Currently so much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training and even the empathy revolve around the agile teams. Leaders are typically either ignored or marginalized at best, and in the worst cases often vilified. But Bob Galen contends that there is a place for managers and effective leadership within agile environments and a central role whose importance increases as the organization size and cultural complexity increases.
In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Those that understand Servant Leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement.
We’ll explore training and standards for agile adoption and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. We’ll examine the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. We’ll also look at how important it is for managers to engage with their teams and not sit on the sidelines simply as a “Chicken”. For example, how to call a team’s poor agile performance out or give them constructive criticism.
Good leadership is a central ingredient to sustaining your agile adoption. Bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. Here we’ll walk the path of the good, but also examine the bad patterns in an effort to inspire you and your teams.