• Agile Leadership

Management team beware – something different is required of you….

An agile organization without managers? Sounds cool, but in reality is a fairy tale. The idea of the traditional manager can be jettisoned, but does that make managers an sich obsolete? No. More and more often we see the hybrid manager who gets to work with advanced organizational and team development. Logical. An agile organization requires different skills from the MT. We need different managers. Or the same Agile managers who grow into their new roles with new skills.

Where do we come from? For centuries, hierarchical management was the standard in organizations that did not need to change quickly. At Universities, our administrators learned how to do this as efficiently as possible, for example by dividing strategic goals through all layers of management with kpi’s into tactical and operational execution. A fairly simple management method that in today’s times produces many undesirable side effects, such as compartmentalization and division, when what you need is focus and unity for an agile organization. But the world was not so transparent in the last century. Any organization could use cunning marketing to make its stakeholders believe they were valuable. Organizations shouted that they were customer-centric until the majority came to believe that they really were. And organizations made sales and profits, which provided scientific proof to the university that their vision was the right one.

The turn of the century … the largest and most successful organizations fell over. No one ever imagined that the Kodak’s or Nokia’s of this world could lose their relevance within a year. Just as no one believed that the Titanic could sink. And even the biggest, strongest, smartest and richest banks are proving unable to adapt to a more transparent and agile playing field in the brand new millennium . The aforementioned universities speak of a paradigm shift: the old system no longer works in the changing environment. Time for a new system in which we can quickly adapt that part of the organization where we create value to changing market demands. The agile organization is born. One-day awareness training for Agile Leaders? Register now.

The agile organization is a holistic system in which an organization can truly thrive. You deliver relevant value for your stakeholders and thus ensures your place in the market. Holistic thinking breaks through the traditional compartmentalization within organizations and acts as a value-generating unit with a common interest. Not an autocracy and not a democracy, but a sociocracy that ensures that you make the best decisions with ownership and without a Polish country day.

“Grass does not grow by pulling or pushing it, grass grows by looking at what it needs so that it germinates and grows.”

The holistic agile organization is composed of multidisciplinary value-generating units. In other words, one or more teams working together to deliver the highest value. Sounds simple, but in practice it is extremely complex. As a team, you have as few dependencies outside the unit as possible, so you adapt “End-to-End” value to the agile environment as quickly as possible. This requires a high degree of team maturity. The MT is therefore tasked with developing a team culture in which autonomous units learn quickly from the changing environment. Thus, the MT guarantees continuous improvement and delivery of the highest value.

So, that requires very different skills from the MT. There is currently a high demand for managers who have the skill set to develop a lean-agile organization and agile teams. Moreover, recent research by McKinzie shows that creating a new culture and role models in leadership are the absolute accelerator of an Agile transition. Do you want to be that valuable manager, too? Register now for one or more modules of the Agile Leadership course

Adrie Dolman MSc