3D Agile Leader Model — Introduction of the Three Dimensions
How to convert a traditional manager into an agile leader is a wildly popular and repeatedly discoursed management topic, given that existing managers themselves are often observed to be the stumbling blocks in organizations’ agile transformation.
Three-Dimensional Agile Leader model is a practical tool we can use to understand the multi-facets of agile leadership and thus properly measure the agility of our leaders or make agile leaders out of ourselves.
The three dimensions required of a “solid” agile leader — Servant Leader, Value Creator, and Intrapreneur — are the three critical roles a manager must assume in order to become an agile leader. Each dimension comprises three themes.
1. Servant Leader: The first dimension calls for servant leadership. To take the role of a servant leader, the manager must provide the employees with a clear, ambitious, and inspiring vision that keeps everyone moving in the same direction; he must continuously develop others by giving proper levels of autonomy and enabling informal leadership based on competency; he must also exemplify the most essential characteristic of an agile leader — authenticity — by building trust based on openness, sincerity, and strong moral values.
2. Value Creator: The second dimension focuses on value creation. In order to sustainably maximize value delivery, the manager, aka the value creator, needs to build an intimate but honest relationship with all the stakeholders to optimize collaborations with them and understand what kind of value each of them is seeking; concurrently, he needs to distinguish the various types of value that his organization must create for its different stakeholders, all the while making wise trade-offs between those value types and stakeholders’ demands; simultaneously, the value creator must embrace system thinking, i.e., treat the organization as a complex adaptive system, which involves fundamental structural and cultural shifts to create a flexible organization that can learn and evolve on the fly to reach optimal equilibrium in an ecosystem.
3. Intrapreneur: The third dimension centers around intrapreneurship, i.e., entrepreneurship inside an organization. The manager, aka the intrapreneur in this case, understands that the best way to build in adaptability and resilience is through innovation. To encourage innovation, the intrapreneur must at first create a culture of innovation that allows ideation — a social process to generate impactful, innovative, and context-wise ideas; following that, he needs to apply proper experimentation to find the fastest, cheapest, and the least risky innovation ideas, which concerns how to finance, design, and execute the experiments; finally, to reach real success, the intrapreneur must be obsessed with a growth mindset, with “growth” here referring to the industrialization or scaling up of the experimentally validated ideas, because innovation doesn’t stop after experimentation — the tougher task is to cross the stagnation chasm between experimentation and scale-up.
This model is but one of many visual interpretations of Agile Leader. In all versions the two most distinguishing characteristics of agile leadership can be observed — collaborative and principled — which epitomize the essence of agile and the key to sustainable success in today’s tumultuous and volatile business environment.
Related articles and book:
3D Agile Leader Model — Servant Leader with Authenticity
3D Agile Leader Model — Servant Leader with Vision
3D Agile Leader Model — Servant Leader with Self-Managed Teams
3D Agile Leader Model — Value Creator: Stakeholders Networks
3D Agile Leader Model — Value Creator: Value Focus
3D Agile Leader Model — Value Creator: Transversal Management
3D Agile Leader Model — Intrapreneur: Ideation
3D Agile Leader Model — Intrapreneur: Experimentation
3D Agile Leader Model — Intrapreneur: Growth
Agile Leadership Explained: We Can All Be Agile Leaders and Change the World Together! (Kobo)
Agile Leadership Explained: We Can All Be Agile Leaders and Change the World Together! (Amazon)
Sources:
Collet, B. (2019). Agile leadership. (Online course). https://www.udemy.com/course/agile-leadership/
Agile Leader Academy. (n.d.). The Agile Leader Self-Assessment. https://www.onlineassessmenttool.com/the-agile-leader-self-assessment/assessment-99121