Leading with Agility

ICP-LEA

Are You The Leader You Want To Be?

Are you practicing the Leadership you aspire to? Becoming the leader you would like to be, does not happen by chance but by working continuously to improve and grow. To change others, you must start by being the change you want to see.

Achieving effective leadership begins with leading oneself. Enhance your leadership skills by developing an adaptive and agile leadership style.

Leading others starts with developing self-leadership, understanding biases and how behaviors affect others, and learning how effective communication can be vital in relating to others.

Agile Leadership is about creating an environment where people can be their best. To lead others, we first need to understand ourselves. The course will provide insights to understand yourself on a deeper level better, why you do what you do, and how you can use this knowledge in interaction with others.

What You'll Learn:

  • Understanding the difference between Power & Influence in organizations, focusing on how they are obtained and utilized, and their effects on relationships and decision-making
  • How to develop self-awareness and enhance your self-management skills: these skills enable you to understand yourself better and navigate challenges more effectively
  • How to apply emotional intelligence in relationships, understanding and managing emotions, improving communication, resolving conflicts, and building stronger connections with others
  • About different leadership styles’; how to adapt your leadership approach based on the needs of the situation and the individuals you are leading.

Our course is available as a dynamic 2-day workshop or 10 engaging 2-3-hour online sessions, leading to a Professional Certification in Agility in Leadership with Agile People and ICAgile.

Why Choose This Training

Whether you are a leader or an individual seeking to elevate your career, this course is designed for you. Invest in your own personal and professional development. 

You will gain the knowledge, skills, and mindset necessary to drive impactful outcomes, build strong relationships, and create a positive and adaptive work environment. Develop relevant leadership capabilities and stay ahead of the curve in today’s dynamic business landscape. Enhance career opportunities and join a network of professionals committed to adaptive leadership.

Our interactive group sessions encourage sharing experiences, discussions, and hands-on learning through our Learning Management System (LMS).

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to take the first step toward becoming the leader you would like to become.

Related Programs

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Target Audience

Leaders

 Leaders at all levels who see the value of growing a collaborative, people-centric organization and are committed to developing the people on their teams.

Agile Coaches

Agile coaches want to learn more about the human aspect of agile and to better facilitate effective teamwork and collaboration within organizations.

Consultants

Consultants that want to deepen their agile understanding to support customers in agile transformations better.

HR

HR professionals at all levels who want to understand and develop people-centric processes and leadership.

Agile People

Curious individuals who seek growth and new challenges and believe in people-centric organizations.

What Differentiates Our Courses & Training Programs

Interactive Learning

Our approach emphasizes interactive group work, enabling participants to learn from one another through shared experiences and knowledge during engaging group discussions.

Professional Certificate

The course leads to a Professional Certification with Agile People and ICAgile. To ensure top-quality learning experiences against proven Learning Outcomes, our courses are accredited by ICAgile, a leading global agile accreditation and certification body.

Agile People Campus

With both the online and in-person workshop, you will gain access to our Learning Management System (LMS), where you can delve into the theory and acquire in-depth knowledge of the subject matter at your phase.

Practical Tools And A New Network

The training will teach you new skills and practical tools while establishing valuable connections. As part of our commitment to your agile journey, we organize regular events to enrich your learning experience further.

Find Your An Agility In Leadership Course Or Program

At Agile People, we consistently offer online training sessions and in-person workshops. Our dedication is to ensure that every participant gains the knowledge and skills they seek, whether they’re joining us virtually or in person.

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Across the globe, our licensed, experienced trainers deliver our training courses and programs with the same dedication, and we are proud to have this global footprint. They frequently offer instruction in their native languages for localized understanding and relevance.

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More Course Information

Course Description

The online and in-person workshops cover ten key topics and are described more in detail in our Course Description.

Three Perspectives

The training covers three perspectives; Individual (you), team (we in our group), and organizational (all of us).

Learning Outcomes

ICAgile accredits our courses and programs, and all our courses have a detailed learning outcome.

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Course Description

This course is divided into two parts, Agile People Fundamentals and Leading With Agility, and each part has five engaging sessions. Uncover the essential principles and practices of Agile People Fundamentals, followed by a deep dive into Leading With Agility.

Agile People Fundamentals

Session F1: Introduction to Agile People and Important Principles/Tools
The foundation of Agile Peoples’ mindset is about the principles, values, methods, and tools we need to start using to release competence and innovation – and what we stop doing. We discuss your challenges and go through the certification assignment. This session is an introduction to the agile way of working and thinking.

Session F2: Psychological Safety as a Foundation for a Learning Organization
The importance of an approach that is permeated by security and confidence to increase profitability and innovation is emphasized in this session – we need psychological safety to increase creativity through a culture where it is ok to fail fast and try again. We play “The Psychological Safety Game” to facilitate the dialogue about complex topics.

Session F3: Emerging Strategies, Structures, and Goals
Emerging strategies instead of long-term planning, new ways of working with strategy, budgets, goals, performance processes, and rewards. Using value stream mapping to optimize flows in a system instead of working with resource optimization and sub-optimization of departments. Mindset Slider exercise. WoWs to be used: Beyond Budgeting, OKRs, Impact Mapping, VSM, etc.

Session F4: Building Conditions for an Agile Culture
In this session, we explore how you can create conditions for a fantastic culture where people can perform at their optimal level, feeling supported and secure. The gap between structures and culture/values is discussed. Structure – Culture Misfit Role Play. The importance of country culture for an Agile transformation.

Session F5: Creating Conditions for Change
In today’s fast-moving and complex environments, we are challenged as people and as organizations to be much more responsive and adaptable to have the capacity to navigate in complexity. How can we make sense of things when things keep changing? How can we make decisions and act when we don’t have all the information we need most of the time?

In this module, we explore VUCA, try out a sense-making and decision-enabling framework for leaders (CYNEFIN), and explore what enables our organizations to become genuine learning organizations.

Talent Acqusition

Leading With Agility

Session L1: The Why & What of Leading with Agility
In this session, we explore the changing environment & dynamics that call for a different leading and following approach.  We look into the misalignment between what managers think drives their people and what people – knowledge workers – expect from managing and leading them.  Finally, we explore our understanding and expectations. What are some of the attitudes, expectations, and concrete behaviors we hope to see from people who lead with agility?

Session L2: Behaviors that Enable Agility
When you wish to make a radical change or transformation, understanding three things enables you to shift.  Where are we coming from, where are we now, and where are we heading toward? This session explores the evolution of leadership theories and which leadership styles and approaches they have given birth to.  We determine what is still relevant. And what needs to change.  A big part of that shift comes from understanding the nature of Power & Influence and how we gain power might be changing. Finally, we look into specific qualities & competencies we can cultivate and develop to increase our agility.

Session L3: Knowing & Connecting with Yourself
If we cannot understand and embrace ourselves, we have little hope for fully understanding and accepting others. Understanding why we react to things in specific ways gives us the insights and ability to choose our responses better and change how we show up in our interactions. Leading others starts with developing our self-leadership. In this session, we explore ways to map and become more aware of our own experiences. We dive into heuristics – cognitive biases – to understand how they work and influence our thinking, how we can become more aware of them, and, most importantly, how we can counter them. Finally, we explore specific leadership mind-traps and how we can unlock those mind-traps to show up in better ways as leaders.

Session L4: Developing & Leading Ourselves
Having gained some insights into how we can know and connect with ourselves to choose how we respond to situations and show up in our interactions with others, it’s now time to put that into practice. We familiarise ourselves with the Clear Leadership model developed by Gervase Bushe and create the leader’s four selves. The Aware Self, the Descriptive Self, the Curious Self, and the Appreciative Self. We explore several different contexts where we can put these into practice. To better check in with people, give and receive effective feedback, step into coaching leadership, and defuse conflicts through creating interpersonal clarity.

Session L5: Skillful Communication
Communicating effectively, relating to others, creating and maintaining healthy interactions, having productive conversations, and ultimately influencing others require both practice and an understanding of the dynamics of effective communication. In this session, we work on the dynamics of effective communication through the lenses of several mental models, the dynamics of productive conversations, and the power of compelling storytelling to move and influence others.  We explore three types of stories we can learn to identify and narrative patterns that help you tell compelling stories as a leader. 

Learning Outcomes - Leading With Agility

Why And What Of Leading With Agility

New Organizational And Leadership Capabilities We Need Today

  • Organizational Agility Capability
    • For most of the 20th century, organizations have been optimized to increase efficiency and maximize production in large part by exploiting economies of scale.
    • Organizations need to optimize for increased innovation and accelerated learning to survive and continue to remain relevant. Examples of effective capabilities used for agility are:
      • An innovative culture: An organization-wide mindset to seek and explore and a cross-functional ability to quickly spark, develop and implement new ideas.
      • A nurturing collaborative environment: a work environment where workers are inspired and they can thrive and create.
      • The ability to continuously adapt: The ability to adaptively respond to rapidly changing external conditions, including the ability to evolve value streams continuously, product, and strategy. Continuous adaption extends beyond incremental improvement of discrete processes to include broader, deeper, enterprise-wide change.
      • Organizational learning and sense-making: A systemic capability to sense the unfiltered, often-chaotic external environment and then make sense of it by synthesizing diverse perspectives into coherent accounts capable of driving decisions, innovation, and policy. Traditionally leadership instructs the rest of the organization. In the learning organization, the rest of the organization instructs leadership.
      • Continuous engagement: The ability to stay engaged and aligned with employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders, even as internal and external conditions continuously change. Relying on a few fixed communication pathways for the sake of efficiency no longer suffices when conditions are emergent, the source of meaningful signals is unpredictable, and structure is dynamic.
  • Why Agility in Leadership is Needed
    • Organizations must transform to develop the new capabilities required to face the challenges of the world we live in today. To lead our transformed organizations effectively, we must also transform ourselves as leaders. The leadership and management practices developed to manage efficiency and production-focused organizations are not suitable for leading learning organizations or for cultivating innovative cultures. Transformation is continuous and never-ending — there is no end-state; rather, the organization is continually improving and evolving.
    • Provide an opportunity for leaders to discuss how traditional approaches to management and leadership don’t always meet the needs of our transforming organizations. In particular, leaders will self-assess to determine how they might need to change their own behavior and attitudes to properly serve the needs of 21st-century organizations.
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Behaviors That Increase Agility 

  • Understanding Power & Influence
    • There is a difference between the vested authority of a title and the ability to influence by other means. Understanding the situational factors is key to applying the appropriate style of power and influence. Provide ways of assessing the need for power in various situations to understand the difference between positional and natural authority, especially in regard to influencing people. Ground this discussion in the culture of innovation that agile leaders strive to create and the ways various forms of power and influence could undermine or promote that.
    • For example, how do you know what kind of power or influence to exercise at any given time? What are the variables to consider as you make your choice? Even if you have to take direct control, how do you enable people to engage and transition to greater empowerment over time? Be clear about the difference between the vested authority of a title and the ability to influence through other means. How effective is coercion or force as a means of persuasion in today’s workplace?
  • Leadership Styles
    • Leaders often associate effective leadership with particular leadership styles. However, even though a given leader may have a predominant leadership style, the agile leader understands the need to expand their range and bring in new styles depending on the situation. Also, it is essential to bring awareness to the impact of certain leadership styles on the goal of cultivating agility and a culture of innovation.
    • Introduce different approaches and/or models for leadership to foster awareness of the participant’s personal leadership style and help them develop an awareness of how to expand their leadership range. Discuss different types of leadership styles and the impact they have on motivating behaviors to increase learning, innovation, and collaboration

Developing Personal Agility

Developing Self As an Instrument

  • Self-Awareness & Self-Management
    • Self-awareness refers to how aware an individual is of their own emotional state and how it may impact their behavior in a given moment. Self-awareness also refers to the kinds of behaviors one defaults to in different situations. Self-management refers to one’s ability to apply insights gained from self-awareness to act from one’s intention and leadership stance.
    • Review and discuss one or more models for emotional intelligence in enough detail to gain a general familiarity with the “personal competence” aspects of emotional intelligence (as outlined here).
  • Mindfulness
    • Mindfulness is the ability to focus on the present moment and take in everything that is happening around you and within you, including your own thoughts and feelings. When fully aware, we enable ourselves to act deliberately in the present moment rather than impulsively, thereby magnifying our efficacy. This also enables us to make decisions calmly in a thoughtful, non-reactive way.
    • Explain the concept and value of mindfulness and introduce the learner to at least one mindfulness practice.
  • Growth Mindset for Leadership
    • Personal and professional growth involves believing that we can change, then examining and deliberately advancing our patterns of thought, feelings, and behavior. We can develop new mental and emotional capabilities.
    • Explain the criticality of a growth mindset for leading with agility
  • Personal Purpose and Values
    • Leaders are most effective when they lead in alignment with their personal purpose and values. The first step is to make the effort to reflect upon and identify one’s own purpose and values. This helps ensure that leaders lead organizations from a place of authenticity with respect to how they align with the organization’s purpose.
    • Illustrate the importance of clarifying one’s own purpose and values for authentic and effective leadership. While it is common to act automatically from inherited values, an agile leader intentionally chooses the values which will guide their thinking and actions and constantly work to close the gap between espoused values and values-in-action. Emphasize the connections among these concepts and the concepts of self-awareness, self-management, and mindfulness. Provide one or more tools/techniques to help participants identify their purpose and values.

Developing Self As Leader 

  • Assessing Yourself as a Leader
    • The ability to assess oneself as a leader using a variety of measures is a crucial step in leadership development.
    • Explain at least one model for self-assessment, such as the Leadership Circle™, Agile Leader Health Radar™, Blind Spot Assessment, and/or Implicit Association test.
  • Skills of Self Development
    • Personal development for leaders has often been considered only “nice to have” in leader development. More and more research, however, is revealing a correlation between the level of personal development and organizational efficacy.
    • Describe the importance of personal development for leaders and how it relates to organizational efficacy.
  • Mental Models
    • The term “mental models” refers to the deeply ingrained assumptions, beliefs, and stories we hold about ourselves and the world. Agile leaders regularly practice surfacing and examining their own and others’ mental models. They also recognize that others have a different experience of situations, sometimes radically different and that we cannot assume a common frame of reference.
    • Teach ways to identify one’s own mental models and to be aware that others will have different mental models. Explain concepts like Chris Argyris’ practice of double-loop learning or William Isaacs’ Dialog process. Relate the importance of identifying mental models to the overall process of self-development.
  • Committing to and Practicing Agile Values
    • On the personal leadership journey, aspiring agile leaders are called upon to serve as role models for the values they encourage their organizations to espouse.
    • Convey in concrete terms what agile values are and why they are needed to develop organizational agility. Leaders will discuss how emergent agile values may conflict with values long existent in organizational culture and how critically important it is for leaders to resolve this conflict by demonstrating that they have personally adopted these values.

Developing Relationship Agility

  • Introducing To EQ: Social Context
  • Emotional Intelligence in Relationships
    • Emotional intelligence also refers to an individual’s social awareness and relationship management. Social awareness is a person’s ability to sense and empathize with another. Relationship management is a person’s ability to interact with another on the basis of what could best serve that other or the relationship you have with that other, as opposed to interacting with another on the basis of one’s emotional reaction or habitual behavior.
    • Introduce the INTER-personal aspects of emotional intelligence. Review and discuss one or more models for emotional intelligence in enough detail to gain a general familiarity with the different aspects of emotional intelligence in the context of Agile organizations.
  • Thinking About Organizations as Human Systems
    • Effective Agile leaders need to understand organizations as multi-leveled human systems. The roles that people play in organizations are complicated by the fact that they simultaneously participate in multiple systems and sub-systems. The implication for leaders is that policies or decisions that are perfectly acceptable in one system’s context may generate an unintended consequence or conflict in a different system’s context.
    • Develop leaders’ awareness of the different systems found within organizations, the often hidden dependencies between them, and how conflict can arise when they have incongruent agendas. Introduce steps leaders can take and practices they can adopt that will help them navigate, maintain congruence and reconcile concerns across systems.

Exercising Agility In Key Conversations

  • Conversations as the Key Vehicle of Communication in Agile Leadership
    • Communication skills commonly emphasized in leadership courses imply a one-way exchange, with the intention of making the communication successful enough that it is fully received and accepted. A conversation, on the other hand, is, by definition, at least a two-way exchange and is the primary mode of communication for an agile leader. This implies that a variety of points of view will be exchanged and allows for the possibility of a meeting of diverse minds. The quality of conversations is, therefore, key.
    • Highlight the importance of being able to engage in effective conversations. Provide the opportunity for learners to practice inquiry & advocacy skills, including framing invitations rather than demands and asking clarifying, opening, deepening, and provocative questions. Also, discuss the importance of enabling high-quality conversations as a leader as opposed to always participating in them.
  • Telling Compelling Stories as a Leader
    • Storytelling is a key skill for leadership – stories are inspirational and make a message personal and relatable. Also, careful use of metaphor and understanding of the power of what language conveys is key to stories and conveying intent.
    • Show how to extract the meaning from a situation and craft a compelling story. Provide examples of how metaphors and language influence what is taken away from stories.

Leading To Agility

Organizational Transformation And Agility

  • The Nature of Organizational Transformation
    • Organizational transformation differs significantly from more limited organizational change initiatives. Often, transformation teams mistake organizational transformation for a series of limited change initiatives.
    • Describe how transformation is different from typically sponsored change initiatives. Point out that transformation generally implies a change in purpose or strategy that is radical and systemic, while sponsored change initiatives are more limited and typically focus on the how and less on the what and why. Discuss how the transformation process is different from the change process of more limited change initiatives. In particular, discuss how transformations tend to take their own course on their own time and that they are less predictable and less controllable than more limited change initiatives. Note that transformational change can run deep and have a profound impact on personal identity, norms, attitudes, mindset, and corporate culture. Explain how traditional organizational change models designed for limited change initiatives may not provide all leaders need to navigate transformation.
  • Why Transformation is Needed for Agility
    • The development of capabilities needed for sustainable organizational agility involves much more radical and systemic changes.
    • Discuss the reasons why established organizations need to undergo a transformation in order to develop agile capabilities. Cite examples such as radical shifts in how decisions and responsibility are distributed and fundamental changes in mindset (e.g., shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset), values, culture, and purpose.

Leading Change And Transformation

  • Leading from the Future and the Larger Context
    • To paraphrase a famous quote, you get what you pay attention to. If you attend to the present, you get a variation on the same thing. If you think of a future possibility, you are much more likely to achieve something new. As Peter Senge has written, “It’s not what the vision is; it’s what the vision does.”
    • Describe and experience what standing in the future is like and how that impacts one’s assumptions and behavior, as opposed to focusing on future goals while standing in the present state. Creative tension is the gap created when one stands in a desired future while at the same time honestly working with a clear picture of current reality.
  • Leading vs. Managing Change
    • It is sometimes said that you can’t manage transformation, but you can learn to lead it successfully.
    • Discuss how the emergent quality of transformation makes it inherently difficult to predict precise outcomes. Discuss the differences between managing and leading change and why and how leadership grows more important as uncertainty increases (i.e. co-creation of strategies and desired outcomes, bolstering a learning culture by shortening feedback loops and celebrating failure, etc.). Introduce tools and techniques to help gather and distill important information in the face of uncertainty.
  • Leader as Agent of Transformation
    • Leaders can only take an organization as far as they themselves are willing to go and must always see themselves as role models for and agents of the transformation they wish to catalyze in the organization.
    • Discuss how the emergent quality of transformation makes it inherently impossible to predict precise outcomes. Discuss the differences between managing and leading change and both why and how leadership grows more important as uncertainty increases. Review some tools and techniques that help leaders lead as opposed to managing change.

The Training Cover Three Perspectives:

 

Individual
Perspective​

You

  • Knowing yourself and why you do what you do.
  • Developing yourself and understanding biases, mind traps, and how to avoid judging.
  •  Communicating effectively using storytelling and visualization are powerful tools.
  • Coaching others to find their perfect place in the organization taking their personality, interests, and passions into account.

Team
Perspective

We
In Our Team

  • How to increase the pace from immature to mature high-performing teams, using skills for communication, leading, coaching, and conflict resolution.
  • How to grow and develop teams to be independent and empowered to make their own decisions, for example, about their contribution to the organization’s goals or salaries.

Organizatinal
Perspective

All
Of Us

  • How to balance an agile culture with an agile structure, providing enough support for emerging strategies where all people are involved in setting the direction.
  • How to work to change behaviors by removing limiting structures like annual budgets linked to fixed performance targets and individual bonuses.
  • Create conditions for a Learning organization where it’s ok to make mistakes and learn from them, which requires a platform of Psychological Safety.

Glad you want to learn more!

Hello! I am Ingela, and I work with the core team at Agile People. I’d love to connect woth you and explore potential solutions.

You can write me an email or schedule a meeting to discuss further!