Leadership Health Check
Leadership Health Check
Working with anAgileMind we emphasise the importance of Leadership over Management. The attributes of leadership align with the characteristics of the culture we wish to create. A culture where colleagues are motivated by the intrinsic rewards of mastery, autonomy, and purpose. If we wish to move towards Leadership and away from Management then we need to understand how we recognise good leadership. Inline with the concepts of introspection, feedback and continuous improvement we should assess ourselves against an objective set of leadership indicators. The Leadership Health Check provides an effective set of leadership indicators that you can use.
In A Nutshell
The Leadership Health Check allows any team or group that consider themselves to have some leadership responsibility to assess the status of leadership in their organisation or group. Indicators are presented against which the team compare themselves to identify strengths and weaknesses. Once these are understood, action can be taken to reinforce strengths and to resolve weaknesses.
The Health Check is structured in four sections reflecting the domains of leadership activity that make for great organisational and team leadership:
Develop Culture - defining, implementing and sustaining an ideal culture for the organisation
Develop The Organisation - ensuring that the organisation is structured and operates following strong leadership principles
Develop Teams - giving teams the best possible start in life and the best chance to mature to high performance
Develop Individuals - giving individuals the best opportunities to grow their experience and mastery
Each section contains a number of Indicators that each describe a valuable characteristic of leadership in the topic referenced by the section - culture, organisation, teams, individuals. Each indicator also gives guidance on how leadership quality should be assessed, giving three levels. The levels are labelled “green”, “amber” and “red”.
As with any health check, the teams involved must think about how to apply the results. Any scoring framework is contextual and contingent. Leadership may be evaluated as “red” for a given indicator - this doesn’t mean that immediate action needs to be taken. If, in the context of the organisation, the “red” indicator is considered less important, then acting on a more important indicator evaluated as “amber” may provide better value more quickly.
Organisations
It is important to define what we mean by “organisation” for the purposes of this health check. We can consider three levels of organisation:
Whole Organisation - a business, division or some substantial entity that we would traditionally label as an “organisation”. This is the level at which we would normally think of applying a leadership health check.
Product, Function or Group of Teams - Organisations tend to be structured hierarchically. Within a “whole organisation” we will find many smaller entities. These will have their own leaderships and it is valid for these leaderships to use the health check to find improvement opportunities.
Team or Small Group of Teams - In many organisations there are small groups of teams that need to collaborate to achieve their goals. In such groups, leadership is often emergent rather than defined. Such leaderships may well have the most to gain by using the health check.
In reality these definitions are somewhat recursive. The health check can be applied to any cohesive group where leadership is considered to be important to the success of the group.
Applying The Health Check
Health checks are always intended to be self-assessment. Whatever the organisational level that is performing the assessment, that group is looking at its own ability to lead itself. The evaluation results and subsequent actions are to be performed by the group on itself.
The health check is not about “others assessing us”. Such assessments are always judgemental and frequently lead to friction and argument when the evaluations produce controversial results.
Leadership Domains
The culture of the organisation is the sum of its purpose, values, behaviours, principles and beliefs. The culture is made manifest through the people, ways of working and products of the organisation. Leaders play three key roles in developing the culture of the organisation. First, to stimulate the definition of the desired culture working collaboratively to engage as many colleagues as possible. Second, to lead the change towards the desired culture. Third, to sustain the culture as the organisation evolves.
To provide new and improved services to our customers, the features we create must be transitioned into production. Unless we apply the right rigours and disciplines, transition represents a real risk of service disruption for our customers. Small batch sizes are inherently less risky, but we must be able to deploy frequently in order to keep batch size small. Automated testing and deployment serves to reduce the risks associated with frequent, small deployments.
Our product only starts to give value to our customers when they are able to access its services. We operate the product so that we deliver the services with the Quality of Service that has been agreed. We monitor the value provided to our customers in order to confirm we are meeting the customers need. This will influence the priority of the product within the product portfolio.
We seek to improve the product by using metrics data and feedback received. Improvement applies to the quality of the product, the quality of service provided to customers and the ways of working of the team. Improvement means seeking to reinforce and repeat good qualities and behaviours as well as seeking to eliminate bad qualities and behaviours.