Agile Leadership

How our current business climate creates poor leaders, how to change that climate, and how to build the clarity and courage necessary to lead with an infinite mindset.

Simon Sinek achieved international fame with the TED Talk “How great leaders inspire action” and his first book “Start With Why.” Now he is expanding his discussion of leadership and delving into the question of what has gone so wrong for businesses and their leaders. In this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Simon Sinek goes deep into the subject of his newest work, “The Infinite Game.” He shares that most leaders don’t understand the infinite game they are in. Simon explains how our current business climate creates poor leaders, how to change that climate, and how to build the clarity and courage necessary to lead with an infinite mindset.

Complex systems are better handled through trial and error, and yet many individuals are convinced to know solutions at the onset.

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

Explaining that leadership is making others feel secure, drawing them into into a circle of trust - even when it means taking on big responsibilities.

What makes a great leader? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests, it's someone who makes their employees feel secure, who draws staffers into a circle of trust. But creating trust and safety -- especially in an uneven economy -- means taking on big responsibility.

A simple primer on what a good OKR looks like and common pitfalls that lead to poor OKR writing.

Objective Key Results (OKRs) are having quite an impact on the business world since their adoption. They have been deployed across companies in a bid to enhance teamwork, achieve organizational goals, and for scalability. This article helps us understand ORKs by detailing the meaning of Objectives, Key Results and how the two building blocks of OKRs come in handy in an organizational environment.

Deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about - promoting work-life balance that rewards the wisdom of workers.

What if your job didn't control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don't have to). It's a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?

Embedding the capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization, and decoupling it from the personality of the leader.

The award-winning agency focused on creating transformative digital content MindSpring presents an amazing animation adapted from captain David Marquet's talk on Greatness showing how he dropped centralized governance in his submarine to give complete control to the officers allowing them to share ideas on what was supposed to be done on the ship, rather than him giving orders. A great way to understand more about the power of psychological ownership in an organization.

Four leadership competencies - Humility, Adaptability, Vision, and Engagement that will help guide you through any uncertainty.

Our businesses operate in unpredictable markets that constantly change respective to external factors. Organizations re-engineer to adapt to the new market changes to keep delivering value to their customers. Covid-19 triggered many organizations to adopt technology and strengthen their agility in a bid to cope with the change. At the same time, several other companies were rendered obsolete by this market turnaround. So how should you prepare your business to offset the effects of such changes? Learn four core agile leadership competencies that helped business executives during the pandemic and will remain valuable in the post-Covid-19 business world.

Learn to empower your dev teams to help them create better products and free up some of your time.

An empowered development team owns its work, is authorized to make the right decisions, and is able to work independently. Empowered teams are happier, create better products, and allow you, the person in charge of the product, to spend more time on product discovery and strategy. This article by Roman Pichler shares five tips to help you empower your development teams.

An attempt to answer the question of leadership in the context of agile transformation.

As we are all aware, a manifesto contains the views, intents, and motives of a particular party/ individual leaders on how they plan to transform a current situation to bring change. So what role does 'leadership' play in the context of Agile transformation? This manifesto is the first to attempt to answer that question. It is based on Peter F. Drucker’s research on knowledge work and the leadership of knowledge workers, as well as on the positive conception of mankind of the theory Y from Douglas McGregor’s pioneering book “The Human Side of Enterprise”.

Neuroscience reveals the social nature of the high-performance workplace.

How do leaders give others a feeling of safety even in uncertain environments? With a basis in neuroscience, David Rock shares how spontaneity (rather than feeling suppression) leads to a sense of relatedness and fairness, how intelligence can relate to low self-awareness, and how leaders can create the kind of atmosphere that promotes status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

Senior leaders must not only lead themselves, but their organization. Learn 15 skills you need to master to be a great manager of managers.

A well-descriptive article that suggests 15 skills leaders should adopt to thrive as great managers. It explores what it takes to be a manager of managers and how to level up your areas of weakness citing that most leaders face a whole new set of challenges when they become a manager of managers and that it is important to learn how to make the transition from a manager of individual contributors to a great builder and manager of other managers. Dive deeper into the article to find out more about these 15 skills and their impact on managers.

With many stakeholders already questioning their social contract with institutions, how can leaders invest in, rebuild, and renew trust in these relationships?

Punit Renjen urges leaders to rebuild and reinvest in trust with their stakeholders noting that trust has fractured across government, business, and other pillars of society and continues to deteriorate further accelerated by the pandemic. He argues that this is hindering leaders from investing in relationships that result in mutual value citing that leaders are better able to create loyalty and confidence among stakeholders—their employees, customers, and ecosystem partners—and solve problems more quickly with trust. Thus, Punit further examines how we can invest in, rebuild, and renew trust. Read the article to find out more about the power of trust in business and social relationships.

Reflections on 7 years of experience in the Israeli army and insights about how the army really operates.

Experienced major in the Israel defense forces Vered Netzer reflects on her 7 years tenure serving the Israel army reiterating how she found out that the army is the most Agile-oriented organization she ever worked with. The presentation is intertwined with army war stories & tips for leaders in the agile world to inspire a new wave of Agile Leaders, through sharing examples of effective leadership, concepts, and useful takeaways. She states that the army is not as ‘Command & Control’ as people commonly expect – it is much more empowering and agile than you’d think.

Pros and cons of shielding our teams from their own dysfunction, in superhuman attempts to manage up.

John Cutler helps us understand who is a ''Perfect Manager/Leader'' stating that some managers need the chaos in a company to feel helpful or else something is wrong but this is not actually the case. He suggests that being a manager is not about carrying all the problems on your shoulders, it's about having a healthy company. Not perfect, and not without the occasional acute issue, but mostly healthy. Let's read the article to find out more about why there’s no requirement for managers and leaders to absorb the full weight of the world.

Modern Agile leaders are adopting key characteristics and exhibiting forward-thinking traits to accelerate organizational agility.

Ever asked yourself why top-down hierarchy is considered obsolete in the modern business world? Or why do modern organization leaders prefer to work across all departments closely with employees? Working and reporting directly to leaders in an organization hinders effective transformations. Modern leaders are solving the problem with 3 key agile principles that pave the way for organizational agility and better customer experience.

The 5 Scrum values take center stage

In 2016 updates were released to the Scrum Guide, which at the time already had six years of experience under its belt. The update was a simple one, adding the 5 values of Scrum to the Guide: Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness. Dave West shares why these values that may appear obvious, are actually really difficult to adopt in most ‘traditional’ organizations.

Simon Sinek introduces his breakthrough concept of the Golden Circle, explaining we all need to start with the "why".

In this timeless video, Simon Sinek introduces a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question: "Why?". This is one the original videos to "break the internet", going viral and becoming one of the most watched Ted Talks. With powerful and clear explanations, his examples include Apple, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers. A priceless video that is a must watch.

There's more to team leadership than just shipping it. What's your team's reason for being?

Iikigai is a japanese concept meaning reason for being, which helps individuals weight their passions against expertise in order to identify their lever of greatest impact. Jeff Gothelff argues that basing your agile leadership style on ikigai creates psychological safety for your teams, pushing teams to understand their context and articulate each component of their positive impact. Complete with a great visualization of it.

Wise executives tailor their approach to fit the complexity of the circumstances they face.

A discussion on the relationship between product learning and accidental complexity, from the keynote at the Intel Agile Conference in 2014.

David Hussman took the stage during the Intel Agile conference in 2014 to explore the relationship between product learning and accidental complexity with the analogy of gravity citing that accidental complicity replicates gravity and keeps great ideas in the organization down, hence people need to achieve a certain threshold of velocity to escape.

Infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing play rather than to win, and leaders that embrace it build more resilient organizations.

Philosopher Dr. James Carse articulated a basic truth about how our society actually works, giving deep insight on how we interact with each other as a civilization. His work has had a profound impact on Simon Sinek, who wrote a book to pick up where Dr. James Carse left off. Fortunately, Simon had a chance to sit down with him a few months before Dr. Carse passed, to chat with him about belief, fulfillment, and the Infinite Game.

Based on several years supporting and coaching leadership, these are the ways leaders think and act that will sustain an Agile transformation and Agile delivery.

The 6 fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a way broadening our view of situations by incorporating an understanding that there are overall structures, patterns and cycles beyond specific events. Leyla shares what she sees as the concepts that are critical for you to develop individual agency and systematic actions. Each of the concepts are building blocks for developing a detailed perspective of how the world works from a systems perspective and will enhance your ability to think divergently and creatively for a positive impact.

Differentiating activity-driven from results-driven organizations, and how they achieve desired outcomes.

An article and video content by Henrik-Jan van der Pol well-describing the similarities and differences between KPIs and OKRs and the roles they play in achieving the organizational ultimate goal. Henry states that activity-driven organizations only execute the process and initiatives with less focus on the company's ambition but results-driven organizations leverage KPIs and OKRs to measure the company's performance and progress when executing these processes and initiatives.

How OKRs and the Balanced Scorecard can work together, including each framework pros and cons.

Comparing how the 4DX and OKR goal management frameworks structure their process of strategy execution.

Lessons learned over the years about what not to do when deploying OKRs in your organization.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have been popularly considered as one of the viable mechanisms for agile teams for converting strategies into deliveries. Most teams leverage them through the delivery cycle to turn strategies into actions that lead to better organizational outcomes. However, as you use OKRs to achieve your organizational goals, what are some of the anti-patterns that you need to learn for the process to be effective? The article outlines these anti-patterns and details WHY teams should have an eye on them when deploying OKRs.

Too often, we evaluate and prioritize projects based solely on the business case.

Author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, writes about the importance of having a purpose for a project citing that when evaluating and prioritizing projects, looking at the business case alone is not enough. He further notes that knowing the project's purpose positions it toward the organization's goals. The Marshall Goldsmith coach member then suggests a simple straightforward method to uncover a project purpose.

Sharing the results obtained when combining autonomy and alignment in the transformation journey at the Ericsson 3G product development unit.

Coaching is a skill that needs to be learned and honed over time.