Ingredients of a Transformational Leader-What can you do?

Leadership is one of the frequently talked about topic in scholarly and professional literature and yet is the most confused topic. From the great man theories promoted Dowd (1936) emphasizing different degrees of intelligence, energy, and moral force in leadership and contingency theory focusing on task or relationship orientation in effective leadership (Fiedler, 1967) evolved the integrative people-value based theories of transformational leadership evolving from theory and servant leadership evolving from practice have found their common place in many organizations.

Yet, the leadership component is evaluated on management that focuses on tactical execution. Some of the reactive nature of business units makes executive management evaluate if these functional leaders are proactive and transformational. Questions evolve on proactive processes put in place to control chaos where efficiency of management is confused with leadership of effectiveness. In a dynamic demanding organizational environment, what are some of the ways for transformational thinking?

Burns (1978) began with the idea of transformational leadership that Bass (1990) expanded. Additionally, readers are directed Scholar-Practitioners like Peter Drucker and John Kotter for leadership and management. But here I would like to present a few questions and tips that will map to the four “I”s of Transformational Leadership so that one can walk away with actionable steps. Transformational leadership exhibits idealistic influence by inspiring and motivating the team, giving individual consideration differentiating from group and team, and intellectually stimulating them to excel themselves. How could this be done? 

Given below are some questions that people can ask them to

1      How do I facilitate getting the job done always?

2      Do you feel like you have a role or a job?

3.    What have you done to make a member exceed their abilities and grow their skills?

4.    What makes others reach out to you?

5.    What do you know of the individual’s career goals?

6.    How have you addressed “what’s in it for them?”

Transformational Leadership Category	Some Thoughts – Actionable steps
Ideal Influence	1. Walk the talk and avoid lip service. Let the results speak to your efforts. 2. Build trust for the team by “being there” for them and modifying people’s behavior to embrace change 3. Proactively implement new ways to organizational culture
Inspirational Motivation	1. Learn what motivates people – extrinsic and intrinsic needs. 2. Learn from failure so that future strategies can avoid risk and improve quality 3. Maximize learning from success so that these are not accidental outcomes but repeatable outcomes 4. Ask how you contribute to the organizational vision and empower them for change.
Individual Considerations	1. Give work assignments to match one’s skills but challenge you to grow them by pushing them out of comfort zone. Be a servant leader – they may not how it benefits them always. 2. Consciously build a career plan. You owe it to your team even in a balanced matrix organization by providing recommendations.
Intellectual Stimulation	1. Foster Creativity & Innovation - If the wheel is not broken, then, you haven't looked hard enough. 2. If people agree too often with you, ask yourself if you are surrounded by "yes" men.

Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”  To me success is a meeting point between preparation and opportunity. We need to prepare ourselves to lead before an opportunity presents itself. Understanding one’s own drive and emotions is instrumental to understand the others, which is a perquisite for the transformational leadership that is practiced every day with effective habits on us first before they can be practiced on others.

Are there any other actionable steps or questions that can make this list more comprehensive for practice?

References

Bass, B. (1990). Bass & Stogdill's handbook of leadership. New York: Tl1 e Free Press.

Bums, J. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row

Dowd, J. (1936). Control in human societies. New York: Appleton-Century.

Fiedler, F. (1967). A theory of leadership effectiveness. New York: McGraw Hill.

Essential Leadership behaviors for Agile Transformation

In the recent Scrum Coaches Retreat that I attended, I saw a pattern where the majority of the topics presented for discussion centered on organizational transformation and implementing agile correctly. The topics ranged from change management traits for individuals and organizations, executive leadership behaviors, coaching approaches for executive leadership, coaching for non-technology groups to implement agile, facilitation techniques for team trust, and scaling agile for coaching within an organization. Having established, led, and managed a program management office (PMO) in a healthcare IT and professional services industry and with a strong desire on leadership behaviors through project management and product development, I joined the team on this theme seeing an increasing focus around executive leadership behaviors for leading organizations to embrace agile successfully (“Build an Agile Organization Executive Coaching”, 2013).

Following the agile principles of user story development, our group with backgrounds from multiple industries began identifying the major categories of persona in today’s leadership that lacked understanding or came with a traditional mindset in transformation. These observations were later shared across the various participants from numerous countries during our daily retrospectives to further refine our persona categories. The major themes of persona classification of executives evolved are listed as follows that I have reordered in a continuous spectrum of the knowledge of agile in their implementation challenges.

Resistant: The executives that fall into this category are those that have a generational gap leading to a resistance in change. The relevance to current ways of managing projects or understanding product development is not in the radar screen for taking the organization to the next level. These leaders are more task-oriented managers than leaders who feel challenged that agile may not add value. “It has been working for me and so I see no need for agile” is the theme behind such leadership.

Never heard of agile: The executives that fall into this category are open to ideas but are unfamiliar with the agile framework.  This group’s lack of understanding may arise due to many reasons such as their own personality towards new learning, lack of initiative, and firm’s industry representation to understand new trends. These members often rely on the experience of others bringing in consultant experience or another senior member to implement the transformation. If the consultant or the senior members fail to apprise of the executives of the implementation challenges in product development, skills reorientation, and the structure required for agile development to thrive, then, these executives lose faith in Agile.

  

Big Vision: These groups of executives understand that their current structure is not in line with their big vision for growth. They recognize that they need to develop products differently for competitive position of themselves in the marketplace or excelling in doing things efficiently. They have heard of the agile framework through their own due diligence to implement their growth ideas and look forward to their delegates for support.

Misinformed: Similar to object oriented programming where the subclass inherit characteristics of super class, this group of executives have had bad experience from the earlier bad implementation in their organization or in a different organization. Their “bad taste” of agile implementation shouldn’t be attributed to agile framework’s failure but the failure of those leaders or consultants that didn’t implement a stable and scalable solution.

Metric Oriented: Some executives have an instinct to not just focus on the profit motive but also establish key performance indicators. But lack of having correct types of metrics and threshold to begin with may impede successful implementation.

Insufficient Experience: This final group leans on those consultants or senior members that are brought into the organization just because they have implemented agile in their previous job. As Boyatzis and McKee (2005) noted, these high-profile members need to understand the emotional makeup of the new organization and not just their own personal success in their previous job. The reliance on a structure or set of tools that they had found useful previously but failure to understand the new organizational structure, impediments, and product makeup among others add up to the challenge of insufficient experience that these roles bring to implement agile transformation successfully.

In the end, the successful implementation relies on proper coaching of the organizational executive for leadership behaviors that they need to inculcate to succeed leading to forming a team that can coach and train the organization. If the leadership has not bought into the fundamental twelve agile principles for successful agile transformation and middle management members like functional team leads and project management not trained on product ownership, project team leadership, process governance, and client management, then, the fragile leadership should be held accountable for agile framework’s failure.

Do you think there may be other persona besides these persona classifications?

References

Build an Agile organization executive coaching (2013). Scrum Coaches Retreat. Retrieved December 17, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_6rEkTP8k&feature=youtu.be

Boyatzis, R.E. & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant leadership: Renewing yourself and Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.