Thanks to COVID, an unstoppable transformation is now in progress for our society and the working world.  

During these uncertain times, leadership means influencing and empowering rather than ordering, micromanaging, or instructing them what to do or merely doing the work yourself.  

Like a rocket tearing up the sky, we’ve landed into space where, by obligation, a leader needs to master the art of creating an environment where agile teams collaborate, learn from each other, get quick feedback, focus on quality and continuous learning.

Agile leadership is the future; accountability, self-learning, adaptability, and setting the right goals are the fundamental elements of this leadership. 

Agile leaders shape up the environment, which allows employees to develop.

“A leader is like a gardener, who doesn’t cultivate flowers by forcing them to grow but instead creates the perfect environment for the flowers to grow and thrive” Reference unknown

Taking this humble approach of a gardener and creating an environment for the team to thrive is a pressing priority in today’s era. 

As a leader:

• How you make a considerable change with ease and quickness?
• How you create a progressive environment for the self-managing team?
• How you encourage the team to take ownership?

When teams do not flourish, when things are not going as planned (characteristics of today’s uncertain world), or when your customers are not satisfied – new world leader doesn’t blame the team. Instead, the leader sees this as feedback, and helps the team to find areas of development, and together they adapt and improve.

My experience of being agile following Kanban method 

I find the Kanban method, one of the most frequently used agile management style handy. Being a true mélange of visual & kinesthetic learner, I find this method motivating, straightforward, helps me minimize waste activities without sacrificing productivity and create more value for my customers.

In the Kanban method, a board is used to visualize tasks with their status. Generally, a Kanban board has three columns: “to do”, “in progress” and “completed”. Coloured post-it notes represent the different tasks and are moved from column to column depending on their status. However, I customized it by adding or removing columns based on the need. 

Visualizing the workflow brings everyone on the same page. As the team gets more responsive, I can easily manage the work and not the people (it’s a need for WFH teams). Instead of micro-managing employees or trying to keep them busy all the time, here we are encouraging them to focus on managing the work processes and understanding how to get that work faster through the system. 

A daily stand up meeting or a virtual call for (WFH teams) is a mandatory feedback loop, it ensures that we are adequately responding to potential changes and in sync allow knowledge transfer among the team. Here the focus is on finishing work to boost collaboration. 

Kanban’s limitations 

Seeing the B-side of Kanban, if you have tight deadlines, then Kanban might not work for you. As tasks are not specifically delegated, so time management can be an issue. Also, if the teams, comprising of highly specialized employees, Kanban can lead to bottlenecks and mismatched workloads. Finally, the Kanban board needs to be frequently updated for a clear overview.

Can Kanban be agile?

Agile and Kanban are built separately – The Kanban Method (2007) and Agile (2001). However, both aim at the same aftermath – create an environment that allows teams to grow, enable them to be adaptive, and focused on customer needs. 

For this reason, a lot of teams that aim at becoming more Agile choose to adopt the Kanban method.

Folks, we’ve now entered into an era of title-less, shared leadership, where everyone can be a leader. Join our interactive session on Lean & Agile and get more insights on Agile leadership and the rules of the Kanban method: four principles and six practices.