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The Responsibility of building a thriving work culture and taking forward all aspects of an organisation together comes under strong leadership. Therefore, the recommendation is that one pay close attention to the leadership style he/she opts for conducting their business. There are different leadership styles like Adaptive Leadership, Servant Leadership, Situational Leadership, Thought Leadership, and Transformational Leadership. However, today’s progressive leaders choose to stress the value of being Agile in the modern business environment.

By taking inspiration from the tech world’s philosophy of ‘Agile development’, this management style allows leaders to be versatile, adaptable and swift in their decisions. The popularity of ‘Agile Leadership’ is seen clearly in its prevalent use in diverse fields. In uncertain environments, sectors such as the military, educational institutions, the automotive industry, and even marketers are all exploring the Agile approach and other alert frameworks for introducing innovative products in the market. The reason is Agile project management has benefitted many businesses, and it’s easy to set up.

 

Mindfulness: Secret Ingredient to Develop Effective Agile Leadership

Mindfulness is a state of being mindful and present at the moment without being judgmental. It enables one to cease amid the constant inflow of spurs and consciously decide how to act in a specific situation. Mindfulness is undoubtedly a fundamental skill for Agile Leadership for the core values it stresses. Let’s have a look at some of the key principles!

 

Mindfulness Principles

 

· Empathy Awareness

Regardless of how advanced technology gets, the human aspect will consistently fill in as a significant part of project management. The inability to adapt to changing circumstances is evident by depending too vigorously on process and tools.

· Focus Motivation

Mindfulness means to be completely present at the moment. Pay close attention to who you are with and what are you doing uninterruptedly. A project manager is in constant collaboration with other team members. They always address new ideas and creative ways to create the best solution while interacting with them. It is impossible for a good scrum master to afford to be anything but mindful. They never reserve themselves like communicating via email or discourage two-way communication. If this happens, there would be no collaboration, meaning no Agile environment.

· Non-judging Understanding

One of the essential assets of your business is your customer. Incorporating them throughout the procedure, whether internal or external customers, can ensure that the end product fits their requirements more effectively.

· Awareness Empathy

Mindfulness and thinking about the present moment and refer to one’s potential to recognise their mind begins to wander and stray. Pulling yourself back into focus and noticing your thought of trail drifting away is a form of awareness in itself. It would be best if you reminded yourself to listen actively and fully engaged in what is being said when you listen to someone. Sometimes, you find yourself judging or trying to think about your response.

 

Mindfulness Help Leaders Achieve Agile Team Success

For leaders trying to bring forward an Agile team, a few points of concern go a long way in creating their team’s ideal traits and characteristics.

· Purpose

Having a goal motivates members of the team to work tirelessly to achieve the objectives assigned. An Agile team is no better than any other team without a meaningful purpose, but the Agile coach is concerned with imparting this sense of purpose.

· Transparency

As an Agile team is a cross-functional entity with members from different departments working together to achieve the same objective, it is essential to be transparent when sharing information and brainstorming ideas. Sharing ideas and collaborating to generate solutions and improvements is critical to an Agile team.

· Stronger Communication

Efficient Agile teams display positive interactions without obstacles to behaviour. Teams with powerful communication skills can quickly resolve problems and surpass other teams in productivity and high performance. Before a problem develops, an Agile team expects to interact effectively and present challenges. Besides, Agile teams are, by design, built for iterative product creation, so communication is an integral feature of its very existence.

· Faith

Since transparency is vital for building an effective Agile team, trust is another aspect of a team that brings cohesion and dependency. A team will collapse into elements of doubt and anguish without confidence. Trust allows team members, irrespective of possible humiliation and disgrace, to come up with issues that bother them and seek help without any second considerations.

· Consistent Upgrade

To arrive at a fully deliverable product, Agile teams work on a continuous solution-finding cycle. However, precision cannot be achieved until the team can identify and accept deeply rooted insufficiencies and enhance them. The team continually needs room for improvement, even though it has everyone on board.

To cut the story short, Agile, at its core, refers to a set of principles that require a leader to collaborate, show flexibility while trusting others. These principles subsequently lead to deliver something valuable to the whole organisation. Mindfulness helps an Agile leader to create a highly collaborative work environment, and this achievement occurs when you are aware of your emotions, thoughts, and actions. Similarly, a self-aware team capable of efficiently communicating can better support each other in times of change and stress. Not only this, Agile teams can always come up with something creative in times of need.

In other words, Agile is a mindset. Without correct mindfulness, all the different parts of Agile operating can’t be in one place. When teams and their leaders have a strong Agile mindset, a strong aspiration alone is usually enough for a fruitful operating model of Agile to emerge.

 

Mindfulness- Improving Your Focus, using Agile Methodology 

 

· Project Strategy

Your team should be clear about its end objective, the worth it holds for the organisation, and how to measure success before any project. You can create a project scope here, but realise that the Agile project management goal is to resolve project changes and add-ons, making it clear that the scope is changeable.

· Product Brainstorming

Your awareness helps you map a complete overview of characteristics that can help you create the result. Consider this as an essential element of the Agile Leadership arrangement phase as, during each sprint, your work squad will form the unique features of the product. At this stage, you will create a complete product backlog, a list of all the deliverables and features that will help form the final product. Later on, when you plan the sprints, your team will easily pull out the backlog.

· Releasing Plan

One implementation date in conventional waterfall project management comes when the whole project has completed. However, when using Agile leadership management in your project, shorter development cycles are used towards each cycle’s end. So, before initiating the project, you will make plans for releases of features, and at the start of every sprint, you will review and revisit the release strategy for that feature.

· Sprint Planning

Before the beginning of each sprint, the investors/stakeholders usually do a sprint planning meeting to know what each individual will accomplish during that sprint period, achieve, and evaluate the tasks according to the sprint. However, it is vital to share the equal load between the team members, enabling them to perform the tasks effectively during the sprint. Also, you will need to note or document your workflow visually for transparency of the team, mutual understanding of the group, and then identification to remove the obstacles.

· Daily Meetups

To help your team achieve their tasks throughout the sprint, call the short-form regular stand-up meetings and measure whether any modifications are needed. Throughout these meetings, every team member will shortly talk about what they have attained before the day and their workable task. Since they are short meetings, these regular meetings’ period shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes. Prolonged problem-solving sessions or an opportunity to discuss general news items are to be part of these sessions.

 

The Power of Mindfulness Allows Agility

The ability to manage interactions between stakeholders is the power of agility to allow fully engaged clients to deliver products and services that meet their needs, even in the face of volatility, the complexity of uncertainty, and ambiguity.

With its collaborative, service-based approach based on mindfulness and the enhanced intelligence mindfulness allows, an Agile approach needs Agile leadership to be successful. The Agile approach will likely be ineffective without this kind of leadership – either too rigidly adhering to an impractical set of rules or not applying the correct level of discipline.

 

Perks of Using Agile Leadership

· Higher Productivity

With greater participation and simpler decision-making processes, you can ensure maximum productivity.

· Reduced Risk

In creating a knowledge-sharing learning environment, you are also reducing the risk of operational bottlenecks.

· Focused

Clear direction and focus on the organisation’s business goals and focusing more on the most valuable activities.

· Efficient

To create smarter and more effective teams in terms of gender, nationality, background, and personality, you have to encourage diversity. Managing and understanding the cultural blocks of self-organisation, such as the culture of blaming, the anxiety of being accountable, losing position, unconsciousness, personal agendas; guidance vs command should be a part of guided and practical exercises.

· Help Cope with Uncertainty

Agile leadership helps organisations deal with uncertain situations. Not to mention, change is the only constant in the business world. This belief requires business leaders to adapt to changes quickly, creating an opportunity for a leader’s agility to come to the rescue. Agile team with mindfulness bring new and innovative solutions to embrace the transition successfully.

Mindfulness Fuels Agile Habits

 

· Upgrade Your Game by Putting Efforts

In some businesses, leaders may also be product owners and play a crucial role in shaping the product. Such leaders must make a product’s development, and success should be their highest priority. They must have some understanding of technology and how industries are transformed. They must have a strong sense of the product characteristics and market needs that would be most valuable for the customers and consumers. Also, leaders/product owners can combine the market knowledge with the engineer’s feedback on the product’s specific features’ technical viability to make a clear development plan.

· Shaping the Product

Under traditional approaches, IT leaders interview the business unit leaders for product development to collect the business requirements, like what new features are needed to develop new software/application? And on which platform the new application will run/work? Product developers need to understand better the technology and how to transform their respective industries.

· Motivate Your Team

For team motivation, we can take the examples of the C-suite and business leaders. They play an essential role as a missionary for the software products they co-develop. They usually hold product owners responsible for the successful rollout of any new announcement/release and its effect on the company. Also, they encourage the IT engineers and product owners to educate their colleagues about the reasons for and benefits of software adoption.

· Think Like A User/Consumer

The product owners must know the needs of the user/consumer, which helps in creating the products/ software. This assists in changing the way the company functions or attracts clients. Senior executives can inspire product developers/owners by asking relevant questions about the product during the product review.

· Test and Learn Approach

Unlike traditional project management, in Agile, you don’t need to do multiple check-ins of the product. Agile project management emphasises a test and learns approach like the release of the minimum feasible product that offers the consumers short term value but can change their concept about the product.

In the last, if you are a product developer or manager, you must have seen organisations embracing Agile values successfully. These values motivate them to do better in their roles.

If you want to change your team members’ mindset, perfect their work practices, not pay attention to the outcomes or result, then adopt Agile leadership management.

How are you going to apply Agile leadership in your team?

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