Agility Starts at the Executive Level
Scrum Alliance takes an agile approach to an interim CEO with team leadership.
At Scrum Alliance, becoming more agile as an organization has been a top priority for 2018. And we know that research shows how important the CEO is to defining company culture and moving an organization in a more agile direction.
We have operated this year with an interim CEO, as the board searched for its ideal leader. However, our interim leader left the organization to pursue a new opportunity in Washington, DC. Not wanting to lose any steam on our 2018 agile initiatives as the CEO search continued, the board undertook a bold experiment. Rather than again filling that leadership role on a temporary basis, they decided instead to try a collaborative, team-based CEO approach.
It has worked well. We’ve been able to keep projects moving quickly, a testament to a more agile approach. For example, we developed and executed a campaign to strengthen relationships with more than 10,000 certificants in just a few months. Previously, a project of that size would have required a lot of movement between departments, various meetings and multiple loops of approval — the accumulation of which may have pushed the project out multiple months.
The collaborative leadership approach also allowed us to work well with our board. We’ve been much more inclusive of the CEO and staff leadership teams in board conversations, which has helped us streamline initiatives as well as build trust and stimulate openness between the groups.
As our chairman of the board, Eric Engelmann, noted, “The team CEO has been powerful to see both in culture and in action. Culturally, it has bolstered teamwork and agility. At play, it has helped Scrum Alliance move projects forward, share information and deliver value to our community faster than ever before.”
“A team CEO has helped Scrum Alliance move projects forward, share information and deliver value to our community faster than ever before.” (Click to Tweet)
We’ve found we are able to live the agile values of individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working [teams] over comprehensive documentation; [member] collaboration over contract negotiation; and — perhaps most especially — responding to change over following a plan.
In the future, we will be able to carry these improvements forward with a stronger team, better perspective and more experience in working collaboratively. We are excited to continue to see how Scrum and Agile executions, within our C-suite, will help drive the organization forward.
There has been so much to gain from a more agile structure. At the end of the day, our customers, the dedicated members of Scrum Alliance, are the people who should benefit the most from this experiment. However, we expect spillover effects, such as a stronger, more satisfied and sustainable staff, to be other welcome effects of the positive use of Scrum.
The challenge of leadership dedicated to true agility is an obstacle many organizations report facing in their Agile journey. We can’t wait to keep you updated on how we continue to approach this challenge as an asset to further building our agile nature.
-The CEO team at Scrum Alliance
Shannon Carter, VP of Education
Renata Lerch, VP of Global Marketing & Communications
Angie Stecovich, Sr. Director of Finance
