The Leadership Fairy Tale

Servant Leadership

Classical command-and-control leadership demands strict hierarchy, while agile leadership proposes servant leadership at all levels of the organization. While the former has its obvious shortcomings in today’s ever faster-changing interconnected world, as laid bare by the more successful agile organizations, the latter is turning out not to be the Holy Grail of agility for all.

Many organizations that have been around for a while and grew up with traditional command-and-control are now struggling to adopt servant leadership at all levels. As it turns out, leadership and self-organization are not found at every corner of our organizations.

Perhaps it is time to reflect on the absence of success of leadership at all levels and look for new and better ways to propel organizational leadership to a more agile way of working. In the end, servant leadership is not a goal by itself, but a mere means to an end of being able to succeed in today’s ever faster-changing environments.

Agile Heaven

Ever since the Agile Manifesto gained popularity we’ve heard numerous agile prophets preach that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”, that we can do without middle management layers, that senior management should give their…