Chro Perspective On Leading Agile Change

This short blog will look into the perspectives of top CHROs from around the world as they come together to discuss the opportunities and challenges of leading agile change. While some stated perspectives are primarily common sense, others require some strategy and thought to implement successfully.

While there were varying opinions and some hot debate surrounding some topics, the overall consensus was that the below mentioned four areas should remain the main focus:

•  Major Cultural Changes
• Improving Leadership Mindsets
• Understanding and Solving Remote Work Concerns and Opportunities
• Increasing Efforts to Improve the Agile Journey
  

Culture Changes

Discussions revealed that while there had to be significant changes in mindset, approach, and eventually culture amongst top management, the goal had to be quickly spread the cultural change across the organization.

Agile organizations value autonomy; this being the case, most CHROs pointed to this as a challenge in adopting new cultures quickly. The solution presented was the possibility of creating an improved incentive structure. Another solution was to assign ownership of such changes to teams and not just individuals, hoping that peers and superiors working together to achieve a common goal would have more expedient results.

Improving Leadership Mindsets

Another point that was agreed upon was that leaders had to move from an authoritative stand to a more collaborative and inclusive approach to lead agile change—in essence, requiring leaders to unlearn formerly acceptable practices, which are now considered unsatisfactory.

The difficulty that most CHROs faced was deciding how much direction to provide while still allowing teams to be autonomous contributors. The fact is that efforts to increase autonomy have often left teams without the necessary guidance.

The participants also emphasized the importance of agile coaching and getting trained by professionals to ensure that top executives could shift their mindsets.

Understanding and Solving Remote Work Concerns and Opportunities

The shift to remote work brought with it a new and unexpected set of challenges, revealing major flaws in the agile operating models of many organizations. While the initial stages of the forced remote work phase seemed to disrupt communication, collaboration, innovation, and human relationships, it was soon revealed that quite the opposite became true because of increased virtual communication.

Of course, almost all the participants had to agree that remote work has accelerated innovation and improvement in technology in a very short period.

The understanding was that without an agile change being implemented correctly, sudden shifts to remote work or returning to the office, or any drastic changes would be difficult to implement.

Increasing Efforts to Improve the Agile Journey

The agile journey requires constant improvement, and the efforts towards that end must never end. Most participants agreed that creating measurement tools to define success or failure can be a significant challenge. Using OKRs that are structured and aligned with top business goals, and discussing them in quarterly business reviews, was the most effective solution that the discussion produced.

The major takeaway of the discussion was that the agile change process has to be measured and improved constantly.

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