The Agile Manager
An Integral Approach to Designing Breakthrough Agile Environments
Why This Class?
We all know by now that no matter how great your agile implementation, it all
ultimately hinges on how well your management and leadership not only gets Agile,
but how able they are to create the organizational environments needed for it to
grow and thrive and, ultimately, to ignite truly great performance across the
organization.
The Agile Manager is specifically designed to help managers in the middle (directorlevel and down) develop the awareness and know-how needed to create
organizational environments that give your Agile teams what they need to truly
grow and prosper.
In this workshop, we’ve assembled all of the learning from our combined decades of
enterprise coaching, and from the worlds of lean thinking, leadership development,
product development and human systems development and narrowed it all down in
order address one simple question: what do agile teams need in order to not just be
great agile teams, but to catalyze real organizational agility?
Less a collection of easy tips, this workshop provides a thought-provoking and
highly engaging environment for managers and leaders who know that the work of
sustainable Agile transformation is hard, and are wanting to dig down to find deeper
insights and techniques that foster greater, more holistic, more sustainable agility.
Who this Class is For
Managers who have direct responsibility for the performance and development of
agile teams and programs and who want to significant deepen their capacity for
managing and leading agile transformation.
Prerequisites
This is definitely not an introductory Agile class. Attendees must have basic training
in Agile, such as Scrum or Kanban, and should be currently managing an Agile
implementation, or preparing to do so.
Outcomes the Class will Produce
By participating in this workshop, you will
 Know and “own” your role as an agile manager: when to step in and direct a
team, when to step back and let a team make its own decisions, when to coach,
when to mentor, and what to pay attention to across the broader organizational
environment.
 Have a deeper understanding of the agile process architecture and where you
can fudge things and where you can’t.
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Learn how to use professional coaching skills to have 1-on-1 conversations with
direct reports that help them grow as leaders.
Learn how to maximize product life cycle profits by managing the delicate
balance between focusing on customer value, on the one hand, and managing
technical debt, on the other.
Learn how to apply systems thinking tools to characterize and resolve your
greatest organizational challenges.
Understand what it means to empower your teams in ways that does not require
you to abdicate your responsibility as manager to the larger organization, or
your leadership.
Understand yourself better as a leader in an agile environment.
What We Cover in the Class: Key Topics
The Agile Manager is oriented around an Integral model of organizational and
change work that offers a comprehensive, systemic view of organizations and
organizational change. This model and approach provides managers with the key
levers and dials they need to create highly adaptive Agile environments. The
workshop’s main topics track this model.
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Maximizing Product Lifecycle Profits: Managing Agile environments is about
managing the tension inherent between the tasks of minimizing cost of
ownership and those of developing happy customers. This translates to the
successful management of technical debt while maximizing the delivery of
customer value. The key here is the integrity of agile team practice;
understanding the phases of agile team development and knowing how to best
support the team where they are; the deeply interlocking nature of agile
practices.
Growing Other Leaders: Agile organizations need leaders everywhere—
whether on teams or outside them. What are ways in which you can grow other
leaders? First by understanding the difference between a person’s ‘inner’ game
(their level of emotional and cognitive development) and their ‘outer’ game (the
skills, competencies and abilities they are able to practice regularly). Second, by
leveraging the skills of professional coaching to help others grow their inner
game, in order to improve their outer game. Learn the art of professional
coaching through practice and demonstration; learn how to effectively engage in
pivotal conversations; honestly assess your own leadership capacity using the
Leadership Circle Reactive-Creative framework.
Resolving Impediments So That They Stay Resolved: Learn that problems
and impediments are your allies: they reveal organizational impediments that
otherwise go unseen. Learn to detect the hidden dynamics of systems behavior
that generate organizational dysfunction; learn to use systems thinking tools to
uncover and remediate those hidden dynamics.
Creating a Culture of Shared Vision, Purpose and Alignment. We’ve all heard
how important Culture is in catalyzing Agile transformation. Here, you will learn
an extremely compelling model for deciphering the cultural make-up of your
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organization, and how to leverage some of your greatest cultural ‘deficits’ for the
greater good of your Agile transformation. You will also learn how to leverage
the latest in relationship systems intelligence (RSITM) technology to more
powerfully influence how groups and teams can work together.
Some Questions You Might Have
How do I know if this class is for me? This class is specifically designed for managers
who know the basics of Agile and who are managing in an organization in which one
or more agile teams or programs are up and running.
How many days? What are the hours? The class is two days. The hours are 9:00am
to 5:00pm on each of the days, with approximately one hour for lunch, plus one 15minute break in the morning and two 15-minute breaks in the afternoon.
How is the material presented? The class is highly interactive, fun and experiential,
combining work in groups, practice in pairs, whole group conversation and brief
presentations of key concepts and distinctions.
Who are the instructors? The instructors are senior instructors from Agile Coaching
Institute. As with all of our trainings, there are two instructors for every class,
providing a highly provocative and dynamic learning environment. Instructors are
highly seasoned agile coaches and consultants, each with at least 12 years
experience coaching large enterprise Agile transitions, and the managers and
leaders who lead them.
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