Agile leadership? Sounds good
The new buzzword “agile leadership” is on everyone’s lips. It sounds good and like what everyone is longing for: being fast, being modern, finding the right answers to changing circumstances. So far, so good. But what is really behind it, and how does it relate to values – your own and those of the company?
Agile management – the answer to the speed of development
The use of agile methods originally comes from IT development. This is no surprise. Traditional project methods define a catalog of services and requirements, known as a specification sheet. This name alone says a lot. Load. Work is a burden, a load. Once it is completed and the results are good, the specifications have been processed. Then the board members can breathe a sigh of relief, because they receive a discharge from the shareholders. Conversely, this means that they are a burden until they are relieved of it. So much for the terminology.
The specifications can then be used to plan the individual steps and draw up a project plan. Both the scope of the work and the time required must be taken into account. It is therefore possible to monitor the progress of the project at any time, with the goal firmly in view.
Planning, time, resources and control are therefore at the heart of classic project management. This was already the case when telephones still had cords. And that’s the crux of the matter. Technological development has gained so much momentum that methods have been sought in IT in particular in order to reach the goal quickly. At the same time, it was necessary to adapt to changing requirements and, if necessary, work with moving targets. The answer to this was agile project management. Today, we are considering whether all projects should be managed in this way. With the corresponding consequences for management.
New roles
Agile management thrives on change and adaptation. It also thrives on making mistakes from which you can learn and then implement the conclusions drawn. In order to keep the pace high, the individual teams are therefore given appropriate decision-making authority. The teams manage themselves! On the one hand, of course, this means that the employees in such an environment must have the appropriate “moral maturity”. Specialist knowledge, a sense of responsibility, openness and the ability to admit mistakes are just some of the requirements for this way of working. This also means that not all employees are suitable for agile working. However, managers also find themselves in a new role. They now have the sole responsibility of steering the process. This requires a high level of trust in the team, as they have to relinquish decision-making authority and a good deal of control. They must also be able to allow mistakes.
Good-bye to hierarchies?
A spectre is haunting German companies – the spectre of the tie ban. It’s like this. Tie sales in Germany are already in significant decline. The idea behind this is to make it visually apparent that everything is being done to create flat hierarchies. This is the order of the day because, on the one hand, employees of the younger generation have different values and expectations than the “old-timers”. On the other hand, current theory says that flat hierarchies are needed to respond to rapid change. Germany has already made good progress along this path. When I started working, towards the end of the 80s, there was a noticeably different working style than today. But it was also somehow more comfortable back then, because you couldn’t exchange messages in a fraction of a second. The fax, if you still know what that is, was a minor revolution. Nevertheless, large corporations in particular are still struggling with this development. This is also due to the fact that there are corresponding job descriptions that describe the responsibilities and accountabilities. In case of doubt, you are measured against these. If it is necessary to relinquish control, a strong conflict of interest can arise which, in case of doubt, ends up in favor of the job description. This also makes it clear that a system change is much more far-reaching than it appears on the surface.
We plan to avoid mistakes – this is what the German error culture looks like
Germans are generally known for their thorough approach to everything. Projects are planned for a long time, ideally every problem should be considered and eliminated in advance. Of course, things always turn out differently than you think. Then a new analysis is started and everything is documented in detail so that later “generations” can read up on what went wrong in order to avoid the same mistakes. The optimum is the normal case, so to speak, which needs no further mention. “Not criticized is praised enough” – this common German saying is confirmed with a smile in almost all of my seminars with German participants. Mistakes are criticized – so you have to avoid them. Germans are therefore great uncertainty avoiders. This attitude has brought our economy enormous progress after the industrial revolution and the historical lesson is simply that this approach leads to success. At the same time, it takes time. Agile management, however, is designed to accelerate. Flexible goals and fault tolerance are part of this. After all, the aim is to learn from mistakes. Small planning steps replace extensive planning works. In other words, agile management “violates” the fundamental values of German culture. It doesn’t help that we walk around without ties, because the values are in our heads, not in our shirts.
Cultural challenges
There is already heavy criticism that Germany is struggling with digitalization. So far, the German economy has still managed to catch up. But will it stay that way? We are at the forefront of the “old” technologies, but are lagging behind when it comes to the new ones. In fact, tech companies from the USA already dominate the market and to a large extent our lives. China is rapidly catching up. And if there are ways to close the gap, our values are standing in our way. It will be interesting to see how things develop. And for all skeptics or traditionalists: there are areas where agile management makes little sense, such as accounting. But possibly not for much longer. The first quantum computers are already working and AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated. One thing is certain: the technological leap will come. What it will do and what our world will look like then is uncertain. Our ancestors may have thought the same thing when the car came along, but what happened in a generation back then will happen in a few years today. Either way, we have to find ways to react to rapid changes. That’s what agile management is for. People can still do this. And perhaps even the Germans.
