Leadership & HR Aligned: The Agile Imperative

"We need to be agile!"

It's not a new trend, companies worldwide have been embarking on agile transformations for years, recognizing the need to adapt swiftly to change and keep a competitive edge. It usually starts with someone on a high floor of a fancy building declaring, "Delivery is too slow, product quality is poor! We need to be agile!"

Then a team of consultants is called in: teams are reorganized, job titles changed, schedules mixed up, new tools introduced, a bunch of time and money is invested, and after it all, everyone is pretty much dazed and confused.

When people are dazed and confused at work, they are stressed out. When they are stressed out there can be an increase in absenteeism, sick-leave and poor productivity. They also usually end up (hopefully) reaching out to a member of their HR department.

The HR department often has not been informed of the "agile transformation", or if they have, they don't know what it is or what it means to the employees or organization. So they are left to support people struggling with change that they can't even begin to comprehend. Now the employees are stressed, HR is stressed because they want to be able to help but can't, the trust between the employees and HR is broken, and everyone is pretty much sick and tired of work and productivity slows to a screeching halt.

I loved these slides by Cyrille Dayen's talk on reducing dependencies in agile transformation at Conférence Agile Secteur Public in Paris that perfectly illustrate these types of actions and resulting confusion of employees.

That's where we can identify a critical oversight in many of these transformations—the role of the most crucial sponsors: the Executive Committee and Human Resources. As the orchestrators of organizational strategy, the executive committees need to do more than order "agile" from the menu of consulting services; they need to lead by example, actively driving and embodying the principles of agility. Alignment and "team health" of executive committees is often (if not always) an overlooked linchpin of sustainable agile transformations.

I recently read a study that found that 65% of senior executives described their leadership team as ineffective. As CEOs and shareholders, it's time to scrutinize how your most expensive resources are spending their time together, week after week. Are they, themselves, agile? Are they able to address conflict, give constructive feedback? Have healthy debate? Make decisions quickly? Follow through with team decisions and defend them to their teams? If not, you might want to consider ordering some other services from the menu.

I may be Patrick Lencioni's number one fan and my favorite quote of his is this one:

“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”― Patrick Lencioni

The ability of your leadership teams to collaborate effectively together, as well as to take advantage of the HR department to support change management, is crucial. True power lies in a leadership team rowing in unison, with a shared vision, agile mindset, and the ability to communicate that vision seamlessly throughout the organization.