Why Senior Leadership is Non-Negotiable in an Agile Consulting Journey
Unlocking the full potential of Agile transformation hinges on one critical factor: the active engagement of senior leadership. In this article, let’s discuss why their role is important and non-negotiable in any Agile consulting journey. 🎯
Systemic Change: The Pivotal Role of Leadership
I often grapple with this fundamental question - “Why is it so important that senior leadership teams are engaged during an Agile consulting engagement?”
The answer is intrinsically tied to the kind of systemic change you’re targeting in the organisation.
Are you looking to transition towards a business that is faster at reacting to changing market demand?
Well, that’s the essence of what we’re discussing when we talk about Agile. 🚀
Leadership’s Crucial Role in Enabling Adaptability
It’s practically unimaginable to think about speeding up customer feedback loops or boosting adaptability in any team within an organisation without involving leadership. 💡
Those circumstances don’t exist.
Without leadership being involved and interested, you’re essentially bound by the constraints of a disengaged leadership team.
Thus, the objective of faster market engagement, which is the purpose of Agile, requires that everyone in the organisation change, participate, and be willing to change potentially any business practice."
Engaging with the C-Suite: CEOs and CFOs
When I’m consulting solely at the team level, I don’t hesitate to seek out the CEO’s office and knock on their door.
Why? Because I believe it’s vital that they be involved, understand, and help with the transformation journey. Yet, I’ve often found that CFOs can be even better allies. 🤝
After all, they’re the ones who sign the cheques and better optimise the value you get from the money you put in than someone who’s fiscally minded, right?
Comprehensive Change: It’s a Requirement, Not an Option
Let’s consider the DevOps team at Microsoft as an example. When asked what changes were necessary to adopt agility, their succinct response was “everything.” 🔄
Every aspect needed revamping, from marketing and sales to stakeholder engagement and product development. Achieving this sort of deep organisational transformation is “super hard” and absolutely demands senior leadership involvement.
Leadership Alignment
In summation, the need for senior leadership engagement is not an optional extra; it’s a fundamental requirement. You need “alignment all the way up the organisation to as high as you can possibly go” to gain the “permission” to make impactful changes.
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So the question is, why is it so important that senior leadership teams are engaged during an agile consulting engagement?
Um, and I guess it really depends on what systemic change you’re wanting to get in the organization. Are you actually looking to transition towards a business that is faster at reacting to changing market demand? That’s effectively what we’re talking about, right?
And if we’re talking about, I mean, often I come into organizations and we’re talking to engineering teams about how they can do that. But can you imagine a circumstance where I could talk to anybody, any team, anywhere in any organization in the world and talk about them getting faster feedback from their customers to enable a greater degree of adaptability to what their customers need?
And we’re not going to have to have a conversation with the business, right? We’re not going to have to have a conversation with leadership. It just doesn’t exist, right? Those are the circumstances where you just know they’re not actually going to be able to get the things that they’re looking for, and you’re going to have to figure out a way for them to get the best they can within the bounds of the constrained system because leadership’s not involved and not interested.
The only way you can transition towards that faster market engagement, which is the purpose of agile, right? It’s just a tool to help us get there, a philosophy to help us get there, is to have everybody in the organization change, participate, and be willing to change potentially any business practice in the business in order to help us get there. And if leadership’s not involved, all of those things are off the table.
Um, so quite often, I, and I’ve done this in organizations where I’ve only been involved at the team level, I’ve just asked, “Where’s the CEO’s office?” and gone and knocked on a door, right? And said, “Look, can we have a chat about what it is I’m doing and what I think you need to be involved in, understand, and help with?”
Um, actually, CFOs are way better, right? CFOs are way better. If you get the person with the money on board, who signs the checks and decides how money’s spent, then you’re totally rocking in that space because who wouldn’t want to optimize the value that you get from the money you put in, right? Who better to understand that than somebody who’s fiscally minded?
Um, hopefully, CEOs are fiscally minded as well, but you know what I mean. Um, and I think that’s why it’s so important for senior leadership, and this affects the entire organization.
There’s a great example of this. Um, your DevOps team at Microsoft adopted agility. If you don’t know, I’ve got some videos and posts about it. Um, but they changed the entire way they do business, and when they were asked, “Right, what did they have to change?” the answer is everything.
We had to change the way we sell the product. We had to change the way we market the product. We had to change the way we build the product. We had to change the way our parts of our business operate. We had to change the way we engage with stakeholders. We had to change everything about how they did business in order to get to the point where they were able to continuously deliver valuable, usable product to the customer, get the feedback, and have the autonomy to be able to make the decisions on what they focus on and what they need to build and how they’re spending money, right? Pushing that responsibility down the organization, and that’s super hard.
You need senior leadership involved. You need to have um align all the way up the organization to as high as you can possibly go, ideally the very top, to be able to get the, I’m going to say permission, right? Because in a lot of organizations, you don’t have permission. But to be able to get the permission that you need in order to make the changes that are going to best benefit the organization.
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