The Agile Leader
Leveraging the Power of Influence

Unleash Your Agile Leadership Potential and Guide Your Entire Organization Toward Agility

In this complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable world, radically agile organizations thrive when they combine strong local autonomy with deeply shared goals. Leadership is a key factor--individuals who welcome complexity and know how to leverage influence, culture, and organizational design to align widely distributed teams are integral to success.

Renowned agile coach Zuzana Sochová presents the skills and techniques you need to become that needed agile leader. Sochová provides inspirational examples drawing on her experience working with leaders in organizations of all sizes, in multiple industries, worldwide. Through practical exercises and assessments, you learn how to unleash your potential, become a better catalyst and community builder, sensibly apply transparency, improve functions from HR to finance, and guide entire organizations toward greater agility.

• Build a powerful shared vision and change organizations and cultures to achieve it
• Explore types and models of agile leadership and choose styles that leverage your strengths
• Practice the competencies and high-level cognitive ?meta-skills? of agile leadership
• Understand and promote agility at the executive and board levels
• Master practical techniques such as large group facilitation, system coaching, trust building, and team formation
• Lead in a world of soaring volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity

The Agile Leader is for managers, directors, executives, and entrepreneurs--anyone, regardless of position, who is ready to take ownership, challenge the status quo, and become a true agile leader.

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Forewords xi
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxi
About the Author xxiii

Part I: Agile Leader—Unleash Your Leadership Potential 1

Chapter 1: How It All Started 3
The Need for Change 6

Chapter 2: Leadership Is a State of Mind 9
What Is Agile? 9

Chapter 3: Organizational Evolution 25
Organization 1.0: Traditional 25
Organization 2.0: Knowledge 28
Organization 3.0: Agile 31
Reflect on Your Organization 34

Chapter 4: The Agile Leader 37
The Servant Leader 40
The Leader-Leader 44
The Leadership Agility: From Expert to Catalyst 48

Chapter 5: The Agile Leadership Model 75
Get Awareness 77
Embrace It 78

Chapter 6: Competencies 87
Vision and Purpose 88
Three Levels of Reality 92
High Dream and Low Dream 94
Bringing Down the Vision 95
Motivation 100
Engagement 107
Super-chickens 109
Feedback 113
Giving Feedback 116
Learn from Feedback 119
Decision 122
Sociocracy 124
Power and Control Cycles 126
Collaboration 128
Facilitation 132
Four-Player Model 134
Coaching 139
Change 141
The Change Dynamic 142
Force Fields 145
Competencies Self-Evaluation 148

Chapter 7: Meta-skills 153
The Me Domain 154
The We Domain 155
The World Domain 156

Chapter 8: Building an Agile Organization 161
Inside Out 162
Evolutionary Purpose 166
Emergent Leadership 168
Culture 172
“We” Culture 183
Competing Values 194
Network Structure 200
Smart versus Healthy 202
Reinventing Organizations 205

Part II: The Different Parts of an Agile Organization 211

Chapter 9: Business Agility 213
Agile at the Executive Level 216
The CEO in an Agile Organization 220
Agile Board of Directors 223

Chapter 10: Agile HR and Finance 229
Agile HR 229
Agile Finance 253

Chapter 11: Tools and Practices 257
System Coaching and Facilitation 257
Open Space 259
World Café 270
Systems Thinking 274
Radical Transparency 277
Experiment, Inspect, and Adapt 285
Be Inclusive 286
Have Courage 288
Growing Trust 290
Teamwork 296
Building Communities 298

Chapter 12: Summary 303
Organizational Perspective 304
Agile Leader Perspective 307
What's Next 310

Bibliography 313
Index 321

Zuzana Šochová is an independent agile leadership coach and Certified Agile Leadership Educator (CALE), who specializes in leadership, coaching, facilitation, and culture change using agile and Scrum in both startups and large enterprises. Šochová led one of the Czech Republic's first agile international projects, focusing on distributed Scrum teams working across Europe and the US. She has promoted agile adoption in telco, finance, healthcare, automotive, mobile, and high-tech software companies. A widely recognized public speaker, she co-founded the Czech agile community, which organizes the annual Agile Prague Conference. The author of The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay (Addison-Wesley, 2017) and inventor of the #ScrumMasterWay concept, she has been elected by the agile community to the Board of the Scrum Alliance and was named one of 2019's top project management influencers.