• Agile Leadership

Marieke Morsch still sees many opportunities for executives

We are writing the year 2013. An inspired Marieke starts working under the wings of KPN on the company’s website and app. Feel free to call it a tipping point in her career, because in the process she is introduced to the Scrum Framework. “I led a team of designers, developers and online marketers. We also added Lean Start-up methodologies to our way of working, to work even more experimentally.” The immediate benefits? Better collaboration and focus. The longer-term benefits? “We saw the greatest benefits when we also made things very measurable. This allowed us to learn faster and faster what worked well or not,” Marieke summarizes.

‘Step by step you can really change things yourself in your work to make it more enjoyable and effective‘

Training with the ladle

During the years at KPN, Marieke worked as a manager in various departments with colleagues of all levels and backgrounds. Today, the Scrum Academy trainer is very grateful for that: “I am now reaping the benefits. I estimate fairly quickly in people what they need to move forward.” Yet that experience is not the only thing that inspired trainership comes from. “I myself am very eager to learn and enjoy passing on what I learn to others. I come from a real teaching family, I’m sure that’s where that comes from.”

Logically, that primal urge to pass on knowledge became more powerful with age and Marieke started working for several digital agencies. There she learns to apply the Agile method in other fields, for other target groups and in other roles: “I have filled roles there as Product Owner, Scrum Master and facilitator of strategic sessions and Design sprints.” Her application of Design Thinking methodologies in workshops stands out and creates a question from more and more agencies: can you also develop and deliver training for us? The answer is “yes” and so Marieke rolls into the training profession.

‘I like to work with participants interactively with the material. By means of an example case, but preferably of course with their practical situations.’

Marieke’s Scrum-Academy Style

As an Agile trainer and coach, she is a fan of interactive formats. Less of a fan of sitting still. It is one of the explanations why Marieke and the ‘Scrum Academy style’ fit together so well. For dozens of training courses, Marieke’s knowledge and the style of Scrum Academy thus work synergistically together for open enrollment groups and in-company programs. What she likes to reflect in all her training and coaching sessions? “The exercise where you have to prioritize quickly is really an eye opener for many people and so I like to use it.” Recently she has been doing this for ONVZ, among others : “There I coached a group of Product Owners. Besides teaching them to apply tools to do their jobs even better, we worked on transforming the rest of the organization to a more Agile way of working.”

Inspirational vs. conventional leadership

In her work as an Agile trainer and coach, Marieke meets many different types of leaders. That fact triggers her to ask the inquisitive Morsch to once again pass on her acquired knowledge. After all, what influence does leadership have on the quality of the team’s work? “Especially a lot of influence. I notice that too often managers still have the idea that by setting deadlines and giving assignments they keep control. But that’s not how you get the most value out of your business and your teams. To get happy teams and good results, you need inspiring Agile leadership. Leaders who state what “objective” they have and then empower teams to work empirically towards a good solution themselves. I believe managers’ eyes need to be opened to a new way of leading.” A powerful ending to this article, which I’m sure you’ll want to read more about. You can. And here it is.