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The Professional Scrum Series #7
The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations
Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive
To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.
The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done.
Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster.
"Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it."
--From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.
The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done.
Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster.
"Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it."
--From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
208 pages, Paperback
First published May 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 14, 2022
A must read for anyone, but especially departement managers and people managers, embarking on an agile transformation!!
January 17, 2025
Highly recommended for leaders spearheading transformation in their organizations. This book is endorsed by scrum.org, and is primarily focused on leaders, the challenges they will face and what they must do in the face of agile transformations.
Just when I thought that I knew everything there was to learn about Agile, this book offered more ideas. This book offers the best of theory and story. On one hand there is a fictional story based on the authors' real life experiences, while on the other hand there is theory and commentary explaining the generic situations that organizations face.
There are several models this book introduces, but of them I found these 3 new which I hadn't come before:
Agile culture: On a world where there is a lot of opinion on what it means to be agile, this book boils the definition of agile culture o two factors: self-managed teams and empiricism. In the absence of these two, you can't be agile.
Key value areas: These are 4 areas where organizations must improve: Unrealized value, current value, Time-to-market and Ability to innovate
Leadership styles: There are 4 types of leaders - combative, compliant, competitive and catalytic.
The book takes us through the problems that typical organizations face in responding to changes. The solution is to move from top-down command and control to self-empowered teams, followed by a shift from output to outcomes and impact and becoming feedback-driven. But this change is harder, especially due to leaders who are comfortable in their old ways of working. The transformation requires fundamental changes in everything: rewards and incentives, career paths for experts, specialist teams etc. At some point hard decisions need to made - the old and the new ways of working cannot co-exist forever.
The book has a nice flow and is easy to understand. The parallel, story and pictures make it easy to consume.
Just when I thought that I knew everything there was to learn about Agile, this book offered more ideas. This book offers the best of theory and story. On one hand there is a fictional story based on the authors' real life experiences, while on the other hand there is theory and commentary explaining the generic situations that organizations face.
There are several models this book introduces, but of them I found these 3 new which I hadn't come before:
Agile culture: On a world where there is a lot of opinion on what it means to be agile, this book boils the definition of agile culture o two factors: self-managed teams and empiricism. In the absence of these two, you can't be agile.
Key value areas: These are 4 areas where organizations must improve: Unrealized value, current value, Time-to-market and Ability to innovate
Leadership styles: There are 4 types of leaders - combative, compliant, competitive and catalytic.
The book takes us through the problems that typical organizations face in responding to changes. The solution is to move from top-down command and control to self-empowered teams, followed by a shift from output to outcomes and impact and becoming feedback-driven. But this change is harder, especially due to leaders who are comfortable in their old ways of working. The transformation requires fundamental changes in everything: rewards and incentives, career paths for experts, specialist teams etc. At some point hard decisions need to made - the old and the new ways of working cannot co-exist forever.
The book has a nice flow and is easy to understand. The parallel, story and pictures make it easy to consume.
November 3, 2023
A must read for any agile leader to better understand empowering teams and agile values
April 10, 2024
I’m not convinced. Alternating between “vignettes” with fictional characters and traditional textbook explanations makes for a bumpy ride. I stopped reading after the first chapter.
January 8, 2026
Great book with simple but insightful examples.
Agile is fighting against people nature to control and obey
Agile is fighting against people nature to control and obey
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews