Leading in Agile Organizations

Scheduled sessions

Dates are confirmed on booking. If a session has to be rescheduled, registrants are given at least 10 business days' notice and may transfer to the next scheduled session or take a full refund. To book, email lukas@klose-coaching.com.

Learning objectives

At the end of this course, the learner will be able to:

• Facilitate a group to a decision through divergence, deliberation and convergence, and recognize when a group has converged prematurely.
• Set and announce a decision rule appropriate to the situation, and explain why an unannounced rule damages trust more than an unpopular one.
• Place a team on Hackman’s authority matrix and name what would have to be handed over for it to move up a level.
• Diagnose which layer of team dysfunction is limiting a team, and select an intervention that addresses that layer rather than its symptoms.
• Identify their own and others’ default conflict mode, and choose deliberately among the five when a conflict calls for it.
• Structure a difficult conversation so that facts, feelings, interpretations and decisions stay separated under pressure.
• Write constraints that keep a team’s output within acceptable bounds while leaving the method, and the ownership, with the team.
• Replace an instruction with a question that produces the outcome they were going to specify.
• Assess an organization against the Competing Values Framework and say what culture its stated goals would actually require.
• Design a change approach for their own organization covering discovery, sponsorship, commitment, execution and anchoring.

Curriculum and outline

1. Leadership by problem domainWhat leading looks like when the solution is knowable, and what changes when it can only emerge. What the leader is actually responsible for in each domain.
2. Working agreementsTeams formed by constraint rather than instruction. The case each participant brings: what the company actually is, where the participant sits inside it, and what is ailing at both team and organizational level — the material everything later in the course is built on. Each team writes its own agreement, and the room writes one for itself. Using an agreement to hold a team to its own standard rather than to yours.
3. Participatory decision makingDivergence, the groan zone, convergence — and why the first two must not run at once. The facilitator’s job in each phase: airtime, psychological safety, visualizing the conversation, and announcing the decision rule before the conversation rather than after. Why someone with a stake cannot also facilitate. Live facilitation of a real decision, coached in the moment.
4. Team healthTeams as systems, and Hackman’s precondition for a real team rather than one in name only — a shared task, boundaries that make clear who is inside and outside, and stable membership. Hackman’s authority matrix — manager-led, self-managing, self-designing, self-governing — against executing the task, managing the process, designing the context and setting direction. Team maturity assessed three ways, on Tuckman’s stages, Hackman’s stages of team maturity and Hackman’s team performance model, with one action chosen to move the team up. The five dysfunctions argued into order, each layer’s dependency on the one below, and remedies that serve the whole pyramid rather than a single layer. Motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
5. Facilitating conflictAssertiveness and cooperativeness as two dimensions; collaborating, competing, accommodating, avoiding and compromising, each with the situations it fits — including why compromise can produce the worst available outcome. Focused conversations that separate facts from feelings from interpretations from decisions. Moving a stuck negotiation from competing solutions back to underlying needs.
6. Constraints and questionsLimiting constraints as guardrails, enabling constraints as skeletons. Rewriting a directive as a constraint that states the benefit being sought, so the team can meet it their own way. Karl Tomm’s framework for powerful questions, laid out on two axes — past-oriented against future-oriented, single reality against multiple reality — with the question types placed on it: closed, open, circular, triadic, hypothetical, miracle, paradoxical, ranking and rating, each with its follow-ups. Why a question produces buy-in and problem-solving capability an instruction does not. Coaching stances, and being explicit about which one you are in.
7. Culture, values and beliefsCulture as something that emerges from values and beliefs and shows up in behaviours, structures and artefacts — and why a behavioural change unmatched by a change in belief does not hold. The Competing Values Framework: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy and market, and what each counts, celebrates and rewards.
8. Leading changeNaming the business problem the transformation is meant to solve, before choosing how to run it. Guiding coalitions drawn across senior leadership, operations, business and front line. The eight steps, with particular attention to consolidating wins without letting the organization conclude it has arrived. Why introducing a metric changes behaviour in ways that cannot be predicted, and why interventions should be fewer, more deliberate and checked empirically.
9. Leadership responsibilities and toolsA self-assessment against nine leadership responsibilities — decision-making, flow of work, focus, continuous improvement, transparency and collaboration, accountability, support, safety, and engagement and creativity — each marked on a maturity scale, paired with how it supports agility, and mapped to the local and organization-level tools that serve it, scored interview-style with the team rather than alone. Then a plan for the participant’s own organization: what is ailing, how it becomes visible, who sponsors it, how commitment is built, who executes, and how the new way of working gets anchored.