Lead & Empower Agile Teams To Achieve Success

Managers, leaders, coaches and team members in Agile environments can display empowering behaviour in many different ways. If you empower another person, you help them succeed, if everyone does that in a team environment, it creates an culture of empowerment. People feel like they are being supported to do what they need to do. Agile teams consist of experts in software development, architecture, testing and design. They know exactly what they need to do, but if people are constantly second guessing them, then instead of spending their time doing their job, they actually waste time explaining why they are doing something instead of actually doing it.

Richard Branson said that you shouldn’t hire great people and tell them what to do, you should hire great people so that they can tell you what to do. Its exactly the same principle and for managers it’s a change in mindset because they are literally paid to tell people what to do. Managers interpret instructiions from higher up in the organisation and pass them down. In traditional management practices its literally unheard of for a team to tell a manager what they are doing.

Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>

A constant theme in my research about how to empower Agile teams was the concept of servant leadership. You’ve probably heard the concept, but in this lesson we will go into it in some detail and you’ll learn its true nature and potential for achieving successful Agile teams. In truth it’s a practice that everyone should adopt but lets look at some practical ways in which you can empower Agile teams by exhibiting servant leadership.

Servant leadership takes the concept of empowerment one step further. In addition to empowering somebody else or people in a team, it also asks the question of what I can do to help that person achieve success. A manager can’t just get out of the way, leave the team to their own devices and think the team will be successful. The manager’s authority in the organisation must be put at the disposal of the team. Again – a habit of questions not commands will help develop servant leadership behaviours.

One of the people I interviewed during my Phd made the following statement: “mistrust is built into the DNA of these larger organisations”. What he was saying is that the structure, organisation, layers and policies of a large organisation are geared towards control. Now control is important – shareholders and society need large organisations to control their operations, especially if they are in industries like banking, medicine, communications and other critical functions that we need to perform for the greater good.

The irony is that we need to trust these organisations to do the right thing, so they implemented control in their operations that seem to be distrustful of their own employees. Now its true, you do need to make sure that people do the right thing, look after the company’s money, not break the law etc. Generally these are good things and when everyone sticks to the agreed way of doing things then its good for society. But there were many examples in my research of where organisations, and managers in particular, had translated this control into micro-management of their teams.

In this wipeboard lecture I teach you about the link between empowerment and sentiment. My research developed a 15 point sentiment scale and empowered team exhibit the most positive sentiment. I break this all down for you on a wipeboard so that you can get a full understanding of how, and why, empowered teams exhibit positive sentiment.

Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>

Agile is a way of delivering projects in a way that emphasizes short work cycles, and iterative ways of developing products and solutions. Many companies have turned to Agile to improve their customer service, complete projects quicker and get a higher return on their investment in IT. Agile is based on a set of 12 principles and 4 values with a number of specific methodologies that work within these principles and can be used for different types of teams and projects In this course you don’t have to worry about the specific methodologies – the ceremonies you will learn are used very widely ... there is no doubt that if you are involved with Agile teams then you will have these ceremonies.

In this whiteboard lesson I set the scene for this course and explain how your role as a manager links into the world of the Agile environment and the teams you lead. You will learn how the 2 Agile ceremonies in this course are great examples of the safe environment and ideal opportunities for you to demonstrate your leadership journey and commitment to the team.

I teach this lesson from the whiteboard and unpack a few key concepts about Agile so that you have an understanding of the basics before going into the main lessons. You will get an introduction to the cyclical / iterative nature of Agile ways of working, as well as sprints and Kanban.

In this lesson I talk about my own experience of the importance of management behaviour and participation in the Agile daily stand up and retrospective ceremonies. I have spent 25 years in the workplace and 10 years involved with Agile teams and doing research on Agile teams in organisations around the world.

Teams will do multiple sprints until all the work is done for the whole project. These sprints are the main cycles of work in Agile. Within sprints, a smaller cycles of work is each day. Teams manage their tasks at a very detailed level and the daily standup meeting gets the team together once per day to visualize and monitor progress as well as ensure that teams are focused on removing blockers – or impediments to the work that needs to be done. The ceremony is usually less than an hour and can even be as short as 15 minutes. Its also very common for teams to stand, which is why its called a stand up meeting.

In this activity lesson you will be prompted to take action based on what you have learned in the lesson. It's crucial that you apply what you have learned as soon as possible and make use of the worksheet.

The retrospective is when the team gets together and looks back on something in the project so that they can learn from it and use these learnings to improve on their way of working in this next period. Once again this ceremony requires team members to be authentic and open about what went wrong and it is not an opportunity for you as the manager to judge their performance or take notes that you can use later on. Traditional management practices tend to treat the manager as someone who is constantly looking for information on people but in Agile ways of working this is completely counter-intuitive

In this activity lesson you will be prompted to take action based on what you have learned in the lesson. It's crucial that you apply what you have learned as soon as possible and make use of the worksheet.

In this case study lesson I teach you about the Agile journey at one of Australia's largest insurance companies. Despite early challenges, they learned the importance of new management practices in Agile team environments. As managers were able to evolve and understand their changing role they played a vital role in achieving significant success.

In this case study you will learn about the Agile journey of Standard Bank and how they wanted to become more innovative and improve the relationship between IT and business. Managers played a vital role in this evolution by helping to build trust and supporting the cross functional teams in order to achieve all the benefits they did.

In this demonstration lesson I explain the Agile research that I did and the sentiment scale theory of Agile team environments. During my PhD I interviewed senior Agile experts from 25 organisations around the world to find out more about the human factors of Agile software engineering.

In this whiteboard lesson I briefly describe how Agile ceremonies neutralise team sentiment. This is based on my Agile research into team environments at large organisations around the world.

In this lesson I explain your assignment, which is to take what you have learnt in this course and put it into practice in the coming weeks and months. Focus on applying these lessons as you interact with your Agile teams and particularly in the Agile ceremonies you have learnt in this course.