Leading with the Leadership Spiral
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, effective leadership is more crucial than ever. The Agile Leadership Spiral serves as a powerful framework for leaders seeking to navigate complexity and foster adaptability. This model helps you structure and organize your actions, guiding you to lead with greater agility.
At its core, the Agile Leadership Spiral is divided into four essential segments: Me, You, Teams, and Organization. These areas represent a holistic approach to leadership, emphasizing the importance of self-reflection, building relationships, supporting teams, and driving organizational change. As you engage with each segment, you’ll find that this journey is not linear; rather, it spirals outward, allowing you to revisit familiar challenges with new insights, experiences, and perspectives.
As you embark on this journey of Agile Leadership, you’ll learn to apply the principles of the Spiral to enhance your skills and effectively lead those around you. Let’s delve deeper into each segment and explore how you can leverage the Agile Leadership Spiral to transform your leadership approach and empower those you lead.
The Agile Leadership Spiral is a simple still powerful tool to structure and organize your actions and lead with more agility. The illustration represents the model and its elements: you see a spiral, divided by a thread cross into four segments: me, you, teams, and organization. These are four fundamental areas for leadership and they represent my reflection on myself as a leader, my contact and relationship with other individuals, my interaction and services for my teams, and finally for the big picture and organizational change. In their application als agile leadership model, these four themes are repeatedly tangent, processed and enriched with new perspectives, experiences, insights, findings and goals. As a leader you go in circles around these segments of the model. Except you don’t go in circles, because you have changed and the people around you are different and the environment has evolved. So you move along a spiral path that expands outwards, because your own knowledge and sense of purpose grow.
Let’s explore the model further and have a closer look on the segments.
ME – start with myself!
Every journey toward Agile Leadership begins with self-reflection. At first, this might seem self-centered, but that’s not the intention at all.
Be Strong
To effectively support others, you need to be in top form yourself. You must be stable, strong, reliable, and full of resources. That’s why the journey starts with you.
Know Your Purpose and Goal
When finding and creating meaning for others, it’s essential to connect your own sense of purpose to the larger context of your environment and organization. So, be clear on your own meaning and purpose!
Clarify Your Success
To achieve success, you need to understand what it looks like for you. Define what success means and measure your progress against that vision.
Define Your Intention
You can only succeed where your intentions are clear, aligned with your inner motivations and drivers. Acknowledge that you are on this journey and actively choose to continue it. Say a clear YES.
Be a Role Model
As a leader, you are expected to set an example. Work on yourself so that those who follow will see the way forward through your actions.
Teach Others
To authentically teach others, you must have lived through and fully embraced the lessons you wish to impart.
Relationships: you and me
The Agile Leadership Spiral leads you to leave your internal view now, turn to other people and the world around you. As the next step, start with one person at a time and explore your relationships to individuals.
Small Yet Already Complex
The simplest form of human interaction involves just two people. Yet even this represents two complex systems engaging with each other. Building, managing, and maintaining a relationship with another person is a challenging task, especially when pursued with the intention of true success.
1-to-1 Relationships
Regardless of the size of the organization or the number of people you lead, at its core, leadership is built on 1-to-1 relationships. All more complex team structures, or even teams of teams, can be traced back to these fundamental connections.
Leadership in Two Directions
Every leadership relationship is a two-way street: while you lead the other person, they also lead you in their own way. How does recognizing this mutual influence change your approach to leadership?
At Eye Level
Embracing Agile values and principles means recognizing the inherent worth of all individuals and building relationships based on respect and courage. Some connections will naturally be closer, while others remain more casual. There will be people you enjoy interacting with, and others you may find more challenging. Regardless, you value these relationships and strive to maintain a sense of equality and mutual respect.
Set Your Boundaries
Even so, there will be times when you need to clearly define and communicate your boundaries to feel as safe and comfortable as necessary.
Team: strong together!
We live and work in a complex world, often described as VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. To navigate and thrive in this environment, collaboration within autonomous, cross-functional teams is essential. These teams should be small enough to stay agile, yet large enough to accomplish meaningful results quickly. Success comes from building stronger teams, working together effectively.
Collaboration
To achieve success, you must learn to work effectively with others and help your team master collaboration. This means teaching them to thrive together and elevate their collective efforts. Key elements include strong communication skills, clear strategies, and empowering teams to make decisions. Regular feedback and openness to new ideas also play a vital role.
Autonomy and Alignment
For a team to move forward in the desired direction, it’s essential to foster a shared understanding and alignment around the team’s vision and goals. This involves motivating each member, ensuring all voices are heard, and encouraging active participation from everyone.
Beneath the Surface
Like the iceberg model, much of what drives team dynamics happens below the surface. Members are constantly navigating their roles, how they relate to others, and how they contribute to shared success. As an Agile leader, you must be attuned to these dynamics, work with them, and persist through setbacks—embracing the cycle of learning and improvement.
Finding the ‘me’ in all the ‘We’
For full engagement within a team, each person must clarify their individuality and goals and align them with the team’s objectives. As a leader, you guide people in exploring and connecting these personal goals with the broader team mission.
Organizations: leading change
Most organizations are undergoing significant transformations to elevate their teams, deliver products that delight customers and users, adapt to rapid market changes, and embrace the future through innovation.
Structures
“Structure eats culture for lunch.” (Peter Drucker)
To drive meaningful change, start with the structures. No matter what you aim to achieve, if the environment isn’t ready and resists, deeper transformation won’t occur, and the initiative will ultimately fail.
Culture
“Culture follows structure.”
(Craig Larman’s Law of Organizational Behavior)
Once structures are in place, focus on the culture. Change will only last if the organization’s culture evolves in line with it. Make this a priority. Work on it consistently. Embrace it personally and within your team.
Leadership
Organizations don’t transform on their own; they require leadership. Change demands leaders who adapt their style to the new context and culture. Consider what leadership approach is most effective for you and what your organization needs from you in this new environment.
Leadership Teams
You can’t lead change by yourself. Identify your allies and build a leadership team to drive transformation. As role models, both individually and as a collective, you play a crucial part in leading the way.
Courage
My favorite value. Agile leadership requires courage, and in return, it will strengthen your resolve. Always be ready to face the unexpected!
Repeat!
Returning to the image of the spiral: this journey is ongoing. Every new challenge will lead you through familiar issues, but from a fresh starting point, enriched by all the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. You’ll carry your skills forward, advancing them to the next stage of your journey, where you’ll apply and expand them in new contexts.
Conclusion
This text offered a brief overview of the components of agile leadership as outlined in the Agile Leadership Spiral model: ME for your regular self reflection and self awareness as a leader. YOU for your relationships to other individuals. TEAMS for your services to teams. And ORGANIZATION for your driving contribution to the change in the organization.
The model can serve multiple purposes: as a self-guidance tool to help you focus when practicing agile leadership, or as a framework for coaching others on their path to becoming agile leaders.
You can utilize this model as a framework, customizing the four segments with approaches and strategies that are most beneficial for you. Here begins your true challenge: to explore and discover the most effective way for you to leverage the Agile Leadership Spiral.
Spiral Forward: Transforming Leadership, One Step at a Time!
about me…
Anja Stiedl is an independent Coach and Trainer located near Munich, with a focus on agile methodologies. As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Certified Agile Coach (CEC | CTC), she assists teams and organizations in effectively understanding and implementing agile practices. Drawing from her extensive experience in the IT industry, Anja provides interactive, hands-on training that emphasizes practical applications and continuous improvement. Her expertise covers key areas such as Scrum Mastery, Product Ownership, Agile Coaching, Scaling, and Agile Leadership. In 2021, while designing her Agile Leadership training programs, Anja developed the Agile Leadership Spiral, which she now employs to address leadership challenges.