Posts

How Agile Leadership Can Fundamentally Change Work Culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This quote is perhaps one of the most familiar business phrases of all time. Yet, while most leaders agree on the importance of culture, surprisingly few actually devote serious attention to shaping workplace culture. Why is this the case? What role should culture play in business success? And how does agile leadership help shape successful organizations? In this article, we’ll explore these questions in detail…

Why Smart Leaders Value Culture

Just how deeply should leaders focus on culture? Edgar Schein is widely considered the father of organizational culture. In his book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, he describes leadership and culture as two sides of the same coin.

In other words, leaders invariably shape culture for better or worse, whether they intend to or not. It starts when they establish organizational policies and practices. Then, through their daily actions, leaders demonstrate their commitment to these standards. Ultimately, they become role models for expected behaviors.

This aligns with Andrea Tomasini’s definition of culture as “the set of behaviors that are accepted and expected.”

Culture Change: A Case In Point

One example of a leadership-driven culture shift comes from a large telecom equipment provider. The company’s culture was highly hierarchical and control oriented. Employees were even forbidden from posting anything on their office walls or windows.

Although the company was a recognized market leader, it was losing market share to smaller competitors. This was when executives recognized the need to build a more innovative, collaborative culture.

Leaders visited directly with teams to ask what they needed to work in more collaborative, innovative, agile ways. They documented the various responses on sticky notes, and then posted these comments on a highly-visible wall in the building’s atrium. But the process didn’t end there.

In essence, this wall of sticky notes became a Kanban board that helped drive organizational change. Leaders started taking action on each request. They began meeting weekly at the board, where everyone would see them moving sticky notes from “To Do” to “In Progress” and eventually to the “Done” section when each action was completed.

Within months, teams began creating their own Kanban boards and collaborating daily. Sticky notes on the walls became a new cultural norm. The leadership team’s visible actions changed employee understanding of behaviors that are accepted and expected.

How Does Agile Leadership Help?

In their book Leadership Agility, Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs offer a well-researched, practical model for leadership development. Think of leadership skills as a series of vertical stages of increasing effectiveness. As leaders develop capabilities, they move from Expert to Achiever to Catalyst.

These stages are like gears in a car’s transmission, letting leaders “shift” into different speeds as needed. In fact, research shows that the most effective leaders have the agility to shift fluidly between leadership modes – as well as the awareness to know which leadership mode is most appropriate in a given situation.

The Leadership Agility Model in Agile Leadership

Most leaders start at the “Expert” stage. Experts are focused on hands-on work that leverages their functional expertise. They tend to focus on tactics and solving immediate problems. However, they tend to lack awareness of their leadership style and have low emotional and social intelligence.

At the “Achiever” stage, leaders begin to rely more on others. They are focused on results and outcomes, and are willing to delegate the “how” to others. They become more invested in influencing others to accomplish their goals. They’re also more aware that they need buy-in to achieve the best results.

When leaders reach the “Catalyst” stage, they develop a broader, more systemic perspective, long-term orientation, strong self-awareness, social awareness, and situational awareness. They realize that goal-setting, alone, isn’t enough to motivate people. Vision and purpose are also essential. And they genuinely believe people are assets — not just “resources.”

How Agile Leadership Affects Workplace Culture

Agile leaders demonstrate multiple capabilities that are vital for shaping organizational culture:

1. Situational Awareness and Balance

Agile leaders are able to shift their approach between expert, achiever, and catalyst modes, as needed. They can operate effectively at a tactical, strategic or visionary level. This means agile leaders are adept at tackling a wide range of problems. By tapping into this broad set of skills, they serve as role models to others in the organization, creating a culture that values leadership growth and development.

2. Long-Term Visionary Orientation

“Catalyst” leaders devote more of their energy to a long-term vision for their organization. They realize the key role culture plays in achieving this vision. And they realize there is no silver-bullet shortcut that creates a positive culture. This is why they move deliberately and persistently to build a better culture. As role models, they help other leaders in their orbit develop a similar visionary perspective.

3. People-Centered Leadership

Catalyst leaders have strong social intelligence and genuine empathy for people on their team. They are willing to invest time in coaching and mentoring people for personal growth. This goes beyond merely setting goals, measuring performance, or demanding results. This leadership style serves as a role model for all in an environment where people feel genuinely valued.

4. Ability to Navigate a VUCA World

Today’s fast-paced global economy is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). In this environment, agile leadership is essential. It frees leaders to let go of the illusion of control and gives them the confidence to help others do the same. Agile leaders frame complex challenges as learning opportunities rather than neatly defined execution tasks. Instead of punishing small failures, they reward learning. This kind of support encourages people to take initiative and tackle complex problems.

5. Concern for Psychological Safety

By combining two agile leadership capabilities we’ve mentioned – social intelligence and willingness to reward learning – leaders can establish a sense of psychological safety. When people feel it’s safe to participate, learn, contribute, and even challenge the status quo – innovation can flourish. By actively promoting an atmosphere of psychological safety, leaders can help their organization evolve and succeed over time.

Modeling and Shaping Culture

For leaders who want to proactively shape workplace culture, a cultural assessment model can be particularly helpful. At Agile Leadership Journey, we rely on the Competing Value Framework (CVF) by Kim S. Cameron and colleagues. This CVF model focuses on four cultural archetypes: Collaborate, Create, Compete, and Control:

Competing Values Famework in Agile Leadership

 

CVF research indicates that no singular “best” culture exists. Instead, the most successful organizations try to balance the four archetypes. CVF provides a model for assessing an organization’s culture “shape” – the relative strength of each value system and culture archetype. With this tangible assessment, leaders can make deliberate choices about actions that can shift the culture in a desired direction.

Culture Values Framework Agile Leadership

Because culture is so complex, leaders should treat these activities as experiments — assuming the outcome is uncertain, and side effects will be difficult to predict.

Our experience with CVF and culture shaping reveals that these techniques can lead to a measurable shift in culture. However, significant changes often take years to manifest fully. This means organizations need to rely on the strength of “Catalyst” leaders with the agility, wisdom and skills to persist through a complex cultural transformation.

Photo: Joshua Coleman

Going Agile: Beyond the Buzz

“Agile” has been a buzzword thrown around Silicon Valley, startup conferences, town halls and HR department meetings for years now. Additionally, in the past several weeks we’ve heard “agile” again in large volume as companies rapidly try to adjust to remote work and the new realities we’re all living in due to COVID-19. While it’s true that adopting an agile mindset may be more valuable to companies than ever, it’s much more than successfully managing a quick transition from in-office to work from home. 

Though the idea originated way back in 2001, there still is not a widespread understanding about what agility really is, and how it can benefit organizations of all sizes — especially now. From addressing internal dysfunction to helping a business overcome competitive challenges, to coping in a world filled with VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), embracing agility can give businesses the edge they’re looking for, ultimately transforming the way they work. 

For the transformation to be successful, however, agile has to be more than a buzzword. If it’s just showing up in memos, on Slack channels and PowerPoints or mentioned in passing at meetings, you are doing it wrong. To go from just saying or writing agile to actually being agile, you need to know where to start and what to watch out for. 

Here are four of the most common barriers experienced when trying to implement the agile mindset, and how to overcome them to become a truly adaptive organization — and thrive in these uncertain times:

If Agile Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

In my work as a Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Coach and Certified LeSS Trainer, I occasionally come across teams that want to be agile just so they can say that they are agile. I call this “agile for agile’s sake,” and it’s a big warning sign. Too often teams haven’t sharpened their focus enough before attempting to embrace adaptive practices. This can lead to confusion, frustration, and ironically, the opposite of agility. Another large warning sign is if you see heavy slide decks and best practices books popping up all over about how you’re going to become agile. They often mean that DDT (Deck Driven Transformations) is underway, as it is usually instituted by a large consultancy. When employees are still tasked to work through the controlled process of long development and feedback cycles for a project, then they are using up their valued time and resources, and a growth in documents contradicts what agile is all about!

Instead, figure out what agile will fix for your organization. It’s imperative to understand your own organization’s priorities – to know the why behind implementing agile – if you want your transformation to succeed. Otherwise, you’re just using a new buzzword, without any true meaning behind it.

Agile is an OS, Not an App

Another common pitfall I see are teams looking to jump on the “agile bandwagon” and expect it to be a quick and easy process. These are organizations looking to put a check mark next to “agile” and cross it off on its to-do list. We often see organizations “buying, unwrapping and installing” a popular, commercially available heavy framework or producing an internal over-engineered operating model that resembles a traditional model, spiced up with agile buzzwords.

But that’s not how it works. It’s not an app that you can simply download, install and be up and running on within moments. Agile is an Operating System – it will impact how everything is done (remember, the goal is transformation), and it can take some getting used to. 

Setting realistic expectations about what the agile framework is and is not, and how long it will take to transform into an adaptive organization is extremely important. Without this mindset, team members’ commitment to the transformation may wane, undercutting everyone’s efforts to evolve, as full, company-wide buy-in is necessary for success. 

Swim a Lake, Don’t Boil the Ocean

Another problem I’ve seen when working with companies looking to embrace agile is starting off too broad and shallow – looking to overhaul everything at once. Instead, I recommend focusing narrowly but going deep in specific areas, and then expanding, for example, like in Large Scale Scrum, where the idea is to descale an organization, in order to scale agility. The bigger the organization, the more important this is. 

To do this, identify a product or function where impact can be felt in real terms quickly. This is your best bet about where to start. Oftentimes, HR is a great department to include in an agile transformation. This is because HR policies are incredibly important, as it involves changing the way employees are treated.

It is interesting, however although maybe not surprising, lean companies are having a less painful experience adjusting to the unprecedented conditions we’re currently in, because being lean helps with adaptive-ness (agility), and it is based on the degree of organizational “descaling.”

Urgency as the Catalyst to Change 

Finally, in my experience, there needs to be a sense of urgency for an agile model to really take hold and thrive within an organization. The team must know and feel that something is fundamentally broken, and that embracing new practices and methods is essential to survival. Without the understanding that something must be fixed, the likelihood of a successful transformation is significantly lower. This is because those without a sense of urgency are resistant to change.

This is true from the top to the bottom of an organization. Without buy-in from the entire team, creating real change, real transformation is impossible. When it comes to senior leaders, getting them engaged and invested can make all the difference. 

Contrary to how you may have heard the word “agile” used previously, it’s not about cutting costs. That has never been the primary goal of being an agile company. Agile is about moving beyond the buzzword to become more adaptive and nimbler. This allows a company to transform the way it works fundamentally, innovate quickly and ultimately become more competitive. This ability to adapt and innovate has never been more important than it is today, where the entire fabric of work is changing with unprecedented unemployment and entire industries turned upside down by the pandemic. The businesses that can adapt fast will have an edge on those that are moving slowly: ultimately, the faster you can adapt, the more economically feasible your business is in our rapidly changing world.