Agility in Leadership Track

Foundation + Leadership + People Development

ICP-BAF + ICP-LEA + ICP-PDV | 20 Online Sessions

Read an article about the Agile People Leader here.

"During this Business Agility Foundations course, I particularly liked how Pia Maria Thoren utilized different presenters and augmented the course materials with videos and blogs for further learning and exploration. This approach kept all the modules interesting and relevant with new points of view. One of the most positive aspects of this course was the global nature of this class. Learning about people's perspectives working in different cultures was really eye-opening and intriguing, such as exploring giving and receiving feedback. I highly recommend this course."

Feedback from participants in Pia-Maria's last course:

• I'm so happy that I found this course, and Pia-Maria, your passion for agile has inspired me to change my career and business content plan. I want to spread the Agile mission!
• Fantastic!
• Great work, great instructor, great team! I loved the whole journey
• Awesome course
• Great experience, really enjoyed it!

In the future of work, managers and leaders will need to take an Agile People Leaders' role, with the necessary competence about basic human needs, behaviors, teamwork, and how to support an emerging strategy towards the organization’s purpose.

An Agile People Leader works inside an organization or as a consultant and wants to spread the principles and values to every corner of the company. You want to bounce ideas and get inspired by a community of like-minded people who have the same goal: increasing business agility and helping organizations on their learning journey/transformation by supporting people to attain an agile mindset.

The Agile People Leader is an alternative career for traditional managers and HR professionals. An Agile People Coach is more than an Agile Coach, although the basic understanding of agile values, agile tools and methods, systems theory, and organizations are the same. The difference lies in the deeper People's perspective. During this training, you will learn how to coach people to find a place to be the best and create conditions for people to perform together.

This training can lead to Professional Certifications in Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF), Leading with Agility (ICP-LEA), and People Development (ICP-PDV).

Take all three certificates to qualify you for the ICAgile Certified Expert in Agility in Leadership

During the Agile People Leader training, we cover three perspectives:

Individual perspective (YOU)

Knowing yourself and why you do what you do: The Reiss Motivation Profile (RMP) shows your basic needs and motives and contributes to a better understanding of yourself and your leadership.

Developing yourself and understanding biases, mind traps, and how to avoid judging
Communicating effectively using storytelling and visualization are powerful tools.

Coaching others find their perfect place in the organization taking their personality, interests, and passions into account

Team perspective (WE IN OUR TEAM)

How to increase the pace from immature to mature high-performing teams, using skills for communication, leading, coaching, and conflict resolution

How to grow and develop teams to be independent and empowered to make their own decisions, for example, about their contribution to the organization's goals or their salaries

Organizational perspective (ALL OF US)

How to balance an agile culture with an agile structure, providing enough support for emerging strategies where all people are involved in setting the direction (via OKRs or other kinds of relative targets)

How to work to change behaviors – accomplishing an agile mindset and culture through removing limiting structures like annual budgets linked to fixed performance targets and individual bonuses

Create conditions for a Learning organization where it's ok to make mistakes and learn from them, which requires a platform of Psychological Safety

Target Audiences

• Agile Coaches who want to understand how to help HR and Leaders to attain an agile mindset and support them in change initiatives
• Leaders or HR professionals at any level in an organization who aspire to lead an organization on a business agility journey
• Leaders who see the value of growing an agile organization and are committed to developing themselves as agile leaders to achieve that aim
• Anyone wishing to learn about the paradigm shifts necessary to lead in adaptive environments and to develop relevant leadership and HR capabilities to support the change
• HR-Consultants, Management Consultants, Change Managers, or Agile Coaches want to use the Agile People course content and exercises as part of their product portfolio.

Agile People Leader / Trainer with Agile People

After the training, you can become a partner with Agile People and offer courses from your own company or as a consultant/employee in a larger organization. Contact Pia-Maria Thorén at piamia@agilepeople.com to find out more about this option.

Training Program

You will participate in 20 online 2-3 hour sessions for this training over one month or the whole year. If you miss a session, you can take it back in the next course round starting in 2023.

All times are in CET

B01 11/09 h 08:30 - 11:30 The Need for Business Agility

B02 13/09 h 08:30 - 11:30 Emergent Strategy and Value Creations

B03 15/09 h 08:30 - 11:30 Frameworks Tools and Techniques

B04 18/09 h 08:30 - 11:30 New Ways of Thinking and Behaving

B05 20/09 h 08:30 - 11:30 Business Agility as New Normal

D01 25/09 h 08:30 - 10:30 Introduction to Agile People Principles and the Online Training setup

D02 27/09 h 08:30 - 10:30 Types of Learning and the Effect on the Culture

D03 29/09 h 08:30 - 10:30 Being a Role Model for Continuous Development

D04 02/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Delegating Outcomes and Hiring to Elevate

D05 04/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Early Focus on Motivation and Brain-Based Learning

D06 06/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Developing your own Learning Journey

D07 09/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Everybody needs to be a Leader and find their Unique Style

D08 11/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Self-organizing for Collective Outcomes in a Suitable Environment enables Team Accountability

D09 13/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Providing Effective Feedback and setting up the Team to Succeed in the Larger System

D10 16/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 Diversity, psychological safety, and conflicts in teams

L01 30/10 h 08:30 - 10:30 The Why & What of Leading with Agility

L02 03/11 h 08:30 - 10:30 Behaviors that Enable Agility

L03 06/11 h 08:30 - 10:30 Knowing & Connecting with Yourself

L04 08/11 h 08:30 - 10:30 Developing & Leading Ourselves

L05 10/11 h 08:30 - 10:30 Skillful Communications

Session B1-5 Agile People Foundation

Session B1: The Need for Business Agility

In today’s Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environment, business agility is more and more critical for success. The new competitive edge is new values and principles and self-organizing teams with the right mix of cognitively diverse people close to the customer experience and empowered to make decisions.

Session B2: Emergent Strategy and Value Creation

Aligning teams around a strong purpose and generating a vision is essential to inspiring and creating high performance. In addition, it’s imperative to empathize with customers to maximize customer value and make it visible to focus on value creation.

Session B3: Frameworks Tools and Techniques

Agile is about adapting to change. You adapt to the customers' changing needs and work according to priorities to deliver the most significant value for the customer first. Using a Lean StartUp approach, you can test your hypothesis with a Minimum Viable Product. Using Scrum, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping in the whole company is not different from using it for Software development. What are examples, and how can you design your processes using the agile ways of working?

Session B4: New Ways of Thinking and Behaving

The ability to recognize and understand complex adaptive system dynamics accelerates the path toward Business Agility. It is not only our organization’s dynamics that we should understand and manage with “Polarity Management” and “Cynefin Decision Making Model”; but also our thinking & behaving patterns by the concept of the “Ladder of Inference.”

Session B5: Business Agility as the New Normal

In today's fast-moving and complex environments, we need to be more responsive and adaptable to navigate the complexity. To do that, we need to:

• Understand how to make sense of business challenges when things keep changing
• Be able to make decisions and act when we don't have all the information we feel we need
• Create the conditions to allow the right culture to grow for everyone to perform at their best. In this session, we will recap the impact on business.

Due to our VUCA world will explore what is needed to embrace agility, deepen understanding of the structure/culture misfit, and why transformation can fail.

Session L1-5 Agile People Leadership

Session L1: The Why & What of Leading with Agility

In this session, we explore the changing environment & dynamics that call for a different leading and following approach. Next, we look into the misalignment between what managers think drives their people and what people – knowledge workers – expect from managing and leading them. Finally, we explore our understanding and expectations. What attitudes, expectations, and concrete behaviors do we hope to see from people who lead with agility?

Session L2: Behaviors that Enable Agility

When you wish to make a radical change or transformation, understanding three things enables you to shift. First, where are we coming from, where are we now, and where are we heading? This session explores the evolution of leadership theories and which leadership styles and approaches they have given birth to. Second, we determine what is still relevant. And what needs to change. A big part of that shift comes from understanding the nature of Power & Influence and how we gain power might be changing. Finally, we look into specific qualities & competencies we can cultivate and develop to increase our agility.

Session L3: Knowing & Connecting with Yourself

If we cannot understand and embrace ourselves, we have little hope for fully understanding and accepting others. Understanding why we react to things in specific ways gives us the insights and ability to choose our responses better and change how we show up in our interactions. Leading others starts with developing our self-leadership. In this session, we explore ways to map and become more aware of our own experiences. Next, we dive into heuristics – cognitive biases – to understand how they work and influence our thinking, how we can become more aware of them, and most importantly, how we can counter them.

Finally, we explore specific leadership mind traps and how we can unlock those mind traps to show up in better ways as leaders.

Session L4: Developing & Leading Ourselves

Having gained some insights into how we can know and connect with ourselves to choose how we respond to situations and show up in our interactions with others, it’s now time to put that into practice. We familiarise ourselves with the Clear Leadership model developed by Gervase Bushe and develop the four selves of the Leader.. the Aware Self, the Descriptive Self, the Curious Self, and the Appreciative Self.

We explore several different contexts where we can put these into practice to better check in with people, give and receive effective feedback, step into coaching leadership, and defuse conflicts by creating interpersonal clarity.

Session L5: Skillful Communication

Communicating effectively, relating to others, creating and maintaining healthy interactions, having productive conversations, and ultimately influencing others require practice and effective communication dynamics. In this session, we work on the dynamics of effective communication through the lenses of several mental models, the dynamics of productive conversations, and the power of compelling storytelling to move and influence others. We explore three types of stories we can learn to identify and narrative patterns that help you tell compelling stories as a leader.

Session D1-10 Agile People Development

Session D1: Introduction to Agile People Principles and the Online Training setup
The foundation of Agile Peoples’ mindset is about the principles, values, methods, and tools that we need to start using to release competence and innovation – and what we stop doing. This session is an introduction to each other and how we run the training.

Session D2: Types of Learning and the Effect on the Culture
Individual agility influences organizational agility. Here, we describe ways to increase engagement within organizations. Assessing the culture, we recommend how to create a continuous learning culture. What are the factors that would promote vs. detract from this kind of culture?

Session D3: Being a Role Model for Continuous Development
In this session, we evaluate your attitudes toward learning, the importance of self-development, and the development of others within the organization. Unlearning existing knowledge and beliefs becomes essential to create opportunities for new learning to happen. The insight that learning is an organizational competency tied to people's behaviors - how can we avoid the wrong behaviors and amplify those that support a learning culture?

Session D4: Delegating Outcomes and Hiring to Elevate
We are focusing more on delegating outcomes than delegating tasks that impact learning and development in the organization. How can we empower, and what delegation techniques are there? How do we limit the way we delegate responsibility and decision-making? Contrast hiring to elevate vs. hiring to delegate and provide examples of where hiring to elevate has been done.

Session D5: Early Focus on Motivation and Brain-Based Learning
Learning in your way starts early in the onboarding process when joining a new team. Your motivational factors will decide within what areas and how you would like to develop yourself. The SCARF model helps you understand how your brain works and what learning techniques work with your brain, not against it. What is the difference between you and other team members, and how can you overcome these to work well together?

Session D6: Developing your own Learning Journey
Explaining here how to co-create development plans and how to encourage individual ownership of development. What tools can be used in self-evaluation with individuals and teams in your organization to identify strengths, passions, and interests? How to link personal development plans to align with organizational needs and what happens when personal and company goals do not align?

Session D7: Everybody needs to be a Leader and find their Unique Style
Leadership at every level is necessary and valuable in an agile organization. Self-leadership becomes a must for every employee, and for most people, it's also about helping to lead others. Finding your own leadership style is essential - you need to be authentic. Here, we also learn how to approach difficult conversations that challenge behavior without undermining the dignity of the individual.

Session D8: Self-organizing for Collective Outcomes in a Suitable Environment enables Team Accountability
We learn here why self-organizing can make the team move quicker through team development stages and what leadership skills are required to speed up the process and shape the environment. In addition, different physical environments impact a team's ability to collaborate and learn towards a shared, collective purpose when moving through team development stages.

Session D10: Diversity, psychological safety, and conflicts in teams
There are many benefits of diverse teams over homogenous teams, and if there is psychological safety, cognitive diversity can maximize collaboration conditions. We examine how working together can create more value when we have a trusting, safe team environment. What leadership qualities become essential here, and how can leaders create a climate of healthy conflict?

Agile People - a global community

You are welcomed into the international Agile People community, a global network of agile professionals working to help organizations increase agile values using principles, tools, methods, and models. The vision is to create better organizations with happier employees and higher adaptability to cope with the changing reality.

After the training, you can subscribe to the training material and the exercises you can use in your organization or with your clients. For example, maybe you work today in an HR role or have been a leader for a shorter or longer period. Or perhaps you are an agile coach who feels ready for more profound challenges and understanding regarding people and how HR and leaders need to change so that you can support them in their future roles.

FAQ

Do I need any pre-competence?

You don't need any pre-competence to attend the online course. We are tailoring the approach for the participants and your level. As a bonus, you will learn to use modern digital tools, like digital Canvases, Video meeting platforms, Kanban boards, etc.

How does the process look for this training?

We will use virtual online tools to communicate, learn and interact. You will need a good internet connection and an undisturbed workplace where you can have a quiet background. We will work in break-out sessions in Zoom and use our community platform for communication between the instructor-led sessions. We will go through all practicalities during the first session.

Are the sessions scheduled on specific days at specific times?

Yes, the sessions take place according to a schedule for the year that has been predetermined. If you miss a session, you can always take it back at a later session.

After training completion, what is the process to become ICAgile Certified?

The certification process requires finalizing the certification assignment and answering several questions after each session. When the work is completed (approved with feedback from us), you can buy your ICAgile certificate in our shop. In addition, we will make your certificate download available from ICAgile via a link. The Agile People Certificates are included in the training price after finalizing the course, and there are separate certificates for the modules Foundation, HR, Leadership, and Coach.

Course Leader

Your course leader and facilitator is Emanuele Moscato.

He's a Consultant and an Agile Change Agent and the founder of VARIACTION change consulting & grounding

Online Delivery

We are working with Zoom for interactive discussions and team exercises, Mural as the digital canvas, and our community platform for communication between the sessions. In addition, you will get access to a Learning Management System (on agilepeople.com) that contains an overview and detailed information about videos, articles, documents, and case stories for all sessions, including links to all of the tools used in training. You will also get access to Pia-Maria's three books in digital format.

She is the author of the books" Agile People – A Radical Approach for HR and Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees)," the "Agile People Picturebook," and Agile People Principles – Your Call to Action for the Future of Work. All three books are included in digital format in this course.
There will be some work after every session, so add about 3 hours more every week. We will distribute course literature and material digitally. You will accomplish the certification assignment between the sessions to be ready on the last session's day.

Events Cancellation Policy

If you should have to cancel your registration, a notification in writing should be sent to info@agilepeople.com. Would you please make sure you state the name of the conference/event in the subject line of your email?

• We will refund 85% for cancellations received 60 days before the start of the event.
• We will refund 50% for cancellations received 59 days and 31 days before the event starts.
• We will refund 25% for cancellations received 30 days and 14 days before the event's start.
• We will issue no refund for cancellations received within 14 days of the event.
• You are allowed to send a colleague