Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive

To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.

The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done.

• Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way
• Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose
• Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility
• Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules"
• Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever

• Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture
  Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster.

  "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it."
  --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org

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  Autorentext
  Ron Eringa is a Leadership Developer. His mission is to create organizations where people love to work and where real customer value is created. In the last 20 years he has built expertise on how to lead IT organizations that use Agile and Scrum. After an initial education in electrical engineering and software engineering he ended up in different leadership roles. In these roles he discovered the leadership capabilities that are essential to create autonomous teams with a high level of maturity and creativity. He believes that autonomous teams are the fundament of a modern organization that thrives in this complex and ever-changing world.

  Kurt Bittner has been delivering working products in short, feedback-driven cycles for nearly 40 years, and has helped many organizations do the same. He is particularly interested in helping people form strong, self-organizing, high-performance teams that deliver solutions that customers love, and helping organizations use empirical feedback to achieve customer outcome-focused goals. He is an author or editor of many books on agile product development, including Mastering Professional Scrum, The Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum, The Professional Scrum Team, and Professional Agile Leadership, as well as The Guide to Evidence-Based Management, and The Nexus Guide. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

  Laurens Bonnema is an Agile Trainer and Management Consultant and a mentor to leaders creating resilient organizations at any scale. He has a strong background in IT with experience in almost every role. As a Professional Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Certified Agile Master, Agile Master Assessor, IPMA Agile Assessor, and PRINCE2 Practitioner, Laurens strives to merge classic and agile management in the conviction that it is the future of professional management. As a Professional Scrum Trainer and SAFe Program Consultant, he helps to improve the profession of software delivery as well as marketing, human resources, and finance. Laurens brings his experience in enterprise IT since 1999 and on Scrum Teams since 2006 to his teaching, is a driving force in the agile community, and a sought-after speaker at conferences and events.

  Inhalt
  Foreword xi
  Preface xv
  Introduction xvii
  Acknowledgments xxv
  About the Authors xxvii

  Chapter 1: An Organization at a Crossroads 1
  Complex Challenges Create Urgency for Agility 2
  Reducing Dependencies Makes Change Possible 4
  Organizational Change Requires Protective, Progressive Dictatorship 10
  Two Paths, One Goal 12
  Reflections on the Journey 15

  Chapter 2: Forming Teams and Discovering Purpose 17
  Changing the Organization, One Team at a Time 18
  Finding the Right People 22
  Empowering Teams 26
  Placing the Customer at the Center of the Change 29
  Reflections on the Journey 35

  Chapter 3: Shifting from Output to Impact 37
  "What Gets Measured Gets Done" 38
  Reflections on the Journey 53

  Chapter 4: Learning to Let Go 55
  Empowerment Doesn't Come for Free 56
  Agile Leaders Help Teams to Grow Their Ability to Reach Audacious Goals 60
  Letting Go in Small Steps 65
  Slow Decision-Making Kills Team Self-Management 69
  Reflections on the Journey 73

  Chapter 5: The Predictable Existential Crisis 75
  New Ways of Working Threaten the Old System 76
  Reflections on the Journey 97

  Chapter 6: Leaders, Everywhere 99
  Nurturing and Growing an Agile Organization 100
  Reward Building Teams and Leadership, Not Silos 114
  Promotional Rewards Lock in Organizational Structures 117
  Performance Reviews Don't Go Away, but They Do Change Dramatically 118
  Reflections on the Journey 122

  Chapter 7: Aligning the Organization 123
  Evolving the Operating Model 124
  Scale Agility by Removing Dependencies 131
  Consolidating Support and Eliminating Opposition 132
  Realign Compensation Plans 140
  Realign Career Paths 141
  Embrace Catalytic Leadership 142
  Replace Status Meetings with Transparency 143
  Be Realistic About How Long the Transition Will Take, and What It Means 146
  Reflections on the Journey 147

  Chapter 8: Aligning the Culture 149
  What Makes Changing Culture Hard 150
  Agile Leaders Must First Find Their Own Way 152
  Build Bridges to the New Culture 153
  Anticipate and Overcome Setbacks 159
  Use "Self-Sustenance" as a Measure of Success 162
  Agile Journeys Never Really End 165
  Reflections on the Journey 168

  Appendix A: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Effective Leadership 169

  Appendix B: Doreen's Sketchnotes 171

  Index