- Reframe to the higher intent
- Double down on alignment
- Explain the framework for making decisions
- Respect the system and interconnectedness of hierarchies
Do these resonate with you as a leader, or do you want to understand them more?
If so read on!
What do these rules mean?
Based on leadership concepts applied in the agile world, these rules help you navigate some fundamental leadership principles needed to create highly engaged autonomous teams.
Understanding these rules can help new leaders get started embracing an agile leadership approach.
Understanding the Rules
Rule 1 — Reframe to the higher intent
When encountering friction in execution, reframing away from detail and clarifying the higher-level intent enables teams to avoid arguments around detail and the opinion driving their alternate perspectives. Instead, clarifying intent allows a team to realign around the higher-level objective and subsequently enables a more constructive conversation to occur around the detail.
Rule 2 — Double down on alignment
When overloaded with work, the tendency for individuals is to get stuck into the detail of execution. Doubling down on alignment instead of focusing on execution enables a leader to unleash the collective power of the team. Instead of wearing the burden of execution alone, ensuring high alignment to the goals and strategies of the team enables all team members to contribute at a significantly higher level of effectiveness. Doubling down on alignment subsequently reduces the workload for the leader.
Rule 3 — Explain the framework for making decisions
When developing a team, there is a fine line between providing too much room for growth and not enough. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to direct and tell teams what to do. Direction giving is often amplified by how confident they are that they are right.
Instead of telling your team what to do, it is possible to generate better outcomes by helping them make decisions that are as good as, or better than your own.
By explaining the environment they are unaware of, and the strategies you would employ, you help teams make better decisions. If you also refrain from telling them the things that they could come up with themselves, you generate increased engagement towards achieving the goal.
Due to the co-creation approach that follows, while resulting in more effective execution, you also develop the team's strategic thinking skills, ultimately resulting in a higher-performing team.
Rule 4 — Respect the interconnectedness and system of hierarchies
When encountering a problem in a system, it is rarely the sole responsibility or fault of a single element of the system.
Telling someone to "just do a better job" or "fixing" a single element of the system often results in short-lived impacts and rarely creates the effect you expect.
Instead, by focusing on changing the environment and the dynamics that are preventing the system from succeeding, you can create a more impactful change. Focusing on changing the system will often result in processes that are entirely changed, ensuring different results occur.
Why adopt an Agile Leadership approach?
Leading an Agile team is quite different from leading a traditional team. So much so, it is common for people not from the agile world to be sceptical as to whether "Agile Leadership" actually works.
The problem is "Agile Leadership" isn't really a thing. Instead, it is a leadership style that draws on the modern leadership principles that work for rapidly changing business environments.
Traditional leadership styles still work, but depending on your business environment, they may no longer be the best ones suited for you.
What is an Agile Leadership Style?
Agile encourages "responding to change over following a plan" as well as empowering "individuals and interactions over process and tools". This difference in focus means that the leadership styles that worked well for traditional scientific management approaches don't work in an Agile context.
The core problem is that the styles popularised by Frederick Taylor with scientific management assumed people were lazy and should be told what to do. Because leaders just needed to tell people what to do and be followed, there was no need for workers to understand or care about what a company was trying to achieve. They just had to do.
In contrast, an Agile Leadership style is designed around the belief that people are inherently motivated, and a leader's job is to help them be awesome. By enabling individuals and building their commitment to a vision rather than conscripting them to it, it is possible to achieve more than we could otherwise have.
However, because Agile draws on a wide range of modern leadership concepts, it can be challenging to know how you should respond in various situations. Instead of attempting to learn everything on day one, I find it easier to start with just the two fundamental concepts that I believe are critical for creating highly engaged autonomous teams.
These two concepts are Directed Opportunism and Systems Thinking.
What is Directed Opportunism?
Created by Stephen Bungay in The Art of Action, Directed Opportunism is the business adaptation of a tried and tested leadership approach. This approach manifests itself in modern military organisations as Mission Command. Developed over decades, this leadership style encourages empowered action by individuals at the team level while retaining high-level alignment to the overall objectives of an organisation.
This level of alignment and autonomy is achieved through the effective use of clear missions and operating parameters.
What is Systems Thinking?
Systems Thinking is a collection of concepts that embrace the interconnectedness of our world and provides tools and approaches that help with understanding it, as well as changing it.
Within Systems Thinking, it is accepted that a system is not the sum of its parts, but rather something different due to the interconnectedness of its elements.
Helping new leaders understand these two concepts helps prepare them to deal with complex business problems by giving them the skills to build and enable highly aligned autonomous teams.
Why use the rules?
Because an agile leadership style can be difficult to grasp immediately, I use these four key rules to help leaders take their first steps on this path.
These rules help leaders reflect on how they are leading. They also provide a guide on how you can respond in certain situations without having to explain in detail the broad concepts that underpin them.
Using these rules helps reduce the time it takes for leaders to apply an agile leadership style by providing some basic strategies and tactics to get started.
Wrap Up — What if I choose to be an Agile Leader?
If you choose to start using an agile leadership style, remember the rules and use them to reflect on how you are approaching various situations:
Reframe to the higher intent — When you encounter friction in execution, always reframe away from detail and clarify the higher-level intent.
Double down on alignment — When you find yourself overloaded with work, double down on alignment instead of getting stuck in execution.
Explain the framework for making decisions — Instead of making decisions, help your team make decisions that are as good as, or better than your own. Do this by explaining the environment and the strategies you employ that they aren't aware of themselves; only directing when others can't come up with it by themselves.
Respect the interconnectedness and system of hierarchies — When trying to improve something, telling someone to do a better job rarely works. Instead, focus on changing the environment that is making it hard for them to succeed.
You will never remember to apply all the rules, all the time. However, by keeping these rules in mind, you can limit the periods in which you lead with a style that isn't contributing to developing a highly engaged autonomous team.
I hope you'll find these rules useful — I still use them myself to help make sure I'm doing the right thing.
Good Luck!
If there is interest in this post, I'll continue to write about these four rules in more detail in future blog posts. I would appreciate feedback and thoughts about what should be explained more.