The 7 Most Popular Agile Leadership Training Courses Compared.

We all get elaborate ideas thrown over the fence from management. Everything is top priority, but we are far from seeing the added value in everything “.

It’s the most common complaint I get from teams I coach or train. The result? I see unmotivated teams because they’re doing work they don’t support at all. Unmotivated teams are obviously something you want to address as soon as possible, but what will put the most pressure on them?

Happy Teams with Agile Leaders

Happy teams have an inspiring leader. It doesn’t matter if they are Department Managers, Product Managers, Product Owners or Team Leads. As long as they focus on value, as you expect from an Agile Leader. So I went looking for a good Agile Leadership training to make sure my teams were empowered.

Criteria for good Agile leadership training

But what training do you choose to improve your Agile Leadership? In short, I believe that a good leadership training contains at least these three components:

  1. Impart vision and inspire;
  2. Create focus by driving by value;
  3. Provide safe base and give people challenges from there;

As a leader, you don’t come up with the right answers yourself; you ask the right questions. You don’t manage by output, but by outcome. Therefore, you give the team room to experiment and learn. This way, management will take less and less of your time. If you are a leader of the future, you work on your team’s autonomy, proficiency and commitment. What training programs offer all that? We went looking!

Advantages and disadvantages of the various Agile Leadership training programs in the Netherlands

With these criteria, there must be some good leadership training programs out there, right? Curious as I am, I teamed up with Gert-Jan and Anton from Scrum Academy to find out what Agile leadership training programs there are in the Netherlands. I am happy to share my findings in this clear comparison chart.

CompanyTrainingDurationPositivesWhat I am still missing
SixsigmaAgile leadership3 daysYour practical situation is the focusInspire and provide challenges from a safe base
Scrum CompanyLeadership in agile organizations3 daysGetting started at the organizational, team and personal levelLittle, but I believe coaching ‘on the job’ would make it better
Agile Scrum GroupAgile for Managers1 dayRole as a manager in an Agile organization is in itIn particular, it involves explaining Agile and how to implement it
Epic AgilityAgile Leadership Teams1 dayYou learn how to create a safe environmentYou don’t learn to apply it to your own practice
Prowareness & XebiaProfessional Agile Leadership Essentials2 daysYou will learn how to support, mentor and coach Agile teamsBy the looks of it, most of it is about explaining Agile and how to implement it
XebiaLeadership for Product Managers1 dayYou will learn about personal, product and people leadershipYou don’t learn to apply it to your own practice
The HookHigh Performance Leadership5 daysDeals hands-on with the ‘soft’, personal undercurrent and the ‘hard’ goal-oriented upper currentI miss the empirical mindset that allows you to create value quickly

My conclusion: that ideal Agile Leadership training did not yet exist

As you can see, all of these trainings have their pluses, but all of them lack an angle, working form or relevant component. So even after my research, I still didn’t know where to send the leaders of “my teams.

That’s why we developed the training course: Inspiring Agile Leadership

Not finding the ideal training, I teamed up with my colleagues at Scrum Academy to create the training for Inspiring Agile Leadership. A training of three days, with periods in between to apply what was learned immediately and with 1-on-1 coaching.

Now my challenge is to get the training filled. Because what I notice is that, as a manager, you do have your team’s best interests at heart. You invest in the team, you hire trainers, you work hard to get clear tasks for the team. But you don’t realize that together with your team you form a system. If you don’t change both, the system will stay the same. Recognizable?

I am very curious about your opinions on this. To what extent do you recognize the desirable qualities of a leader described in this blog? And as a leader yourself, do you feel the need for such training? What do you think of the description of our new training? Feel free to let me know in a comment, send me a message on Linkedin or contact Scrum Academy. I look forward to hearing your questions and insights on Agile Leadership.