Nowadays, leaders want rapid and effective results but using the same mindset. This means that the results are really fragmented and with a very low impact on the clients and the organization. Cultural Transformation by Leaders is possible?

When I refer to the same mindset is just pushing the results instead of creating and promoting a new environment where there is a different sense of purpose and a new way of collective performance towards better results.

The beginning of each year is a time where leaders have to be open-minded in order to rethink how they lead their teams, what lessons learned were in place and what new opportunities arise in the horizon.

Creating an agile culture means developing three main focus that are very important for the client and the expected outcomes.

1. The first focus is related to having a sense of direction for the organisation.

Having a sense of direction means getting clarity and alignment about what the client needs and the organization priorities. Leaders can lose a sense of direction by adding too many priorities dispersing the focus toward the client.

Leaders have to demonstrate a new level of excellence with creative ideas of how to exceed client´s expectations from the beginning till the end.

Design thinking is a very useful approach because it develops and promotes critical thinking skills within the teams and the clients so that there is a significant improvement in the product and service as well as the picture of the success of the organization.

2. The second focus is related to getting a sense of connection between the middle-level managers, their teams with the clients.

Having a sense of connection requires creating and developing new habits of execution among different teams in an environment of mutual support and collaboration.

For this second focus is necessary to implement a cultural transformation project at the strategic and middle management level so that an environment of cross-functional accountability gets in place and allows the breaking of silos, eliminating waste of time, rework and conflicts among the different functions and concentrate the work toward the needs of the client.  

On the other hand, Agile helps concentrate on the achievement of the milestone of the client’s needs in a very rapid and consistent way especially at the middle manager level and their cross-functional team.  

The sprint review and the team retrospective are scrum artefacts that, if done in a consistent and effective way,   develop a set of two excellent habits of execution that accelerates the course of the project.      

3. The third focus has to deal with the sense of continuity.

The organization has to create the conditions for sustaining the results and develop a productive cycle each year. In order to be consistent, the leader must execute certain key factors such as

1. Updating their picture of success and client’s expectation in a periodic way.

2. Measure and prioritise all habits of execution.

3. Eliminate major barriers that can interfere with the continuous improvement of execution and team interactions. In this case, the theory of restrictions can work as an excellent approach .

4. Lastly, the leaders have to develop competencies and new habits for creating self-development teams in a constant way and recognize their efforts.          

Luis Ramirez – Cultural & Digital Transformation

Purpose-Driven Consultant