Do you think leaders need to champion a SAFe adoption? If so, why and how?
It is essential that leaders champion a SAFe adoption. How do they do that?
Leaders have got a few challenges to start with.
- Leadership is a lonely space and you often have only yourself to back.
- Leaders may not have coaches, mentors, or people to help them.
So, the first thing to do as a leader is to be honest about where you are and what you have. Agile leadership requires a great deal of humility and awareness.
If you are going to champion a SAFe adoption, you first need to take stock of where you are, what you have to support you in that capacity, and what you have at your disposal to support you.
Identify what needs doing.
Skills Acquisition
Agile and SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework is a completely new way of working and it is unlikely that a leader is going to have a strong working knowledge of either agile or SAFe. What are leaders going to need to learn to have a positive impact in the environment?
What are the training options available, and can that be augmented by coaching and consulting?
Job Security
You need to identify which steps are safe for you to take and which steps result in disaster.
Empirical Process Control, built into Agile and SAFe, is there to protect you.
You don’t need to take a leap of faith because you have a lot to lose as a leader. Allow the data and the evidence to guide your decisions. All the process of designing a hypothesis, running an experiment, and inspecting the work to help inform what you and the team attempt next.
Sure, there are great opportunities that need to be exploited and there are threats that need to be addressed, but we work with leaders to identify which steps are safe for them to make and which steps need to be deferred until we have enough data and evidence to support that move.
Start with behaviours.
We can’t transform an organization overnight but we can start with changing behaviors within the team environment, and we can identify which leadership behaviours need to be addressed too.
Some decision-making elements and behaviours foster agility and responsiveness whilst others hamper or stop agility in it’s track. That is always a safe space to start. Simply identify what works versus what impedes progress and make the necessary adjustments.
Create feedback loops in the form of direct reports, allies in other departments, and so forth to ensure that the changes in behaviour are producing the outcomes that we are aiming for. If not, the feedback loop informs that, and we can run a new experiment to achieve the same outcome.
Accountability
In all the interventions leaders make, it is worth making those interventions and intended outcomes transparent. Ideally, what we are looking to achieve is accountability.
We want people to have the psychological safety to call leaders on incongruencies and inconsistencies and we want leaders to be able to do the same.
Whether that is behaviours we have agreed to pursue or minimize, or skills acquisition goals and targets, we want people to be aware of what we intend and how we are performing in relation to those goals and objectives.
Sometimes, that’s a nudge to get people back on track whilst at other times, it may need a focused conversation to understand what is blocking progress and preventing our teams from achieving their goals.
Conversations are great, and allow us to identify and address problems, so we want to foster an environment where that transparency, honesty, and openness is present. If the work or goals aren’t visible and transparent, we simply won’t be able to achieve our targets nor are we able to hold individuals and teams accountable for their actions or lack of action.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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