Walking the talk with agile leadership

​Leaders of agile teams often think that agile methodologies and principles are only for their development teams and not for their leadership.
If you’re still managing your teams in a waterfall way it could be causing several problems:

1. To engage with you, team members have to leave their nice agile world to interact in your non- agile way (“write a paper to get my approval for this change in scope”, “come and present your discovery findings”), it’s jarring, inefficient and things get lost in translation.
2. It shows a lack of commitment from you about agile – “do as I say, not as I do” – it can even build up a perception that building things for customers is less important work than engaging with the boss!
3. Agile ways of working need frequent contact with leaders – you can’t hold up the whole sprint waiting on a decision because your diary isn’t free for three days.

Organisations that do a great job of embracing agile ways of working, take pains to embed it in the culture and that means that leaders walk the talk around agile.
It seems to me that the two most important things are to be accessible and be visible in your commitment to agile ways of working.
A few years ago, I realised that I was becoming a bottleneck for my agile development teams and needed to do something different. Here’s some ideas that have worked for me:
 
Be visible
1. Have a leadership sprint, with regular stand-ups. We had a fortnightly sprint with twice-weekly stand-ups right in the middle of the team floor, using a virtual scrum board (Jira, but a whiteboard and post-it notes would also be fine). At the end of the sprint we had a retro with a series of questions that we used each fortnight. 

The sprint approach really helped with sharing progress across our leadership team and meant that issues and blockers could be dealt with quickly. But it also provided extreme transparency for the broader team about our priorities and it was a visible commitment to agile ways of working.
 
(In case you’re wondering topics like HR planning and strategy were saved for the monthly leadership meeting).
 
2. Attend showcases/sprint reviews and other agile ceremonies – you will better appreciate the work involved in developing something great for customers and you will be right there to resolve issues or questions that need to be raised with you. Make sure you are positive, encouraging and engaged and only ask to change something if you absolutely have to (eg a law is about to be broken). The teams know more about their work than you! 
 
 
Be accessible

3. Attending leadership stand-ups and agile ceremonies has the added benefit of everyone knowing that you’ll be present. Schedule some time straight after for anything that pops up that needs your input.

4. Office hours – I shamelessly stole this idea from Google (How Google Works by Eric Schmidt). Office hours can be in person or virtual and gives anyone in your organisation the chance to talk to you one on one. Your team members may want to give or get feedback, show progress, raise an issue or just have a chat. Office hours are great for topics that takes 10 or 15 minutes. Longer issues may need a separate conversation.
One thing to watch out for is that folks who are used to more traditional ways of working need constant reminders about office hours and what they’re for (which should be literally anything!)

5. Be where your people are – if your organisation uses platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams then make sure you’re a frequent and involved user. Celebrate the wins, recognise performers, provide updates, ask questions and run polls, all where your teams are. 

​This advice doesn’t just apply to leaders, it’s also for senior stakeholders of agile teams. If I can help you set up some ways to better walk the agile talk then please get in touch.