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Tag: Facilitation

5 Reasons Why a Great Project is Like Good Chicago Style Pizza

Comparing project management to a Chicago style pizza may be quite a stretch, but you need to first understand how much I like pizza.

When I’m in Chicago, I always need Chicago style pizza like Giordano’s, Pizzeria Uno or Lou Malnati’s. Once when I was in Boston for a week long training session with my manager who happened to like pizza as much as me -early in my professional career ended up eating at probably 5-6 different pizza places… In a week. So, when people say “I could eat that morning, noon and night”… With pizza I literally would be ok with that. When we first moved to Las Vegas I came first and stayed in the Luxor Hotel and Casino for a month and looked for a house for us while working in the IT department managing the corporate IT application development team, I ate at the food court every day in there. And there was a pizza place… So, I did literally have pizza very nearly every day for a month. I was ok with that.

Let’s take this very odd analogy a step further and consider these five ways or reasons why a great project is like a great Chicago style pizza… bear with me here… you may or may not enjoy this – who knows but please do let me know through feedback.

The crust is the foundation of a good project.

The crust sort of makes the pizza, right? Bad crust is hard to overcome. Everything else can be great, but on soggy crust it’s still just a bad, unsatisfying pizza. And sometimes crazy good crust can bring a pizza back from the dead if the other ingredients are so-so. You know what I’m talking about. For me, the crust is the leadership of the project. Yes, an easier project can have a “fake it till you make it” project manager who is still barely experienced at leading teams and projects. Everyone has to start somewhere. But not many organizations – unless they are so startup or so startup with their PM infrastructure – are going to put a brand new project manager in front of a $1 million project customer. You need experienced project managers in your infrastructure or project management office (PMO) to lead most of your projects – especially the more visible and high priority or complex projects. You can’t just phone in the leadership of these projects… They require the solid leadership and communication skills of the seasoned and proven successful leader of projects to keep those important customers satisfied and happy and coming back for more work and adding more revenue to the organization.

It’s all about the sauce.

For me, the sauce is a critical ingredient of the pizza. Bad sauce, bad pizza. In this scenario, the sauce is like the project communication. Communication is Job One for project leaders and poor communication can and will definitely bring down any size project. The project manager must be an effective and efficient communicator for the project and the team and the customer. That’s meetings, email, adhoc calls, regular weekly status meetings, team meetings. Any and all communications and follow up on key communications is very important so as to ensure that everyone that was part of that communication is on the same page afterwards. If a weekly status call with the team and customer happens, then follow up afterwards with notes asking them to respond with feedback or changes within 24 hours to ensure everyone understands and received the same information. One mis communication can lead to missed last assignments, tasks not being completed or even worked on when you thought you had everyone on the same page, but they weren’t. Never take understanding for granted.


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What toppings do you like?

The toppings are big because each pizza has different toppings and add different flavor to the pizza. The toppings are the project team members because they vary with each project and with the skill needs for each project. Some projects actually need two business analysts – I’ve had several projects like that – so that’s like double pepperoni, right? Seriously though, some ingredients are just critical on nearly every project and I believe that – especially on tech related projects – cyber security is becoming one of those ingredients… At least as an input to risk planning and management. So that may be the cheese – hard to have a good Chicago style pizza without cheese! And yes, some teams always have the same types of skill sets because they are similar projects, but the great thing about projects is you can have a huge variety of skill set needs – you just need to understand the needs of the project and obtain the right resources and associated skill sets accordingly.

Perfection takes time.

The perfect pizza takes time to perfect and then it takes time to plan for and repeat that success. Likewise, with projects. Planning is a critical aspect of any good, successful project and lessons learned – just as you learn to make the perfect pizza – must be part of the process if you want to add to your skills and become better managers of the projects, customers, and teams you lead along the way.

Better than the imitators.

The best Chicago style pizza is going to be better than its imitators through hard work, great ingredients, a good team of workers, and a proven recipe of success. And there will be imitators just as there will always be competitors for the work you do or the software you make or the products you build or whatever you are doing for your project customers. You must work toward excellence and remain better than your imitators – your competition. They will always be trying to gain on you and take your customers away from you. Stick with your proven best practices, always be learning and improving and perfecting, and you’ll keep your customers and keep winning on your projects.

Summary / call for input

Building great pizza takes skill… And building the perfect project for your customer and their end users takes skill, planning, learning, time and the right teams. Very different yet very similar. But both take key ingredients to come out great at the end.

Readers – what’s your take – what would you add to this or do you even agree with my pizza obsessed comparison. I know it’s a stretch, but thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts on this.

Establish an Effective Project Review Process – Overcome the Obstacles to Improve Performance

A previous article raised the question of why project performance reviews are not universally held,

even though there is wide acceptance that they are a primary way to improve future performance by learning from past performance. In this article, we look at how to address the roadblocks to effective reviews.

Why Reviews are not Held

Among the most common reasons for not holding review are:

  • Fear of confronting failure and its causes – If failure is perceived as Einstein and Edison perceive it – as a stepping stone to success – then there is great motivation to review performance and learn from it.  If, on the other hand, failure is viewed as something to be denied and hidden, then reviews will be avoided.
  • Blaming – If the culture relies on blame and punishment to motivate behavior there will be resistance and defensiveness.  Blaming will promote fear.  It is essential to avoid blaming and focus on the process rather than individual behaviors.   See my May 2019 article Stop Blaming Focus On The Process To Achieve Optimal Performance[1]
  • Negative experience – past reviews have been worthless. For example, they have not been followed-up to implement changes based on lessons learned; the participants were blaming and defensive and blocked any real exploration of what went wrong and why.
  • Lack of skilled facilitators – skilled facilitators are needed to make reviews effective by addressing the tendency of project managers and performers to be action oriented rather than introspective and reflective. A facilitator will enable participants to directly confront ugly realities, not get caught up in blaming and defensiveness and make sure everyone has a chance to participate. Facilitation will make the review experiences more likely to be positive.
  • No time – Stakeholders are off onto the next project or back to their operational activities and the review is not prioritized as a valuable activity and therefore, not scheduled.
  • Lack of a documented project management process – the absence of guidelines and templates makes for unnecessary effort and an absence of useful information captured during the project.
  • Not valuing quality assurance and continuous improvement – if executives and project stakeholders do not value ongoing improvement enough to motivate the time and effort to hold reviews and follow them up, there will be no time for reviews and the ones that take place will be seen as useless.

 How to Hold a Review

To make sure that these causes are addressed, it is necessary to treat reviews as you would treat any important part of the project management process.  Create policies, procedures and guidelines that recognize the phases of the review process – initiation, research and report.  Appoint and empower a review team with the responsibility to

  • Embed the capture of useful data and mini-reviews or retrospectives into the project
  • Assemble the right players (project performers, clients, functional managers and staff, etc.),
  • Collect and analyze project artifacts (for example, project status reports and notes) 
  • Create a set of interview questions for use in individual and group sessions,
  • Facilitate the sessions
  • Evaluate the findings and
  • Produce a report. 

Depending on the scope of the project and the availability of templates, the process from initiation through the report can take from a few days to weeks. 

Note that the review is part of a broader quality assurance process.  The contents of review reports are input to evaluate and improve the project management process.  Lessons learned are truly learned by an organization only when they are used to change performance for the better.


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 What’s in a Name? – Performance Reviews throughout Project Life

In the past, project reviews were called postmortems.  Formal reviews are hard enough to get people to do without associating them with death, so the name has changed.  Now they are Post Project Reviews or Post Implementation Reviews or Retrospectives.  But, those names infer that you wait until after the project is over before reviewing performance. 

Leave out the “post” and call them project performance reviews.  Make them happen as an integral part of the project – not just after it is over.  In other words, regularly review and adjust performance and capture lessons learned so that when you reach the end of a major phase or of the project as a whole you will be ready with a preexisting list of lessons learned and issues so you can discuss them in depth and recommend next steps.

In Agile methodologies there is a review, a retrospective, after each Sprint.  This means that every week or two there is a stepping back to review and learn from performance.  A full project review takes place upon completion of the project.

 Checklists and Agendas

One of the most effective ways to ensure that reviews are useful is to establish guidelines and provide checklists and agendas. Rather than creating yet another checklist and agenda for reviews, use one of the hundreds of templates, checklists and models, including your own project management process model.  Why reinvent the wheel?  Instead, do some research and either use an existing process description or craft one that combines the best features of several.  Here are a few references:

Engage the Team

Reviews can be boring when the same exercises and sequences are repeated or when assertive individuals monopolize the review.  

One paper[2] addresses the need to go beyond standard approaches to use an approach that better engages the participants and results in the kind of useful information that can help make future projects more likely to be effective.

A well facilitated review will avoid simply reading through checklists and reports.  Do not make your review a presentation.  Make it an interactive event at which participants are facilitated to take an active part, sharing their points of view.  

The facilitator should seek to get participants up out of their seats (or actively engaged, if the review is done virtually) to give their feedback.  The Emotional Seismograph exercise is an example of the kind of process that engages review participants.   

If you are doing frequent reviews – for example, sprint retrospectives – vary the way you do the exercises.  A simple web search leads to several ways to do Emotional Seismograph exercises.  Vary the sequence of agenda items.  Vary the facilitator.  

 Emotional Seismograph – Reviewing Behavioral Aspects

One example of a technique to engage the participants addresses the often overlooked emotional dimension of the project.  

“An Emotional Seismograph is used to identify factors which lead to participants’ happiness and unhappiness on the project being reviewed.”[3]  A project timeline of key points in the project life is created with a baseline.  Participants then place index cards or post-it notes above or below the line to indicate whether they were happy or unhappy (stressed-out) at key points during the project.  Distance from the baseline indicates the intensity of feelings.   

The exercise engages the participants visually and physically.  It is a vehicle for discussing the causes of stress and its relief in the project.  It opens discussion of  reasons for different perspectives when one participant reports high stress or dissatisfaction for a point in the project and others do not. 

Notes from regular reflections on the pulse of the project can make this exercise more effective by providing reminders of how things felt at key points so that the impressions of the stakeholders at the review can be evaluated against events in a timeline.  This enables a rich discussion of perceptions.  It invites insights into how what might have been stressful in the moment it was occurring, in retrospect, wasn’t all that bad.  It also highlights the kinds of events that cause stress and opens the discussion of how best to handle or avoid them in the future.

Adding reflections on the emotional state of the project reinforces the importance of the “softer side” of projects – the interpersonal and interpersonal.  Having this as part of the guidelines for regularly stepping back to reflect makes it more likely that stakeholders will acknowledge their stress and how it effects their relationships.

The Emotional Seismograph is one of many exercises that can be used to enhance the effectiveness of reviews. A good resource for finding exercises to use in retrospectives and reviews can be found in 29 Scrum Retrospective Tools for Distributed Agile Retrospectives at https://luis-goncalves.com/tools-distributed-agile-retrospectives/.

 Bottom-line

If you want to break through resistance to reviews, work to make sure that candid performance evaluation is valued and enabled by eliminating blaming and defensiveness.

Add to that clear and practical guidelines, checklists and templates and effective facilitation with engaging exercises. Fold in executive sponsorship for continuous improvement.  

Hopefully, as organizations and their processes mature, effective performance reviews as an integral part of ongoing project performance improvement will become a norm.

 

[1] https://www.projecttimes.com/george-pitagorsky/stop-blaming-focus-on-the-process-to-achieve-optimal-performance.html?utm_campaign=NL_PROJECTTIMES_05_08_2019&utm_source=NL_PROJECTTIMES_05_08_2019&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR3XMbL37za8juqZgonOdzVJ9Bh8oEjnQCfs1fqmA9eOpQRDWB9lr3QJpeU]

[2] Ilyas, M. A. B., Hassan, M. K., & Ilyas, M. U. (2014). The Art and Science of Post Project Reviews, https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/post-project-reviews-closing-processes-1425

[3] [3] https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/post-project-reviews-closing-processes-1425

Five Smart Interview Questions When Hiring A Project Manager

With so many expectations, a project manager is such a prominent position.

The never-ending demands and grind make it a critical designation that not everyone is cut out for. It requires preparedness, execution, accountability, and leadership ability.
That’s why choosing the right candidate for the job is an inherently complex task with no easy solutions. Even an hour-long screening interview can prove redundant if there is no surprise factor and candidates feed canned answers to your repetitive questions. They need to be challenged. In an ideal world, you would love to observe how each of these candidates perform in the workplace in the face of a tough situation. Regretfully we don’t have that option, but you can resort to something that seems to work well in most situations.

You need to ask hard interview questions to identify the right professional for your next project. Questions that help you draw their personalities out – while you carefully listen to what they have to say, and how they say it. Questions they can’t rehearse for – thereby making the entire process challenging, rather than just another box-ticking exercise. With that in mind, here is a list of five smart interview questions that will help you select the best candidate for the position of a project manager. Some of these questions are sure to trip people up.

Question #1: If we provide you with a new project, what will be your approach to manage it, and how would you present results?

On the surface, it seems like a simple question. However, what works here is this – It’s a process-based question. So as an interviewer, you get to venture inside their brain, giving you a quick peek into the kind of work culture they’ve experienced in the past. This is probably the best way to understand the blueprint of their ideal approach, which can help you assess whether they would blend with your organization.
The second part of the question referring to the “presentation of results,” helps you understand how they would handle a standard project delivery. You also get to know about their presentation style and the perceived involvement of different team members in the process. In a nutshell, this is the perfect open-ended question to understand a candidate’s personality, work style, team management attributes, and their most typical approach to fresh challenges.

Question #2 – What if we assign you a complex project that is already running behind schedule? How would you manage it and bring it back on track?

This question tests their creativity and how well they can formulate a hypothesis. Just try and understand how they plan to maintain the level of quality without creating any undue pressure on other team members. Notice whether the candidate is willing to negotiate for more time or resources with the upper management.
Not all PMs are created equal. So, if you don’t like one specific approach or the way someone handled this imaginary problem, you are welcome to move on.


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Question #3 – What’s the nature of the communication style with your team members?

Here’s a cold hard fact. PM’s that communicate well with their team members achieve far more than the rest. The nature of this question would help you understand whether they are aware of the importance of communication mechanisms and how that affects their team members. This is a prime indicator of how they would be able to manage the difficult conversations as and when the situation arises. If you don’t get a satisfying response, it’s quite likely that candidate would fail to deliver in the real world as well.

Question #4 – Share your experience of when you were responsible for training others on any one aspect of project management.

They say great leaders and great trainers have a lot in common with each other. That’s not entirely difficult to understand since good project managers are also known to be the big picture thinkers that influence major decisions in an organization. Holding such an influential position, most PMs become great communicators. That’s why the art of training, coaching, or mentoring should come naturally to them. If the candidates share an experience where they were in the position to coach one of their team members, take it as a positive signal. This means they’re good at guiding other team members to success (as compared to a one-dimensional PM, known for giving orders.)

Question #5 – If you’re allowed to design a dream job, what would you choose as general metrics to determine if a project is on track?

We know that managing a project involves far too many moving parts and variables. This question allows you to listen to how they would design the ideal metrics and judge their ability to delegate, organize, and manage assets in a hypothetical situation. This is an excellent way to judge one’s domain knowledge and skills, as well. Don’t forget to analyse whether their answer is based on the in-depth understanding of the domain and what metrics they choose to ignore because that will reveal their experience and knowledge of the industry.

Summary

Given that hiring, training, and coaching employees are such a time-consuming process, asking these carefully devised questions can help you decide the best fit for your organization. Obviously, there is no right, wrong, or inappropriate answer to these questions. However, it gives you a fair idea of what a candidate wants from the position.

Here’s a bonus tip. Don’t forget to reverse the table and allow time in the end for candidates to ask you questions. This is a great way to understand what matters to them. Their own words will also help you decipher whether they have the correct mindset to succeed as a project manager in your organization. The basic idea is to create a challenging interview environment where candidates can showcase their business acumen along with the soft skills needed for the job.

How to Excel at Managing Multiple Projects

Managing one project at a time can be stressful enough, but try managing several projects simultaneously–

this is where real difficulties start to emerge. Luckily, there are certain steps you can take to help you get more organized and efficient when managing multiple projects. Let’s learn something about them.

Think ahead

The best thing to do, before you start anything else, is to plan ahead. So, take your time, have your morning coffee, tea, whatever you need to fuel your brain, and start planning. Make sure to know your priorities, and how much time you need for each task. For some people, it works the best to deal with the toughest tasks first and save those less demanding for later.

Schedule your time

Make the most of your time. Plan your time ahead, make an appointment with yourself, pick a project and give it your full attention. This will help you stay focused on the chosen task, at least for a short period of time, and it will make you more productive. It’ll help your thoughts stay in one place, and your brain will work better, without having to worry about other projects. So, you should simply block your time for that project and hold on to it.

Stay Focused

Don’t let anything distract you from what you are doing at the moment and stay focused on your current task. For example, listening to your preferred music helps me stay focused on what I am doing. If you love silence, just find yourself a quiet place, or simply do anything that helps you stop racing thoughts and staying on point.

Assess your workload regularly

Follow up on your project plan or time schedule frequently. Consider some unexpected time loss may occur – some projects might take more time then you have predicted, so you will be behind with other tasks. You can avert that by checking up on your to-do list or some other strategy for tracking project progress.


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Entrust responsibilities

Having trouble accomplishing everything? Delegate! Share your workload with your team, or a trusted colleague. Assign them tasks, even the whole projects, but don’t exonerate yourself completely. As IED Barcelona’s current Master Degree in Service Design explains, this field should encourage an exploratory attitude, self-organization and abilities to collaborate in cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary teams. Just make sure you are still involved in the whole decision-making process, and you will be certain that the work will get done

Support the project plans

The best way to do this is by using the project management software. This will help you keeping better track of your project progress. Use milestones to mark the significant dates in your project plan and make sure everything is done and submitted before the deadline. Having this kind of information helps you prevent possible time loss, in addition to lowering your stress level when a busy time comes.

Keep an eye on progress

Many things can go wrong if you have a lot to do, and just not enough hands, eyes or time to keep track of all those things. With this in mind, you should block your time to review all your current projects and make sure everything is going just how you have imagined it would.

Be adaptable

Stay open to embracing change when it comes to your time schedule. Like we said before, some projects are more urgent than others and sometimes, despite your effort to pursue your schedule, you will need to attend some other task and spend unplanned time on it. This is considered inevitable when it comes to managing multiple projects, so just stay flexible and don’t panic if it comes to that.

These tips should help you in managing multiple projects successfully. Even if you encounter certain issues in the process (and, trust me, you will), you should be able to solve them with less stress and worries

The Foundation for Agile Leadership – Mindfulness, Intelligence and Servant Leadership

Agile project management engages a team of stakeholders in an interactive process among developers and customers

to deliver an outcome that satisfies customer and organizational needs.

To make an agile approach successful, there is a need for effective leadership at multiple levels – executive, functional and project/program management, and team.  An Agile approach challenges those who are anchored in hierarchies and a command and control management approach.  As a greater number of executives realize that agile leadership can overcome the job dissatisfaction caused by authority based, non-caring management, agile leadership is being recognized as an effective leadership style for any project or process.

The agile leader serves the needs of the team by facilitating.  Leaders who are mindfully aware, emotionally, socially and cognitively intelligent and who have a commitment to servant leadership are likely to be best at leading agile projects, or, in fact, any activity.

What is a Leader?

A leader is someone who guides and directs to maximize the efforts of others.  The Business Dictionary defines a leader as “A person or thing that holds a dominant or superior position within its field, and is able to exercise a high degree of control or influence over others.”[1]  Other definitions highlight that effective leadership stems from influence rather than from authority and power.  The effective leader inspires, is an agent of change, and takes an approach that engages team members by building a sense of community and empowering them to self-manage.  The effective leader communicates clearly and candidly. He or she sets an example. The effective leader is practical and willing and able to change style to address the needs of each unique situation.  For example, if team members are unable to self-manage and collaborate with others, the effective manager will find an alternate approach that may be more directive. The effective leader cares about people and recognizes it is the people who make projects and organizations work.

Agile Leaders

Agile leaders are effective leaders.  They use the principles of the agile approach to go beyond outdated traditional leadership approaches.  

The Agile Manifesto[2] laid out the basic values and principles of the Agile approach in the context of software development.  These same values and principles apply to operational activities and projects of all kinds.  The agile approach values delivering useful outcomes, individuals and interactions working together in healthy relationships, and responsiveness to change.  Processes, tools, plans, documentation and contracts are recognized as valuable though not as valuable as relationships and adaptability founded on the goal of satisfying the customer. 

Agile leaders are servant leaders. They are facilitators, who provide an environment in which people can learn, grow and perform optimally.  The agile leader buffers the team from disruptions and distractions.  The agile leader promotes continuous improvement by establishing a safe environment in which the team can candidly reflect on its own performance.  The agile leader defines and makes sure everyone understands the goal and is doing what needs to be done to achieve it.

The agile leader, in fact any effective leader, values practicality, adaptability, resilience, and a clear sense of the need for trust-based and respect-based personal relationships.  The agile leader is “cognitively ready” – mentally prepared to perform competently in volatile, uncertain, complex and often ambiguous situations.


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The Foundation

The foundation for effective leadership is made up of mindfulness, intelligence and a sense of servant leadership.

Mindfulness is paying attention, on purpose without judgement.  It is stepping back to observe whatever is happening within and around oneself.  Mindfulness enables resiliency, non-reactive behavior and an experiential understanding of the interconnection among people and systems.  

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply skills and knowledge.  The kind of intelligence required is not just cognitive intelligence as measured by IQ.  It includes social, emotional and spiritual intelligence – the foundations for building and sustaining effective relationships.

Servant leadership is a leadership approach based on the idea that the leader is dedicated to making sure that those being served build upon their skills to grow as people, to become optimally effective, healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely to become servant leaders. 

Building on the Foundation

The leader of an agile team is charged with enabling the team to deliver useful product to satisfy the requirements of clients and product users by making the team self-managing and protecting it from disruptions and distractions.

For example, the agile leader will use formal processes to enable and at the same time moderate the effects of change.   In a project using an Agile methodology, the project manager and team of developers and customers get together to review a backlog of requirements and agree upon the requirements for the next iteration of development.  The customers agree to minimize change within the iteration and any changes in scope are documented and justified.  The intention is to enable change while recognizing that changes, particularly those that take place while work is going on in an iteration, are expensive and disruptive.

Mindfulness and intelligence come into play when it becomes clear that powerful customers may attempt to make excessive changes in requirements during an iteration.  Perhaps these customers do not spend enough quality time thinking through the requirements or do not care about completing the iteration in a timely way. Maybe, they believe that the developers can just adapt and deliver on time anyway. 

Mindfulness ‘sees’ what is happening, objectively.  The mindful person observers the behavior and observes his/her and the team members’ feelings of frustration and fear.

Emotional intelligence is founded on being mindful of the arising of emotions. It comes into play when the fear of confronting the customer begins to get in the way of protecting the team from the disruption of uncontrolled change.  It also influences the way the leader responds and communicates with the team to moderate behavior and, if the disturbing behavior continues, to handle it in a practical way. The ability to recognize and soothe the team’s concerns is an expression of social intelligence.

Conceptual intelligence comes into play as the leader finds the right way to state the problem and come up with a viable solution for the current situation. 

Servant leadership and spiritual intelligence kick in to ensure that the team is protected from unnecessary stress brought on by irrational beliefs and behavior that violates basic agreements among the team members. It also influences the desire to promote learning and personal growth by holding performance reviews and addressing issues candidly.

The Power of Agility

An Agile approach, applied correctly in the right situations, enhances the ability to satisfy customer expectations while enabling healthy relationships among all project team members. By breaking up the work into small “chunks”, delivering product quickly, and by working in a team that combines customers and developers who reassess the plan frequently and collaboratively, the Agile approach to project management promotes agility – the ability to move quickly and easily, particularly in the face of change or challenge.  The power of agility is to manage interactions among stakeholders to enable fully engaged customers in the effort to deliver products and services that satisfy their needs, even in the face of volatility, uncertainty complexity and ambiguity.

To be successful, an Agile approach needs agile leadership with its collaborative, service-based approach founded on mindfulness and the enhanced intelligence mindfulness enables. Without this kind of leadership it is likely that the Agile approach will be ineffectual – either too rigidly adhering to an impractical set of rules, or not applying the right level of discipline. This will cause team members to be unmotivated and performance will suffer. With agile leadership the team gets the support and direction it needs to grow and to perform optimally.

[1] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/leader.html

[2] https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/the-agile-manifesto/