Certified Agile Leadership - Essentials & Organizations

Class Overview

The art and science of transitioning yourself into an outstanding agile leader…

This workshop provides a Certified Agile Leadership, Level 1 (CAL-1) certification with the Scrum Alliance.

Leading agile teams might be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. That is if you want to do it effectively and congruently. The agile methods have moved beyond hype and novelty to embed themselves in nearly every software company in the world. That’s sort of the good news. That these methods are here to stay and have the potential to be a game-changer.

The bad news is that it takes a leadership transformation to effectively make agility work. You see, you can’t just “go Agile” and not change your leadership style, habits, approaches, and posture. It also requires a culture shift. All of which point to you as a key guide to lead your teams through all of these changes. But there has been a lack of focus on leaders and the requisite leadership skills in agile contexts. 

Well, the good news is that this course is intended to address exactly that challenge. And do it in a practical way. Sharing stories, practices, and real-world experience into the dynamics of effective agile leadership. If you are looking to become a skilled agile leader, then this class is a wonderful way to kick-off that journey.

This is a refactored class that originated supporting the CAL-I certification from the Scrum Alliance, which was retired at the end of 2020. I’ve been delivering CAL-I classes since 2017, in both public and private settings. The feedback in both formats has been consistently outstanding.

Beginning in January 2021, we’ll be replacing our CAL-I offering for an organizational leadership audience, with the CAL-Essentials plus CAL-Organizations, 2-day class.

If delivered in a virtual format, the class will be delivered in 3.5-hour “chunks” over 4 days, either in a morning or afternoon session. We’ve found that splitting it up this way allows for a more immersive and less exhausting experience. In-person, it will be a jam-packed 2-days.

At the end of the class, attendees will receive the CAL-E and CAL-O certifications.

It IS possible for someone to ONLY attend the CAL-E part of the class (1-day, 2 3.5-hour sessions) IF you’re interested in attending a CAL-T certification to compliment it. Note: we don’t run CAL-E + CAL-T classes publicly, but we do occasionally run CAL-T classes independently for those who wish to integrate all three classes in their leadership learning journeys.

CAL—E Learning Objectives

CAL-E is the baseline class for discovering your personal alignment towards agile leadership. It’s an inside-out journey that will springboard you on a personal discovery and change journey.

These are the high-level learning objectives the Scrum Alliance has established for the CAL-E.

1. Understanding Why New Thinking and Approaches Are Required for An Increasingly Complex, Unpredictable, and Volatile World.
2. Exploring a Different Type of Leadership.
3. Growing your Self, Situational and Social Awareness.
4. Establishing a Growth Mindset.
5. Increasing your Respectful Engagement.

Our critical focus points for the class:

• We’ll explore two personal tools: Leadership Agility and CliftonStrengths.
• Developing a detailed Agile Leadership Journey personal MindMap.
• Exploring the dynamics of an Inside/out agile mindset.
• Refine and practice the power of your storytelling.
• Huge focus on providing effective feedback leveraging Crucial Conversations & Radical Candor; and practice in Dojo’s.

CAL—O Learning Objectives

CAL-O is the baseline class for discovering how to effectively lead your organizational shift to Organizational and Business Agility. This class focuses on culture, organizational design, and leading thru change with broad strategies and specific tactics.

These are the high-level learning objectives the Scrum Alliance has established for the CAL-O.

1. The Importance of Leadership and Culture in Enabling Agility
2. Organizational Design, Constraints and Enablers
3. Organizational Change

Our critical focus points for the class:

• The leader’s role in culture-shaping is a KEY component of the discussions.
• Leadership Circle Profile or Collective Leadership Assessment is THE assessment tool for this module!
• Explore a deeper dive assessment of scaling patterns without solely focusing on a specific framework.
• Organization-centric Metrics
• iContact case study will wrap-up quite a few ideas.

Who Should Attend?

The CAL series is designed to transform your leadership—

• Style
• Tactics
• Approaches
• Behaviors
• Models

In the same way that your organization must shift and change during a successful agile/digital transformation.

Does attending the class automatically do that for you? Of course not. But you’ll leave with the KEYs to begin, navigate, and advance that journey on your own.

The CAL-T class is focused on team-level and focused leadership and management. Line managers and up will gain value from the class. As would senior Scrum Masters and agile coaches. In addition, senior product managers or product owners would also gain value.

The CAL-O class is focused on the organizational-side of leadership and management. The sweet spot for the class is a company’s entire cross-functional leadership team engaged in an agile transformation. Often, the broader the organizational representation, the better. Senior leaders (C-level, VP, Director, and Sr, Managers) will strongly benefit from this path as well.

Diversity

Bob is a strong proponent of diversity and inclusion. He works very hard to make each public CAL class as diverse as possible by offering steep discounts to aid in increasing class diversity. Please reach out to discuss this further as we’d love for you to attend.

Class Formats

In an on-site or in-person format, each CAL class is a 1-day, 8 contact hours, experience.

In a virtual delivery format, each 1-day CAL class is structured with—

• 1-2 hours of pre-work; (reading, videos)
• 2, 3 ½ hour virtual sessions via Zoom; across 4-days for the CAL-E+O series.
• 1-2 hours of evening homework spread across the 4-days

We limit class size so as to increase your collaborative learning experience. We target ~12-15 attendees per class. No more than 15 guaranteed. And we also have a minimum class size of ~6-8 attendees to keep the group dynamic and diverse.

Each class makes use of:

• Individual reflection;
• Group discussion;
• Slides, handouts, videos, reading;
• Zoom room breakouts;
• And Dojo-style (triad) practice sessions.

Class materials are delivered via Dropbox in both formats. You’ll get a workbook, study materials, access to several e-copies of Bob’s books, including Agile Reflections for Agile Leaders. And your access will remain permanently—so that you can follow the evolution of the classes’ materials and focus over time.

Course Guide

Bob Galen has held senior leadership (C-level, VP, Director) roles within software development organizations since the early 1990s. He has led small and large teams (+200) focused on software development, product/project management, testing, and operations.

Always a student of leadership, he’s been on the forefront as management and leadership techniques have moved towards “the team”. An early adopter of agile methods, Bob has had in-the-trenches experience in building three successful agile technical organizations that have served as models of “agile done right”.

Bob has broad and deep experience leveraging Extreme Programming, Scrum, and Kanban, having been a practitioner since the late 1990s. In 2013, Bob became one of ~90 CEC level coaches with the Scrum Alliance. He coaches cross-organizationally around the world in helping clients achieve improved performance. Often called a “Coach of Agile Coaches”, Bob has included his deep and pragmatic experience in this class.

The point being, you’ll learn from someone who’s been there, and done that, with respect to agile leadership and the associated challenges.