Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Agile Teams & Leadership
Wednesday, November 6
Journey without Fear: Leading Your Teams to High Performance
Psychological safety has been identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as a top condition for creating high-performing teams. Yet many organizations are affected by fear in the workplace. It manifests itself in employee disengagement, lack of innovation, a toxic working environment with gossip and rumors, and the best people resigning. How can we start taking the first steps away from the culture of fear and toward a culture of psychological safety? Join this interactive session to experiment with a Fear in the Workplace game and start these difficult conversations in a fun way. Experience...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
Many leaders want to transform their organization to become more agile, adaptive, and responsive to the market. However, most do not deeply understand how to lead their organization through such a massive change. They install prescriptive scaling frameworks and send employees to training, but discard the elements of true transformation that are difficult. When the inevitable failure ensues, they switch frameworks, fire people, and revert back to what worked for them in the past. What these leaders fail to recognize is that the mindset they used to build their organization conflicts with...
Engaging Leadership: The Missing Piece for Enhancing Agile Adaptation
As W. Edwards Deming wrote, "It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to—that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated." To build and lead an agile organization, it’s crucial that senior leaders develop a new mindset and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization. Join Reha Malik Gill as she discusses how to introduce the practices of design thinking, decentralization, and empowerment to assist you with transforming an agile organization. It...
Thursday, November 7
A Festivus for Leadership Alignment
One of the biggest problems facing organizations that are moving to an agile mindset is leadership alignment across the concepts, principles, and tactics. On the face of things, every leader says they understand agile and that they’re aligned. But saying it is one thing and being it is quite another. On top of that, it seems like feedback between the leaders has become nonexistent. Mary Thorn faces organizational misalignment nearly every day in agile coaching journeys. She has come up with an approach to detect, discuss, and realign organizations cross-functionally around their agile...
The Evolving Role of Manager in an Agile Environment
As teams become agile, are managers still relevant? Companies adopting agile are faced with many challenges, not the least of which is redefining some of the traditional roles. Bharat Nagpal will share his views on how the role of people manager needs to evolve as teams move toward agile. The concepts he presents will equally benefit new as well as seasoned agilists and managers. The session will start off by defining the role of people manager, then we'll discuss new practices that a people manager needs to learn as their teams adopt agile, as well as provide real-world examples of how...
Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. Scott Weiner will detail an approach in depth, including working with leadership to create transparency and space for the team to experiment and learn, adopting a retrospective process and using it as an engine for change, educating the team on agile’s value while focusing on a small set of goals, and building trust and shared understanding by problem-solving collaboratively. We’ll discuss...
Maximizing Agile Benefits through Understanding Learning Styles
PreviewThe Agile Manifesto says we value people and interactions over processes and tools. Yet when we talk about the agile methods, we usually end up talking about processes. Agilists use timeboxing as a forcing function to draw out resolutions and decisions. What if we just needed a better way to describe our needs and issues? What if we could actually be more effective with our communication? Join Robin Foster as he explores the relationships between learning, memory, communication, teaching, and the agile framework. Discover the cognitive science behind the process of learning new...