Developing Leadership in Agile and engineering roles

The Challenge:

Digital change has seen the emergence of new roles, such as: 

• Software engineers, who establish practices around the quality of the engineering,  

• Scrum Masters, who shift the leadership of the team from directive leadership to stimulating self-direction and autonomy,

• Product owners, who liaise with the business and play a key role in realising outcomes, 

• Solution architects who support a continuous stream of decisions while anticipating the directions and assuring the future fitness of the technical solutions. 

Many of those roles did not exist twenty years ago, and people with little leadership experience get promoted rapidly into them. They made it based on their functional expertise and hard work, but their leadership generally did not have the time to establish.

Once they land in the role, they aim to keep it all going by coordinating the activities and getting involved with all decisions. They have become the bottleneck of the system.  Inevitably, the performance suffers: 

• Decisions get backed up, resulting in hold-ups, delays, too many meetings and much disruption, 

• People do not feel empowered and retreat in "Tell me what to do" mode, 

• The leader is placed under pressure, overwhelmed, and inevitably burns out, 

• You can hear the echo of "too many meetings" in the corridors of the organisation... 

Those new leaders need help to establish themselves and grow into their leadership suitably. Help is not often readily available from their leadership, as they rarely have the time or tend to reinforce classic patterns that are misaligned with the problems they are facing. 

Our Differentiated Approach:

We offer specialist services to cover this exact challenge. We bring seasoned leaders from the industry and can organise individual coaching or group coaching series. Our coaches and mentors are relatable and speak the language of engineers, product managers, digital leaders and other Agile roles. 

We help structure the change agendas that will motivate the coaching agendas (if working at the individual level). 

We can also offer structured group coaching cycles that explore different dimensions of leadership and focus on learning from the challenges in practice. Those group coaching cycles also stimulate peer connections and situational learning. Over time, people build the confidence and resilience to organise their reflection and have confidence in the answers they find. 

Expected Outcomes: 

• Improvements in confidence from the respective leaders, 

• Ease and better handling of pressure, which in turn will help with the empowerment of the teams, 

• Better relationships, ownership, and engagement across the board, 

• Stronger, healthier challenges across people, stimulating the system for better performance, 

• Better resilience of those in those roles and reduced attrition amongst those leaders and their teams.

Please explore Henko Services that support those outcomes, or get in touch to discuss »