights the global trend, based on responses from >5,000 change leaders as of January 2019. We place a strong emphasis on using people data to drive change decisions, and using people-centered tools to quickly gather, codify and extract meaning from the widest possible collaboration.
You can see the results below, from our Change Leader Assessment – the 3rd most popular of the change assessment tools available on Roadmap Pro – our digital change delivery platform.
As you can see, averages from our global data would suggest that there is still some work to be done in the 5 key areas:
If these resonate with you as some examples of Agile Change leadership behavior, then how do you measure up? Are you creating the belief systems and processes for Agile Change Leadership behaviors to flourish?