Agile Leadership Mindset
by Jenni JepsenComparative Agile Leadership & Mindset provides leaders at every level with insights on how to involve and engage their people to increase motivation, and support people as they act their way to new thinking.
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Achieving great results depends on creating environments where people thrive.
In her work with leaders at every level in organizations, Jenni Jepsen knows the key to achieving great results depends on creating environments where people thrive. A place where people do their best thinking. Getting to that place requires Agile leadership and a focus on achieving an agile mindset.
Involve & Engage to Create Ownership
Using the four Involve & Engage Principles™: understand together, plan together, validate together, and reflect together, agile leaders enable ownership. It’s here we experience a sense of reward in our brains allowing us to be more open to new things, curious, creative, innovative, and focused on doing our best work.
A Bias for Improving
When we are more interested in improving than in demonstrating how smart we are already (proving ourselves), we activate the parts of the brain that put attention on enhancing learning from failure, remembering new information, and increasing resilience to setbacks. Unfortunately, you cannot expect people around you to move from proving to improving just because you say so. However, you can create the environment for improving by the way you show up and by the way you act, speak and respond to others.
Act Your Way to New Thinking
We cannot think our way to a new mindset. Science proves the only way to achieve a mindset shift, is to do something different - act your way to new thinking. Using experiments where people are presented options, where they decide what to do, create the success criteria and the length of the experiment, we get the benefits of the new action. And by reinforcing the positive effects, a stronger Agile leadership culture with corresponding Agile mindsets are achieved.
Critical Behaviors of Agile Leaders in Shifting Mindsets
Support & encourage
Clear the path & create a safe environment
Provide clarity & give influence
Be patient - rewiring the brain to create
new habits takes time
What Agile Leaders Do…
- Take responsibility for the system and enable people to take responsibility for their actions
- Say what they see, share what they think, offer suggestions and improvements
- Resist blaming actors in the system and develop improvements in the system
- Are transparent with information rather than controlling the flow of information
- Ask questions which make it easier for dissenting opinions to be shared
- Resist giving the team the immediate answer and let them develop the answer themselves
- Are willing to hear differing opinions
- Develop leaders rather then create dependencies
- Observe and describe without judgment
- Invite feedback
- Create the space for frequent and regular pauses for accelerating learning
- Share uncertainty, ambiguities and fears with the team (show vulnerability)
- Allow others to make higher-level decisions inviting them to show their competence and clarity (trust first)
- Provide criteria for decision making rather than just making the decision (provide clarity)
- Celebrate results and the results of others
- State when overloaded rather than becoming a hidden constraint
- Start questions with what and how, inviting more thoughtful responses
Sample Survey Items
Clarity
I know where our team expects to be in one year.Competence
Everyone has the skills, knowledge, and resources to excel.Control
I have the authority to make decisions.Agile
We take time as a team to reflect on the work we've done together.Mindset
We can do almost anything if we try hard enough.General
I trust the leaders of this organization.Sample Survey Items
Clarity
I know where our team expects to be in one year.Competence
Everyone has the skills, knowledge, and resources to excel.Control
I have the authority to make decisions.Top Features
Principle-based assessment to measure your agile leadership strength and willingness to shift your mindset
Benchmark your agile leadership success and agile mindset against industry peers
Applies to leaders at every level in your organization
Benchmark your agile leadership success and agile mindset against industry peers
Principle-based assessment to measure your agile leadership strength and willingness to shift your mindset
Benchmark your agile leadership success and agile mindset against industry peers
Applies to leaders at every level in your organization
Benchmark your agile leadership success and agile mindset against industry peers
Jenni Jepsen
Speaker, Trainer, Consultant
Jenni Jepsen works as a transformation advisor at Denmark-based goAgile. She helps people transform organizations
to create lasting change. By focusing on the value to be achieved and understanding where people are and where
they want to go, Jenni works closely with them to increase organizational effectiveness, motivation and results.
She integrates neuroscience concepts into her coaching, training and sparring with leaders at every level.
In addition to having her certificate in NeuroLeadership, Jenni is also a certified Intent-Based Leadership™
Practitioner, certified LEGO® Serious Play™ facilitator, and has numerous Agile certifications.
Jenni consults, writes and speaks worldwide about leadership, teams, and how to take advantage of how our brains
function to get optimal thinking in the workplace. She runs Intent-based Leadership™ courses together with
award-winning author of Turn the Ship Around! L. David Marquet. She is co-author of the book
TOGETHER - How leaders involve & engage people to get great things done (release date: November 2020).
Get in touch with Jenni here .
Try it out now!
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