Agile Leadership Principles and Practices

Accelerate and improve team decisions by learning Agile’s facilitating leadership principles to unleash team productivity, motivation, and problem solving.

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What You Will Learn

  • Overview of agile and the key roles: scrum master, product owner, and agile team member.
  • Building self-organizing teams for agile projects
  • Facilitating leadership and the power of play
  • Decision science and human mind heuristics
  • Negotiation styles and techniques
  • Managing bias through mindfulness and emotional intelligence (EQ)
  • Lean decision making tools for agile project managers

About This Course

The follow-on to this course series on “Advanced Scrum” is expected by the end of Summer 2020.

Agile can often challenge project managers in the realm of leadership. Old styles of command-control are now a thing of the past, except for the most conservative organizations. While good leaders employ a variety of leadership skills and leadership styles to motivate team members, even this is not enough. Simply setting a common goal and maintaining positive attitudes while raising your emotional intelligence will make you a better leader; but will it truly unlock your team's potential? ****

Instead of leadership traits, Agile leadership emphasizes facilitation and communication skills. This is teachable and much more powerful. This unique and effective leadership style challenges traditional beliefs in what leadership means. ****

Great leaders understand that the leader can no longer stand in the way of their team. Modern society, mindsets, and global competition demand new leadership roles, and leadership qualities all together that empower and motivate the team to new levels of productivity. Business leaders that miss this critical shift in leadership styles concede a powerful competitive advantage to the Agile leader. ****

In this course, you will learn how this new style of leadership redefines and redistributes team roles by: ****

Motivating through empowerment to gain better decisions

Facilitating the creativity and inclusivity of a high-functioning team

Identifying and managing decision making biases

Negotiating conflicts across individuals, teams, and organizations

Ensuring success through delegation and powerful constraint-based metrics.

You’ll learn to turn one internally motivated and critically thinking mind into many; and driving speed and innovation through leveraging all talents on the team.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile leadership is applied in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls. ****

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain

At A Glance

  • Expert Instruction Build Skills
  • Self-Paced Progress at your own speed
  • 4 Weeks 2-3 hours per week
  • Free or $199.00 For the full program experience Discounted to $179.10 when you purchase the full Agile Project Management Professional Certificate Program.
  • 10 Professional Development Units (PDUs) Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification
Your Instructor

John Johnson

I'm passionate about what works as both scientific principles and best practices in project and product management. Teaching is leading leaders, so my first goal is to engage with compelling reasons to change their thinking. Our shared goal is to empower their teams to delight customers while also serving the organization and society that supports them.

What Our Students Are Saying

  • This was a very interesting course. I appreciated the external reading suggestions and real world examples. The course provided scope for self evaluation and insight on how to leverage skills in negotiations and leadership. I can see this being useful at work. Serena Bonini
  • The course was very interesting and helped me understand how agile works and what I need to do to lead a team and develop myself to be an effective agile leader. I liked how a contrast was provided to traditional leadership and it was made clear how agile is different to lean management, but also what they have in common. Seema Navaratha
  • Good course for project management for Agile Leadership. The instructor is well knowledgeable in Agile Project Management. Theories presented are relevant to the subject. Video presentation is great and all the quizzes questions are straight forward with the subject discussed. Musa Ngog
  • Good course to get started with agile leadership. It offers you information about leadership theory and its history in general and then focuses on agile leadership. You will also learn basic methods and tools, and an interesting reading list is provided! Anonymous
  • It is indeed a great course and I have really enjoyed each and every detail of the course as it was designed so perfectly to make me understand each and every topic in detail. The quiz session after each class helped me to refresh the previous lesson very quickly and helped me remember the important keywords/subjects discussed in the previous lesson. Anonymous

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Syllabus

Week 1
Week 1

The first week of this course jumps right into our traditional notions of leadership, defining the concept, the characteristics of a leader, the science of leadership, and the styles that exist today across master and servant models (Primal Leadership, Team Leadership, Situational Leadership, and Transformational Leadership).

Week 2
Week 2

The second week exposes the reasoning behind servant leadership as the optimal approach and how old philosophies and “modern psychology” reinforce the need for leaders to empower teams. Gamification and the power of play are emphasized to ensure optimal contribution and performance across roles on the scaled Agile teams. Here you'll learn the scrum master's secrets and agile techniques for running highly productive teams.

Week 3
Week 3

The third week explores human decision making, its power and its faults in the form of biases, and how we can train ourselves through emotional-social intelligence and mindfulness to go faster by slowing down. Negotiation styles and techniques are also covered requiring self-reflection on how one handles conflict and manages competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating challenges. These techniques are critical for product owners, scrum masters, and those leading in any capacity.

Week 4
Week 4

The final week focuses on putting these lessons into practice with real-world approaches and tools for managing and facilitating decisions, interactions, and environments for optimal team performance.

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