Agile Leadership & Customer Centricity

The global COVID-19 crisis is forcing many organizations to respond with speed and organizational adaptability has suddenly become a necessity. But to achieve this we need to think about Agile Leadership the role it plays in unlocking Customer Centricity.

Agile isn’t new, but these unprecedented times make it more important than ever. An adaptive organization is more than many small teams. The way we lead our organizations plays a vital role in its responsiveness.

In this webinar, Carly Graham, Head of Customer Experience at Merlot Aero, joined us to share her journey and lessons learned from embracing Agile in Leadership.

She explained how this way of leadership fosters more agile ways of working and creates an environment where people can thrive and do what’s best for the customer. She also explained what the key pillars of Agile Leadership are and how they can help you unlock customer-centricity.

“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.” — Angela Ahrendts (Senior Vice President, Apple)

Webinar Recording

Supporting Documents

A copy of the slides can be found here.

The Agile Leadership Collective is a safe and supportive space for leaders to support each other with the challenges they face modernising their businesses. It is designed for people in “end-user” companies adopting agile (not consultants or agile practitioners).

Leading High Performing Teams – how leaders can adapt their style to one that better supports teams reach a high-performing state.

63% of Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders, yet trust is critical for agility.

Carly and Marlene discussed autonomy, empowerment and accountability. This article takes a deep dive into the topic.

Finally, don’t forget to register for the next webinar, Preparing for the New Future of Work: Building a Culture of High Performance and Adaptability.

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Preparing for the New Future of Work: Building a Culture of High Performance and Adaptability

Adaptive performance is, without doubt, one of the most important aspects of organisational performance. Yet few business leaders understand what science already knows – to create a high-performing culture you have to understand human motivation. Based on over 20 years of science and business know-how, Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi offers a proven system for motivating an entire workforce.

In this dynamic presentation, New York Times Bestselling Author and Global Human Motivation Expert Neel Doshi, explained both the science and some actionable experiments attendees can run in their workplace.

This webinar covered the following topics:

Total Motivation – what is it and how you can use it to outperform the market
Task-oriented operating models versus Problem Solving operating models
The Direct and Indirect aspects of the Motive Spectrum
How vital it is for leaders to understand the Motive Spectrum.
How to balance Adaptive and Tactical performance
Intensity without pressure

Neel is a global expert in the science of human motivation and organizational psychology. He is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller “Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation”. Neel has co-authored many influential Harvard Business Review articles and the co-founder of Vega Factor – a company building technology to help organizations transform their culture and achieve the highest levels of performance.

Graphic Recording

Again, the inspirational Sujith Ramachandra has produced a beautiful graphic recording of the webinar. To obtain a high-resolution version, click on the picture below.

Webinar Recording

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Adaptive Ways of Working from the COVID-19 Crisis - Agile Leadership Collective

Crisis is the mother of invention, or as Plato’s Republic said “our need will be the real creator”.

During the COVID crisis, most organisations found themselves scrambling. We had to throw the rule book out the window and figure out how to best work together, iterating day by day, week by week. We worked adaptively, across silos, to achieve the most important things for our customers.

Adaptibility & Leadership – lessons learned

While we worked remotely and collaborated digitally, many of us had to manage multiple competing priorities across our home and work lives. Not only did we get out work done, but in many cases we were more innovative and creative, resulting in better outcomes.

Many firms are now wondering how they can leverage this experience, now that the worst of COVID seems to be over.

Our September Agile Leadership Collective meeting brought the community together to share what we have collectively learned and how we might apply this to improve our organisations.

In this blog post, we’ve captured our own lessons:
6 Critical Lessons in Organisational Agility from the COVID-19 crisis

Video Recording from the event

Video recording from the event. Unfortunately, video recording didn’t captured beginning, but started just after introduction of the first panelist. Fortunately, the main content and key insights are captured.

About our Panelists

Wendy Paul

Wendy is currently the Director of Purpose at Fonterra. Her personal purpose is to build organisational capabilities in anticipating and responding to challenges presented by a constantly changing and unpredictable world environment. She is an executive with a passion for tackling global organisational challenges and delivering improved performance outcomes through cultural change.

Wendy’s focus is on delivering pragmatic, effective and efficient solutions aligned to the desired long term results and outcomes. She believes that shifting leadership mindsets and behaviours are critical to transforming functions including governance, customer services, sales operations, supply chain and crisis/risk management.

Molly Workman

Head of People and Culture at RUSH digital. Molly is driven by the potential that a collective of people within an organisation has on our world, and is excited by how this potential can elevate humanity. Molly has a knack of bringing fresh and challenging perspectives to traditional organisational ways of working and mindsets. She has a wealth of knowledge and passion across agile, people experience and embracing the ever-changing future of work. Molly has worked across government, large corporate, high-growth tech startups and most things in between. She definitely understands that one size doesn’t fit all.

By work-day Molly is the Head of People and Culture at RUSH Digital, working towards the mission of designing technology to better serve humankind.

Antony Hall

Antony is currently the Head Of Organisational Effectiveness at Auckland Transport. Antony firmly believes that great employee experiences lead to great customer experiences which in turn lead to real business outcomes.

Antony has had extensive Human Resources, Talent, Employee Experience, Recruitment, Analytics and HRIS experience in both private and public sector organisations. He’s passionate about the future of work, and how organisations can set themselves up for the future. He combines his HR knowledge and system implementation background with Design Thinking mindset to bring new strategies of change into the organisation.

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Agile at Scale -
Lessons Learned from the Vodafone NZ Agile Transformation

The Vodafone NZ Agile Transformation was one of the largest Agile @ Scale transformations of its type. In this webinar, Vodafone NZ’s key partner, Radically, shared their approach and key lessons learned.

In late 2018, Vodafone set out to improve its customer experience and introduce agile ways of working at scale.

As a result of several successful agile pilots, Vodafone understood this was a people and culture transformation. Winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of all involved was critical to the success of this complex business change. To achieve this, the programme was structured around four core principles: Clear Purpose, Simplicity, Pragmatic and Deep Agile Expertise, and Great Leadership.

With an ambitious 18 month timeframe, Radically’s team was deeply integrated into Vodafone to provide confidence and experience, initially acting as the ‘scaffolding’ for the new agile model, then building capability and gradually stepping back as Vodafone’s maturity grew.

Winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of all involved was critical to the success of this complex business change. To achieve employee buy-in, the programme was structured around four core principles: Clear Purpose, Simplicity, Pragmatic and Deep Agile Expertise, and Great Leadership.

This session was run by both Radically and Agile Auckland. Radically shared their experience of Vodafone NZ Agile Transformation journey, key lessons learned and practical tips to try to help others overcome similar challenges.

Agile Transformation at Scale Lessons Learned from the Vodafone NZ Agile Transformation

“In Radically we found a versatile and values-led partner whose fresh thinking and experience in agile accelerated Vodafone’s implementation while helping us overcome challenges encountered along the way. We benefited from smart, capable consultants who really understood our business and could transfer the skills to build our own internal capability” – Katie Williams, Human Resources Director

While the journey continues, core lessons are now embedded as guiding principles, like the importance of simplifying as much as possible and working from one integrated plan.