Agile Leadership

The company is like a garden. There is an overall purpose with the garden. It could be to be to deliver fruits and vegetables for example. Regardless of the purpose, the garden needs to be taken care of to reach it’s purpose:

We need to take care of the plants. Some like to grow in the shadow, some need more sunshine and we need to remove the weeds.

Some like to grow with other plants of diverse kinds, to develop faster and become beautiful together. Some need a lot of space. Some need lot’s of water. Some grow slower than others etc. 

The agile / modern leader is the gardener who takes care of the plants, trying to fulfill the purpose of the garden.

The gardener can create fundamentals for the plants to grow by giving the right conditions for every plant, without forgetting about the whole garden.

We cannot force the little seed to grow, we can only give the right conditions and the right environment. Then we can just hope that it will grow.

And if it doesn’t, we need to deal with it. It could be that the seed doesn’t grow in our environment OR that the seed comes up as a weed in our garden, but may fit very good in another garden, since there may be other conditions there.

An agile leader meets every employee in the situation he/she is  --- here and now and give responsibility and conditions for development and engagement. And Lets go of as much power as possible, but not more.

I also think that a leader or maybe better to say people coaches need to have the necessary competence about basic human needs, behaviors, teamwork and how to support an emerging strategy towards the organization's purpose.

They need to have the awareness that the secret to success always comes from peoples motivation to create value and that different things motivate different people to perform.