Agile Leadership Principles and Practices

This course is a part of Agile Project Management, a 5-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Agile can often challenge project managers in the realm of leadership. Old styles of command-control are now a thing of the past, except for the most conservative organizations. While good leaders employ a variety of leadership skills and leadership styles to motivate team members, even this is not enough. Simply setting a common goal and maintaining positive attitudes while raising your emotional intelligence will make you a better leader; but will it truly unlock your team's potential?

Instead of leadership traits, Agile leadership emphasizes facilitation and communication skills. This is teachable and much more powerful. This unique and effective leadership style challenges traditional beliefs in what leadership means.

Great leaders understand that the leader can no longer stand in the way of their team. Modern society, mindsets, and global competition demand new leadership roles, and leadership qualities all together that empower and motivate the team to new levels of productivity. Business leaders that miss this critical shift in leadership styles concede a powerful competitive advantage to the Agile leader.

In this course, you will learn how this new style of leadership redefines and redistributes team roles by:

Motivating through empowerment to gain better decisions

Facilitating the creativity and inclusivity of a high-functioning team

Identifying and managing decision making biases

Negotiating conflicts across individuals, teams, and organizations

Ensuring success through delegation and powerful constraint-based metrics.

You’ll learn to turn one internally motivated and critically thinking mind into many; and driving speed and innovation through leveraging all talents on the team.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile leadership is applied in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls.

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you'll learn

• Overview of agile and the key roles: scrum master, product owner, and agile team member.
• Building self-organizing teams for agile projects
• Facilitating leadership and the power of play
• Decision science and human mind heuristics
• Negotiation styles and techniques
• Managing bias through mindfulness and emotional intelligence (EQ)
• Lean decision making tools for agile project managers