Course Taxonomy: Leadership

SAFe® Business Owner Micro-credential

Supercharge Delivery:

  • A fully engaged Business Owner brings clarity of vision, faster decision-making, and unwavering strategic alignment to each Agile Release Train.

Boost ROI:

  • Understand how to focus on the highest-value work, apply lean portfolio principles, and reduce costly rework.

Enhance Collaboration:

  • Learn how to align teams, stakeholders, and portfolios around concrete, shared objectives.

Sustain Momentum:

  • Develop an environment where relentless improvement and innovative thinking become part of your organization’s DNA.

Certified Agile Leader® 2 (CAL 2™)

Part 1: Organizational Strategy & Delivery

Vision/Mission/Values

  • List three common challenges leaders face today related to organizational strategy & delivery and explore their underlying causes.
  • Explore the distinctions between control and influence impact on leadership behaviors.
  • Discuss the influence of vision, mission, and values on organizational performance.
  • Explain how organizational culture emerges from the organization's vision, missions, and values.

Part 2: Organizational Strategy

  • Examine how organizational strategy contributes to fostering agility within an organization.
  • Examine the role of at least three structural constructs for execution of organizational strategy.

Part 3: Organizational Structure and Design

  • Evaluate two organizational design principles and how it impacts the structure beyond individual teams to promote autonomy and collaboration within the workforce.
  • Explain how your organizational structure and design positively or negatively impact its strategy, vision, mission, values, and culture.
  • Propose changes to your organizational structure based on current challenges and potential benefits.
  • Identify team structures that would reduce dependencies within an organization.

Part 4: Value & Metrics

  • Discuss at least one approach or technique to improve delivering value to customers end-to-end across an organization.
  • Analyze three examples of how your organization's structure either facilitates or hinders the delivery of value.
  • Outline at least three common organizational practices that foster continuous improvement and support organizational change.
  • Compare appropriate and inappropriate uses of metrics and its impact on organizational agility.
  • Practice two examples of how to use appropriate metrics for different levels of the organizational value system.

Part 5: Change Management

  • Outline what change management is and explore common misconceptions associated with it.
  • Recognize the importance of leadership alignment on an overall change management approach.
  • Summarize three approaches that a leader can use to support organizational change management or continuous improvement efforts.
  • Explore the core aspects of at least one change management approach and how these align (or not) to your organization’s current change approach.

Part 6: Developing as a Leader: Leadership Competencies

  • Develop a personalized leadership approach focused on continual learning, collaborative working relationships, team growth, and evolving challenges.
  • Identify at least three common obstacles and challenges that leaders encounter in their personal development, and two strategies to overcome them.

Part 7: People Management

  • Identify at least three challenges commonly encountered when developing and managing
  • people.

Part 8: Delegation & Decision Making

  • Explore a delegation model and its associated principles of accountability for the team and leader development.
  • Explore two decision-making models and how they support the shift from being an expert-centric leader to a collaborative leader.

Part 9: Feedback

  • Explore at least two feedback models to effectively deliver and receive feedback.

Part 10: Conflict Management

  • Discuss how to use a conflict model to resolve conflicts and promote positive outcomes that foster cohesive team dynamics within organizations.

Part 11: Difficult Conversations

  • Explore the effectiveness of at least two communication strategies to use when conducting difficult conversations.

Part 12: Influencing

  • Describe how to use an influencing model to develop effective strategies that guide others toward desired organizational outcomes, given your organizational situation or circumstances.

Adaptive Leadership Workshop

Every organization is different, so we've designed the series to be modular, allowing customization that is fit for your purpose, needs, and goals. There are two types of modules, foundations and deep dives. The deep dives combine theory, coaching, and practical workshops to ensure the new concepts are grounded in your context. In a pre-course needs assessment session, your trainer will work with you to determine which modules will add value to your team and organization. The workshop is facilitated by a highly experienced leadership trainer paired with a highly experienced consultant to provide you with the best of both worlds. We design the delivery timing and schedule to suit the needs of busy leaders.

Foundation Modules

  • Impetus for Change
  • What is Agile
  • Team Level Agile | A Leaders Perspective
  • Adaptive Governance
  • Value led Organisations
  • Adaptive Leadership
  • Deliberately Developmental Cultures
  • Managing complexity
  • Strategy to execution
  • Systems Thinking
  • Adaptive Planning
  • Patterns of scaling the change
  • Metrics, Measurements, Incentives
  • Agile and Risk Management
  • Effective continuous improvement
  • Portfolio execution
  • Agile Finance

Deep Dive Modules

  • Generative conversations
  • Accountability
  • Change Leadership
  • Decision Making
  • Vision to Value
  • Conflict Resolution

Certified Agile Leader® 1 (CAL 1™)

Part 1: The Case for Agile Leadership

  1. Define agile leadership.
  2. Discuss the key differentiators between an agile leadership approach and general leadership approach.
  3. Explain challenges that traditional management approaches face in today's world of work.
  4. Describe the benefits of becoming a more effective leader for teams and organizations.
  5. Describe key mindset shifts required for effective leadership in complex and uncertain conditions.

Part 2: Agile Leadership in Action

  1. Define a leadership framework and/or model.
  2. Identify key characteristics of leadership frameworks that support successful leadership development and growth.
  3. Examine the benefits and challenges of having a structured leadership development framework.
  4. Demonstrate at least one way to inspect and adapt your own leadership behavior based on a leadership framework and/or model to increase effectiveness.
  5. Identify at least 5 leadership skills that help agile leaders be successful.
  6. Practice at least 2 leadership skills that can help grow competency in others.
  7. Practice at least 2 leadership skills that can help you grow as an agile leader.

Part 3: Leading Agile Teams

  1. Describe the key characteristics and benefits of a high-performing team.
  2. Describe tools and techniques that leaders can use to help teams become and maintain being a high-performance team.
  3. Describe tools and techniques that teams can use to become and maintain being a high-performance team.
  4. Discuss common challenges and barriers to becoming a high-performing team and how a leader can help the team overcome those challenges.
  5. Illustrate how to enable teams to work with other teams collaboratively and cross functionally to create value for customers and the organization.

Part 4: Leading Agile Organizations

  1. Identify ways the culture of an organization can impact the effectiveness of teams and overall organizational agility.
  2. Discuss the relationship between culture and leadership mindset, behaviors, and skills.
  3. Identify techniques that help to explore, understand, and influence the culture within the organization.
  4. Explain the impact of an organization's structures, processes, and policies on the organization’s ability to create value aligned with the organization's purpose.
  5. Recognize ways to change existing organizational structures, processes, and policies to improve the organization’s ability to create value aligned with the organization's purpose.
  6. Describe how organizational change impacts people and the benefits of involving them in the change process.
  7. Explore one approach to support leadership in guiding the organization's change journey.

SAFe for Executives

Part 1: Discuss current challenges with executives

Part 2: Introduce Lean, Agile, and the SAFe Principles

Part 3: Present key concepts of the Scaled Agile Framework

Part 4: Highlight the benefits others have achieved

Part 5: Define next steps

Facilitating the Agile Culture Change (ICP-AHR)

Part 1: Why Develop an Agile Organization?

A better question may be “what happens if you don’t become an Agile organization?” Experts estimate there will be more technological change in the neAxt 20 years than there has been in the last 300 years. Plus, the generational change in the workforce to Millennials and Generation Z translates into an unprecedented amount of disruption in every organization. How can an organization succeed in this environment? By becoming more Agile. We review the following:

  • The Oncoming 4th Industrial Revolution
  • The Impact of Generational Disruption on Organization
  • The Need for People Centric Thinking to Succeed in the Future

Exercise: You will consider examples where you have seen the technological and generational disruptions within your organization and the general market place. Also, we will discuss how leadership and human resources will need to adapt.

Part 2: Designing a New Way of Working

In order to design work in a new way we have to be open to a new way of thinking. In this section we discuss Agile Values and Manifesto to uncover the critical people centric elements to Agile’s success. We also introduce the participants to Dynamic Thinking where we take a holistic, systematic and growth mindset to challenges you face within an organization. We cover the following:

  • Agile Values and Manifesto
  • Dynamic Thinking
  • Agile / Lean Mindset
  • Fixed versus Growth Mindset

Exercise: You will consider how your organization would need to change to truly live the Agile Values and Manifesto. Also, following the introduction to Dynamic Thinking we will consider the opportunities and challenges to applying the concepts to support the development of an Agile / Lean Mindset within an organization.

Part 3: Realigning an Organization for Agility

The traditional hierarchical or siloed organizational structures has several significant constraints in achieving greater agility. These include lacking a holistic understanding of shifts in the needs and demands of clients, weaker collaboration between groups attempting to deliver value to clients and disempowered employees. In this section we discuss the core Agile concept of self-forming collaborative teams tied specifically to delivering value to the client. We discuss how applying these concepts to an entire organization impacts the skill sets required of the employees, how leadership will have to adapt as well as how many of the traditional tools in Human Resources will need to change. We cover the following:

  • Review of Traditional Organizations
  • Aligning Organizations to the Flow of Value
  • T-Shaped Employees
  • The Theory of Constraints
  • Team of Teams

Exercise: Group discussion of the impact of aligning an organization to the value stream with crossfunctional teams based on purpose, vision, mission, and values.

Part 4: Leadership in Creating an Agile Organization

What is the role of leaders in an organization that empowers its employees to self-organize to create value, encourages proactive critical thinking and rewards performance based on organizational and team objectives? In this section, we share the concepts of Servant Leadership, developing an Agile mindset, and achieving a highly engaged workforce. Discussion includes:

  • Servant Leadership
  • The Meaning of an Agile Mindset
  • Creating Cultural Agility
  • Developing an Engaged Workforce

Exercise: You will explore the differences between leadership in your organization and the concepts of Agile leadership. We also consider ways to develop Agile leaders and what changes would be necessary within human resources to achieve a culture of Agility and engagement.

Part 5: The Agile HR Mindset

The foundations of Agile run afoul of traditional human resources tools like individual performance reviews, compensation tied to individual performance and education/learning dictated by the organization. Human Resources must become Agile to achieve the desired culture. In this section we work together to rethinking the role and tools of human resources, so they support the new culture. Discussion includes:

  • What Really Motivates High Performance
  • A Relook at the HR Toolkit Including:
    • Performance Reviews
    • Compensation
    • Learning
    • Career Planning

Part 6: Developing an Agile Workforce Using Data-Driven Methods

Despite all of the advances in technology we enjoy, most organizations mostly rely on subjective evaluations to identify and develop talent. For many organizations not much has changed in over 100 years. In this section we introduce you to a comprehensive approach to using data-driven methods to identify, recruit, and develop high performing individuals and teams. Data analysis has the potential to enhance collaboration, conflict management, career selection, and tap into intrinsic motivations. You will be required to complete an online personality assessment prior to the class. As well as complete some exercises. The discussion and exercises will use the data from the assessments to help participants uncover valuable insights about yourself and the other participants in the course. Discussion includes:

  • Data-driven Discussion of Behaviors, Motivations, and Skills
  • Identification of Potential Conflicts Among the Participants and Strategies to Manage Those Conflicts
  • The Use of Data-Analysis to Develop Job Descriptions, Improve Recruiting and On-Boarding New Employees

Exercise: Based on the personality assessment that you will complete before the class we review strategies to improve communication, uncover how our individual motivations impact relationships, participate in a job benchmarking brainstorming session to gain greater understanding of how data-analysis can improve hiring and examine how employees will now direct and experience a different sort of career path since organizations will flatter purpose-driven organizations.

ICAgile Leadership (ICP-LEA)

Part 1: Welcome and Introductions

Summary: Opening and general logistics for the class. To get started we will get to know each other and understand the objectives of the course.

Topics covered:

  • Why and what of Agility
  • Start with self
  • Develop self as a leader
  • Develop your toolkit

Part 2: The What and Why of Agility

Summary: As the world rapidly changes, we not only have to adapt our businesses but also the way we work. Advances in technology drive societal and cultural change. As the pace of change increases so does the impact of change. This section focuses on the factors that are driving our need to increase agility in ourselves and our organizations.

Topics covered:

  • Factors Driving Our Need for Agility
  • Key capabilities for Organizational Agility
  • Evolution of Management Thinking
  • Change vs Transformation

Part 3: Start with Self

Summary: People are our most important element to success, so in addition to better understanding ourselves, we also have to understand the social context in which we work and how we interact with others.

Topics covered:

  • Attributes of an Agile leader
  • Seeing organizations as human systems
  • How mental models impact our ability to see
  • Traits of a powerful influencer

Part 4: Develop Self as a Leader

Summary: Personal Agility is a key component of the journey to agility. We need to develop a distinct set of skills to be effective agile leaders. We will better understand how our own styles and mindset need to change in our rapidly changing world.

Topics Covered:

  • Why leaders need to span boundaries
  • Telling compelling stories
  • Assessing potential leadership blind spots
  • Using the situational leadership model

Part 5: Develop your Toolkit

Summary: In this section, we evaluate the latest thought leadership intelligence and recommendations on practical steps and practices to leading a successful organizational transformation towards Agility.

Topics Covered:

  • Tools and techniques to help lead
  • Agile leader as a change agent
  • Leading from the future
  • Leading vs managing change

In-Class Exercises and Interactivity:

In-class exercises help to reinforce the concepts from the class. This includes hands-on exercises, simulations, Agile games, and interactive discussions. The learner also has opportunities to relate the topics to the context of their own organization