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Four Organizational Shifts in Agile Transformation — Shift 4 From Managers to Servant Leaders
Organizational agile transformation calls for four major shifts. The change in management — from traditional managers to servant leaders — is the last one.
The prevailing management paradigm today is still that for mass production. Despite some improvements in terms of responsibility delegation, information transparency, or participation of employees in certain discussions, traditional management’s essential purpose remains to ensure that moderately qualified employees can work with efficiency on repetitive tasks based on standards in big quantities. For this reason, most organizations are conventionally structured in silo functions and hierarchical levels, with rules and procedures to make sure that things are predictable and in line with standards. This only works well when the environment is stable and foreseeable, which is not the case anymore since today’s business world is full of uncertainties. Inevitably, we have to embrace the shift from traditional management paradigm towards servant leadership, which can ensure that our employees or teams receive autonomy and people with proper level of intelligence and expertise can face our clients directly so as to be able to deliver real value to them with speed and adapt to changes with ease.
