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The Agile Mindset

Doing agile is one thing. The real challenge of the agile transformation lies in being agile. As a person and a team, but even more so as management and as an entire organization.

Adopting an agile mindset means that you need to understand and commit to become a learning organization and help your teams become learning teams. Managers need to become servant leaders, be authentic and empathic, adopt a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, and need to help their teams and organization adopt an agile mindset.

That is quite a handful…

How to lead the way

An agile transformation is a journey, of many small steps. You, the team(s) you belong to and the teams you are leading have already started on the road. It often turns out that you are not all travelling at the same speed, not quite in the same direction, meet unexpected obstacles, though.

And that is the intention of this training. Learn to set common goals and align your organization and the different roles around it. Adopt a common vocabulary and way of thinking. Align not just practices, but also the mindset. We propose simple models and ideas that guide you through the transformation and that will help you achieve the necessary skills, for you, for your teams and for the entire organization.

The training also gives you a glance at what skills and insights other roles in the organization need to achieve: the scrum masters, team leads, agile coaches, product owners… They all need to contribute to the agile mindset, help the teams in their transformation, learn to extend the agile mindset and empathize with the customer.

To create great teams that build great products.

What will you learn?

Set goals

Agile managers need to set goals for themselves and for their customers and need to help their teams set their own goals. By focusing on what we have already achieved and on the first achievable steps, our dreamed goal comes nearer.

Engage people

We do not want people just doing their job, we want them engaged. Learn about the JD-R model that shows how some factors in the work environment give energy and others just drain energy and cause negative stress, burn-out even. Learn about the broaden-build effect: happier teams find better solutions and invent and build more desirable products. Ask the team what gives them energy, unleash the intrinsic motivation, and take on the demotivating factors.

Build trust

A lack of trust kills the performance of management as well as of operational teams. You learn ways to establish trust, how to be open, transparent, leading by showing vulnerability. Exercises you can later use in your own context.

Foster learning teams

Learning organizations are built on learning teams. We are proud partners of Organisation 4.0, who have developed ‘TeamLearning’. This approach helps teams become learning teams, under the guidance of a team coach.  You discover the core principles of the approach and experience the power of the TeamLearning model and some exercises that are part of it. You get a taste of the approach we apply every day in our coaching in the field.

Collaborate as a team

People like to collaborate, and teams form naturally. But we have also been trained as individualists, working for ourselves. Hierarchy does not match very well with the network of teams that work best to set up the flexible, customer-oriented organization modern business requires, and the latest generations of employees prefer to work in. Again, we will provide you with some handles and insights that will help you support the transformation to autonomous, performing teams and define your role in that new organization.

Delegation instead of fixing

You know that micro-management does not work and that you need your teams to become more autonomous. You probably found out that this is easier said than done. You learn exercises that you can do with your team and that will help in delegation.

And we will dive deeper into the reparation reflex. People come to you with questions they or their team should solve by themselves. Advice you give is often ignored. Instructions cause resistance…

Learn how not to tell people what they need to do, even if they expect that. Instead, use active listening and solution-oriented coaching, ask open questions, make people reflect on their own situation. Learn how the monkey does not jump onto your shoulder…

Understand and respect your customer

Use Design Thinking to empathize with your customer. Great products do not just deliver what the customer requires, they are also desirable and sustainable. Product management needs to adopt the agile mindset and help the organization become customer centric.

The new way of working

New forms of collaboration are becoming popular. Open spaces, intervision, consent decision making, dot voting, 1-2-4-all, all new forms of eliciting the diversity of opinions that will help create the best solutions for your customers and will make the team members feel heard, respected, and feel  their opinion matters. Knowing these will help you connect with your teams.

 

Who can benefit from this training?

The training is intended for managers involved in an agile transformation, starting out or already well under way. You may be responsible for the transformation, belong to the leading coalition or just a manager interested in what impact the agile transformation has for you. You want to learn what needs to be done in the transformation, start on the right foot and keep the momentum going. You may want to take colleagues with you, senior scrum masters or product owners, so you can find out together what each can use in their role and what other training they may need.

Practical

The training takes two days. It is remote, as long as COVID measures require. This provides an additional training objective: how to use modern tools such as Miro and Zoom to help your teams more performant and you become an effective coaching manager, remotely.