Self-management practices and Team-of-Teams organizations are gaining ground as a response to increasingly volatile contexts. In this scenario, we supported managers in adopting Agile Leadership, helping them read organizational complexity systemically and play their role “with different boundaries” to make a real impact on teams and the organization.
The need: growing a leadership that did not exist before
A fast-growing organization facing a reorganization had to evolve its leadership model to ensure oversight at every stage of value creation and to engage people with richer responsibilities and a real part in innovation.
This evolution led to the creation of an entirely new role — a leader tasked with coordinating teams of consultants — filled by 12 people identified through an internal selection process.
The need was twofold and urgent:
- support 12 new leaders in taking on a role that had never existed before and build a shared style and language; and
- involve senior management to accelerate change in line with the strategy.
The underlying question for the HR function was: how do you grow a new leadership style, spread agile ways of working and activate a propensity for innovation without taking people away from their day-to-day work?
How we worked
We designed a journey that acts simultaneously on three dimensions: the organization, the role and people development.
Three guiding principles:
- activities are designed so that people stay focused on real professional content, experimenting with the new methodologies directly on their own work;
- multiple organizational roles are involved, not just the primary recipients, to create a shared language and alignment;
- alternating in-person moments and remote activities sustains the pace of change over time.
The journey unfolded in two phases.
Phase 1 — Methodologies and shared language
- Agile & Leadership Workshop (for the new leaders)
- Innovation Workshop (for the management line)
Phase 2 — Acceleration Program (6 weeks)
Participants tackled real innovation challenges through a structured cycle based on Design Thinking and Agile. Between sessions, the teams received continuous support.
The journey closed with a shared Follow Up across all the levels involved, to pool success factors and critical issues and decide which ideas to bring to implementation.
The results
The journey delivered results on three levels:
- Role and leadership — the 12 new leaders acquired a shared style and language, translating the agile mindset into team-leading behaviors.
- Concrete innovation — each subgroup developed and field-tested a solution, with success metrics defined in advance: not ideas on paper, but measured experiments.
- Alignment and collaboration — involving the entire line created alignment on innovation goals and strengthened collaboration across a geographically distributed population.
Beyond the individual outputs, the organization gained a replicable method for embedding innovation into normal operations, starting from real needs and from people.