How to anchor an agile mindset in the culture and behavior of your company?
Are you a change agent? Here some coaching tips to promote an agile mindset in your organization.
1. Be aware of your enemies
Becoming truly agile is slowed down by following factors:
- a multi-layered hierarchy makes your organization rigid
- your organization is structured in functional departments - source of silos
- people in your company are used to detailed planning ahead
- managers are afraid of loosing power by given up on their roles
- you have a culture of zero failure - everything must be perfect
- traditions tie you down - you hear often from key stakeholders ‘we always did it that way’
If you can tick some of those boxes, be ready to fight against a strong resistance to change.
2. Get the right people on your side
Pitch the C-level management, from whom the success of your project depends. Without their buy-in, you are not going to move as wished. Consult and seek the support of experienced agile practitioners.
3. Create an environment of trust and transparency
The teams need a safe place to ideate, innovate and experiment as well as to share honest feedback.
4. Train people
Spread the agile principles to the whole organization and make sure everyone gets a chance to be trained on how what the agile mindset truly means. Identify your change agents and create a network of agile supports, to whom teams with questions or issues on the topic can reach out.
5. Establish new governance
Re-define how to understand success and establish new performance metrics. Base milestones on objectives evaluation of working systems.
While flattening the hierarchy, help the managers grow into leaders.
6. Engage people
Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers by decentralizing decision making. Provide a strong purpose, enough autonomy and an environment of mutual influence. At the same time try to minimize constraints. By breaking silos, people will have the chance to acquire new skills. The opportunity of continuous learning helps keeping the team motivated.
7. Improve continuously
Build incrementally with fast an integrated learning cycles. Involve and request customers feedback. The journey of the agile transition never ends and needs continuous adaptation and change.