Agility in HR & Agile Leadership & Coaching

ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile HR (ICP-AHR)

In this course, we are exploring HRs new role in an Agile organisation!

About

Today the most progressive companies have changed the HR role to a more coaching role serving all the people, not just management. Although this changed view of the formal HR role is still not fully mainstream today, many organisations are experimenting with alternative structures, ways of working (like Scrum), and people practices that allow a truly Agile culture to thrive.

You will leave this experience having gained both knowledge and practical skills to bring forward new ways of working and being that place HR in a leading position to creating lasting change, engagement, and a truly empowered workplace. 

Time Frame

The program is made up of 12 topics that we will cover over 12 intensive online sessions (Zoom) – beginning October 16 and ending on December 18 2020. Friday sessions only: session 1: 08:00 – 09:30 / break / session 2: 11:00 – 12:30 / break / session 3: 14:30 – 16:00.

Date   Topics

16-10  Fundamentals 1 -3

23-10 Fundamentals 4 – 5 + Assignment

30-10 Agile HR 1 – 3

06-11 Agile HR 4 – 6

13-11 Agile HR 7 + Assignment

20-11 Agile Leadership 1 – 3

27-11 Agile Leadership 4 – 6

04-12 Agile Leadership 7 + Assignment

11-12 Agile People Coach 1 – 2

18-12 Agile People Coach 3 – 4

Target Audience

The target audience for this training includes HR Professionals, Change Agents, People Managers, Agile Coaches, Scrum Master, Agile Project Managers and people working in companies who require transformation to Agile ways of working. Their current responsibilities may include aspects such as people development, recruitment, performance management, compensation, and employee engagement/motivation. 

Organisational development consultants, hiring managers and Agile transformation leads exploring the people, and structural aspects of transformations will also find this curriculum compelling.

These books written by Pia-Maria Thoren are included in digital format.

Program Content

Agile People Fundamentals

Session 1 – F1: Introduction to Agile People and important principles/tools

The foundation of Agile People’s’ mindset is about the principles, values, methods, and tools that we need to start using to release competence and innovation – and what we stop doing. We discuss your challenges and certification assignment.

Session 2-  F2: Psychological safety as a foundation for a learning organisation

The importance of an approach that is permeated by security and confidence to increase profitability and innovation – to increase creativity through a culture where it is ok to fail and try again. We play “The Psychological Safety Game” to facilitate dialogue about difficult topics

Session 3 – 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 optimise flows in a system instead of working with resource optimisation and sub-optimisation of departments. Mindset Slider exercise. WoWs to be used: Beyond Budgeting, OKRs, Impact Mapping, VSM, etc.

Session 4 – F4: Building conditions for agile culture

Creating conditions for a fantastic culture where people can perform at their optimal level with a sense of being supported and secure. The gap between structures and culture/values. Structure – Culture Misfit Role Play. The importance of country culture for an Agile transformation.

Session 5 –  F5: The learning Organisation as Strategy and the future role of HR and managers

Boundary Spanning and the Buddy System to increase cross-border collaboration and increase the opportunity to create a fantastic organisation together. Tips and examples for the change journey and how HR and managers need to change their role to support it.

Agile People HR

Session 6 – H1: How HR’s role is changing when we need to increase Business Agility 

Design the talent/people elements needed to help support an Agile transition in an organisation and explain how different contexts can influence the approach to be taken. Job titles, competency profiles, titles, career, succession – how do we do it in an agile organisation? User stories for HR and a T-shaped HR-person. Employee Journey mapping – pain points. Examples and cases.

Session 7 – H2: How HR can use tools and practices from Agile. 

Using Scrum, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, and OKRs for HR is not so different from using it for Software development. What are examples, and how can you design talent/people processes using the agile ways of working? User stories for HR – what do they look like? Examples and cases of Agile HR in reality. 

Session 8 – H3: Performance management and examples & cases

Appraise current performance management practices and identify ways of bringing Agile thinking to enhance performance, accountability, and growth. 95/5 Exercise.

Session 9 – H4: Compensation and Benefits

Examples and Cases. Describe and contrast traditional incentive structures with Agile-friendly structures, discuss the pros and cons of each approach, and explain how you could apply them to your environment.

Session 10 – H5: Talent Acquisition and onboarding

Design a sourcing strategy that can be used to find and acquire the “right” people to support the strategic growth of the organisation taking values, culture, diversity, and collaboration into the hiring decision. Design an onboarding experience that enables new employees to become a part of the organisation rapidly and smoothly.

Session 11 – H6: Employee Engagement

Recommend different motivational tools to be applied in a context and describe how the traditional employee engagement survey is changing.

Session 12 – H7: Learning and Development

Suggest ways to enable and support a learning mindset in a team, supporting the shift from a focus on deficiencies to a focus on the development of new skills and capabilities.

ICAgile Certified Professional 

This training is certified by International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile), a certification and accreditation body.

Upon completion of the course and submission and approval of your course assignment, you will receive (knowledge) certification in ICP-Agility in HR.

Learn more about ICAgile ( https://www.icagile.com/ )

Agile People Leadership (ICP-LEA) 

Today the most progressive companies have changed the formal management role to a more servant leadership role, realizing that people are most productive, creative and happy when they have personal control over their own lives and the ability to be leaders of their destiny, private or work-related. In these organizations, everybody is expected to be a leader, so there is paradoxical, a lot more leadership there.

This training leads to an ICAgile Certification in Leading in Agility (ICP-LEA) – read more under FAQ below

Although the changed view on leaders and of the formal manager role is far from mainstream today, many organizations are experimenting with alternative structures, replacing budgets with forecasts and dynamic resource allocation, to create the best possible value. The role of managers is changing rapidly and also, the role of HR is under tremendous change, from focusing mainly on policies and processes to understanding that the future for HR lies in creating conditions for people to perform and be happy. By removing impediments, we can instead maximize engagement and employee satisfaction that will fuel speed and adaptability in a common, strategic direction.

The question is, where do managers and HR go from here? What will become of them, when everybody seems to be able to lead themselves? Will, they slowly become obsolete when information and knowledge are transparent for everybody and power is not anymore in the hands of a few “talents” who were promoted because they were seen as “HIPOs” in a world where people were judged in a yearly performance review? Or is there an alternative future role that would be the natural step when leaving the process-oriented and transactional leadership style in favor of ways of working more suitable for a complex reality?

Regardless if you are an agile coach, a line manager or an HR professional, you need to understand how people strategy and people operations need to change when working in a company embracing the agile value structure. 

During the Agile People Leadership training we cover 3 perspectives:

Individual perspective (YOU) Knowing yourself and why you do what you do.

• The Reiss Motivation Profile (RMP) shows your basic needs and motives, and contributes to a better understanding of yourself and your leadership, and why you do what you do…
• Helping others finding their perfect place in the organization taking their personality and situation into account

Team perspective  (WE IN OUR TEAM)

• How to increase the pace from immature to mature high-performing teams, using skills for communication 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 their salaries

Organizational 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 (via OKRs or other kinds of relative targets)
• How to work to change behaviors – accomplishing an agile mindset and culture through removing limiting structures (budgets linked to fixed performance targets and rewards)
• Create a Learning organization where it’s ok to make mistakes and learn from them (requires a platform of Psychological Safety)

Workshop program Session 13-19: Agile People Leadership

Session 13 – L1: Why Agile Leadership: The impact of big trends and the VUCA world and the drawbacks of the waterfall method for development of new products. Problems with the way we still manage and lead and the better way. Theory X and Y view of leadership – examples.

Session 14 – L2: Types of leadership: A walkthrough of Leadership history and how it has developed until today.

Session 15 – L3: What is Agile Leadership? Examples of frameworks and cases. 9 leadership principles and the gardener metaphor. How performance can be supported with alternative ways of working. Leadership Maturity exercise.

Session 16 – L4: Knowing and leading yourself: Emotional intelligence, mental models and mindful leadership. The organization as a social construct and interpersonal mush vs. interpersonal clarity. How we are biased: 4 examples of biases that we all hold and the antidote. The 4 selves of a leader with a self-assessment.

Session 17 – L5: Conflict resolution: Basic conflict theory and finding the right balance between harmony and creative conflict in a team or organization.

Session 18 – L6: Effective Communication: How do we make sure that what we communicate get the intended result and that we are clear on how to communicate the right stuff in a way that would make sense for people, regardless of cognitive differences?

Session 19 – L7: Boundary Spanning – working cross-functionally and spanning boundaries of different kinds, inside and outside the organization and between topics, areas and diverse people. Buddy System exercise.

Conclusion and next steps: Retrospective (ALL) and KUDOs

Session 20 – C1: Introduction to Agile Coaching – the four roles of a coach: Mentoring, teaching, facilitation and coaching. What is the difference between an Agile Coach and an Agile People Coach?

Session 23 – C4: Conflict Coaching – in our role as an Agile People Coach, there will be times where we need to help people navigate friction and conflict. Either in groups or working, how they escalate, and how we can map conflicts. We will also explore how we can help foster healthy conflicts, and how to coach individuals and groups in navigating more challenging ones.

Manfred van Veghel, has 30 years of training and consultancy experience from large Dutch and international companies for Agile, HR, Leadership and Organization. He is the founder of the Agile Caribbean Meetup Group and has a global network of Agile People.

As a consultant he has worked with Agile since 2001 at ABN AMRO (DSDM) with several frameworks, Agile Project Management, DevOps, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Agile HR, Lean Leadership & Kaizen, from the Healthcare sector to ICT and governmental organizations in Europe, US and on different Caribbean islands.

We are working with Zoom for presentations and team exercises, Trello for keeping track of the agenda items and exercises and Slack for communication between the sessions. There will be some work to be done after every session, so add about 5 hours more every week. Course literature and material will be sent to your location and distributed digitally. 

During the period, you take part in 1,5-hour sessions. Totally 12 sessions – six options, depending on where you are in the world. The date and time are the starts of every session. Please add what Option you choose when you sign up.

You don’t need any pre-competence of agile to attend the online course. We are tailoring the course for the participants and your level.

How does the process look for this training?

The training is a copy of the physical training but we will use online tools instead of face-to-face meetings. You will need a good internet connection and an undisturbed workplace where you can have a quiet background. We will work in break-out sessions in Zoom and use Slack for communication between the instructor-led sessions, which will happen every week between 15-17 Central European Time.

All material will be shared via a Trello board and a Google drive. We will let you know everything about practicalities during the first session.

Yes, classes will be scheduled on specific days and times. See above what applies to this course.

After training completion, what is the process to become ICAgile Certified?

The process of certification is that you need to finalize the certification assignment, which is to describe how you would turn around HR and leadership in a company that has gone bankrupt due to not being agile enough (real case, a Swedish fashion company). When the assignment is finalized (approved with feedback from us), we will make your certificate download available from ICAgile via a link.