This form of leadership allows creating multidisciplinary teams of employees to solve different problems with ideas from their work experience. The common boss is in charge of assigning tasks to collaborators, telling them how to do them and waiting for a desired result, but what if instead of assigning duties and methods, employees are invited to make changes to situations or problems? That can be achieved with the agile leadership.
The agile leadership consists of creating multidisciplinary teams of collaborators to solve problems with ideas from their experiences. A group of people are chosen and empowered to research, identify, test and implement the solutions that allow the company to grow. Depending on the situation, you empower them to decide what changes to make based on their experience.
For example, in a bank branch, you can choose a cashier, administrator, executive and salesperson to form a team and, based on their experiences in the area in which they operate, solve a problem such as reducing waiting times or achieving employees leave work earlier.
When they are given freedom, they can find little things that are not observed from the high level and that can change with minimal movements. That is one of the biggest advantages over the traditional method, where process plans are made without asking what is needed or how certain situations are experienced.
You empower people, you let them try without any limitation, just taking care of security issues or reputations, and once they demonstrate that the methodology works, they can continue to the next level, which is to implement it at a massive level.
Skills development
When implementing the agile methodology, it is observed that the productivity of the collaborators increases and that the processes to resolve conflicts and implement strategies are reduced. For example, one to two months when previously it could take up to six months.
Companies that implement it on a large scale have between 15% and 30% lower cost and 20% to 50% more value generation. In employees, there are also multiple changes such as a high level of efficiency, greater motivation, confidence, development of creativity, commitment and they become ambassadors of change, they have the best aptitude and “the shirt on well.”
Therefore, after the Covid-19 and before the “New Normal”, the ideal is to apply the agile project management to have a better performance and achieve that the company recovers in the shortest possible time. In this way, innovation, agile leadership and collaboration will be triggered.
Reconnect with the essentials
However, changing to this form of work is not complicated or expensive; it takes determination and a change of mind, so any company, no matter its size, can benefit. It is often thought that in a small and medium-sized company this type of action can be more complex to implement; however, those who have the real challenge are the big ones who can learn from the little ones.
In large organizations hierarchies predominate, old methods that are difficult to change, while in small organizations it is simpler, because the founder is close to the operation of the business, the ideals and mission of the organization are well present, and there is a genuine interest in being successful.
