An Agile Approach to Developing Leaders

McKinsey (2018) advises that top leadership and executives in an organisation must be able to adopt an agile approach by embracing its precepts and be willing to enhance their own capabilities significantly.

There are different elements of agile transformation:
● Enterprise agility coaches: The first step is to build a cadre of enterprise agility coaches supported by a leadership transformation team.
● The top team journey which means getting the top team engaged in developing their own capabilities;
● Immersive leadership experience means rolling it out to all senior leaders;
● Application through organisational experiments;
● Agile tempo.

According to agilebusiness.org, the agile leader is one whose mindset evolves in the same way. In a study by Bain and Company, such leaders tend to spend more time focusing on developing innovation, strategy and talent while less time is expended on the work done by their sub-ordinates.

A case study of agile leadership in software development is German engineering and technology company, Bosch. According to Flyntrock.com (2020), the board of the company took on agile roles such as product owner, scrum master and a cross-functional team, to make their teams innovative.

Mckinsey (2018) advises that the Call-to-Action (CTA) for agile leaders is to:
● Engage or develop a cadre of enterprise-agility coaches supported by a leadership-transformation team.
● Design a tailored journey for the top team.
● Create an immersive learning experience for all senior leaders across the enterprise.
● Link and apply the learning to existing and new agile-transformation experiments and initiatives.
● Frame and roll out the leadership initiative in 90-day cycles.

Written by Caroline Theuri