Agile Leadership Training [CAL-ET&O]

About Certified Agile Leadership Essentials

Certified Agile Leadership Essentials (CAL-E) courses bring awareness and understanding to the foundations of agile leadership. Discover the way agile leaders think, focus, and behave. The focus on agile leadership essentials equips you to embark confidently on the journey toward leading with agility and championing agile transformation in your workplace.

What type of leadership is needed for the new Agile ways of working? The speed of change requires a mindset and tools beyond traditional command-and-control management that relies on subject matter expertise. How do we work with Agile teams? What’s our role and responsibilities? How should management and those in leadership roles act now?

• Do you want to improve your leadership, how you grow your team, and give and receive feedback?
• How do we empower others? Motivate them? Get them to talk in meetings and improve collaboration?
• What are the limits of “self-organization”? Can I still hold individuals accountable?
• How do we get leadership and management buy-in to support the Agile efforts, yet still hit delivery dates?

About Certified Agile Leadership for Teams

Agile teams require an alternative to the traditional leadership approaches of the past in order to navigate this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. This course teaches you how to create a safe-to-fail environment and foster a culture of transparency, inspection, and adaptation to allow for experimentation and continuous learning within your teams. The goal of this course is to create awareness about the changing dynamics in today’s world of work and equip leaders with the practices they need to lead their teams with agility.

About Certified Agile Leadership for Organizations

C-suite leaders and directors are now required to shift the way that they think about their organizational culture and employees and become change agents. In this module, participants will gain knowledge, skills, and techniques that will help them to work toward sustainable agility for their organizations. The goal of this module is to bring awareness to the practices and principles of agility and how they apply to business/organizational agility. Through case studies and various models, participants will gain insight into how agile will and can work for their teams and organization.

People at your company say “We’re agile” but something doesn’t seem right to you. With all the changes at work, it still is a lot like the old way – waterfall with some new words, roles and labels. And a lot of the problems remain and it doesn’t seem like things are that much better, or even improving. And you certainly wouldn’t tell others to do Agile the way your company is.

What IS the right way? How do you know? And, honestly, some companies ARE good examples and getting great results. You’re not even clear on why the company is going Agile and what results they realistically expect.

How can you help determine what will work and how to support and lead the changes – from process, policies and metrics as well as supporting and guiding others through the changes? What is your company’s culture, and does it need to change? What are your company goals, and how do we work with team efforts to achieve those goals?

Trainer Scott Dunn is certified in SAFe and LeSS and has lead multiple companies through their Agile transformation, including Deloitte, Dell, Pacific Life, Safran, Rovi, and NASA. He is one of a very few Certified Enterprise Coaches by the Scrum Alliance, a credential that is peer-reviewed and takes years to attain.

CAL Learning Objectives

Context for Agile

• Describe at least three economic or market factors that have led to the rise of Agile approaches.
• Illustrate how the complexity and uncertainty of work relate to the fitness of an Agile approach.
• Identify at least two management trends and their historical fit with the business environments of their time.
• Explain the long-term effects of an organizational focus on delighting the customer, and how that relates to improved outcomes.
• Explain at least three factors that increase the level of employee engagement, and how that relates to better outcomes.
• Describe at least two benefits of becoming a more effective Agile leader.

Agile Overview

• Evaluate the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto for how they relate to an organization’s ability to thrive in complex and rapidly changing conditions.
• Describe at least three characteristics of a high-performing team and how these characteristics relate to Agile thinking.
• Compare and contrast the practices and benefits of at least two common Agile frameworks.
• Describe the benefits of an Agile approach from the perspective of at least three stakeholder groups with differing needs.

Leadership in an Agile Context

• Describe at least three key mindset shifts required to effectively lead in an Agile context.
• Explain at least one leadership development framework that is aligned with Agile thinking.
• Apply at least one technique for incorporating feedback that improves your ability to inspect and adapt your own leadership behavior to increase effectiveness.
• Practice at least one technique that enables a leader to be present, aware, and engaged, while avoiding over-influence and micromanagement.
• Demonstrate a coaching approach that integrates alternative perspectives, engages others, and improves outcomes.

The Agile Organization

• Identify at least three challenges an organization might face when undertaking an Agile approach beyond a single team.
• Apply at least three patterns for increasing trust and collaboration between multiple teams.
• Describe at least two factors that influence the culture of an organization and how that relates to organizational agility.
• Evaluate at least two ways to structure an organization in order to enhance agility.
• Describe at least three governance policies that enhance organizational agility.
• Deconstruct at least one case study of an organization that uses an Agile approach.

Agile Approaches to Change

• Describe an Agile organization as a human system where change is always present and dynamic leadership is required to catalyze that change for positive growth.
• Evaluate at least three organizational metrics for their alignment with Agile thinking and how they impact behaviors and results.
• Deconstruct at least one change management approach and evaluate its alignment with organizational agility.
• Describe at least one Agile approach to identify and reduce bottlenecks, impediments, and overall friction in an organization.
• Reflect on at least one case study of an Agile transformation and critique how it approached change in an Agile way.

*We are a proud part of the Agile Leadership Journey. ALJ is an international group of over two dozen top agile leadership coaches and trainers delivering consistent, top-quality interactive workshops across a half-dozen timezones. ALJ was founded by Pete Behrens, who developed both the CAL and Certified Enterprise Coach program.