agile leadership

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A typical change project involves: an alibi business plan, tons of a(peep) covering benchmarking, unrealistic milestones, full time change managers, sounding boards, hundreds of slides, KPIs and meetings and protocols, meetings and protocols, meetings and protocols…
How about not doing any of that?... and still change?
It sounds scary as you have just listed nicely all the things and they are sooo many: your problem, your issues, your market pressure, your efforts, your responsibility, your necessary commitment, etc. etc.
How about just getting rid of the “Y” first? We cannot change others but we can change ourselves.
Our problems, our issues, our market pressure, our efforts, our responsibility, our necessary commitment, even OUR etc. etc.
Getting rid of “Y” is the first lesson learned from our change initiatives in the past.
Lesson number 2: more is less and less is more:
…isn’t it the concept of the Return of investment? If you want a high ROI, you must not overspend.
Lesson number 3: Simple organizations beat complex organizations.
It is just a matter of time when underperformers start hiding and outperformers start getting lost in a complex structure.
Lesson number 4: All business is people business:
We are not in abbreviation letter business. Our business is full of people: employees, agents, partners, customers…
Note that the customers have the easiest way to walk away ;-)
Lesson number 5: It is not for the company, it is for me
Is what I am doing & how I am doing it, really what & how I want to do it?
Have I invested my emotions into the past or into the future?
Am I ready to get involved with my people or I want them to implement just what I already know?
If you have been missing a definition of an agile organization so far, here it is:
It means: living the following – high - five principles:
Open communication
Empowerment
Customer perspective
Speed
Collaboration
Open communication: You can control a small business
but you need trust to manage a large one.
Imagine: trust is oxygen! How long would we survive in this room?... still alive? ;-) o.k. then let’s continue.
empowerment: you earn the right to listen by giving the right to talk not by taking it away.
Do your procedures and culture limit the say of your people? If so, why do you expect to hear something from them?
customer perspective: Do customers care about our structure, our technical language, our opening hours, etc.?
No, for sure not. Do we care about what she or he cares about?
speed: If time is money – the money in the pipe doesn’t work –
let’s get the unemployment rate of our current account down!
collaboration: we cannot get done much alone;
as a team, we become a strong chain, possibly even a real value chain
A final word on perception:
Like in a well-run PR campaign,
Perception is always ahead of Reality.
The way to reality leads through perception.
Caring about people, means caring about perceptions and as rational leader focuses on territory, an agile leader wants to see his peoples’ maps first.
In fact, perception makes up 80% of the reality.

…and now it’s time for SALMST: a short agile leadership mindset self-test
• Is agile leadership learning how to follow? Follow your talk…walk the talk?
• Do leaders micromanage operationally because they cannot macro-manage strategically?
• Do real leaders need benchmarks? No or Yes?
• Do agile people need leaders?
• Do you really believe that leading by example can be delegated to somebody else?
Doesn’t look like it can be done… so if you want to make a positive impact, just pick an example and lead: at the end, it is all about P&L