In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins studies what differentiates great companies from good companies. The answer? Great leadership.

I’m not surprised. Not only did I spend 15 years in the world’s greatest leadership laboratory (the U.S. military), but I have also worked for some fantastic people whose leadership had obvious positive impacts on their organizations. So what did I learn over the course of 30-odd years while working with some amazing leaders? It’s simple—leadership matters, especially servant leadership. Servant leaders put the needs of others first to meet the collective goals of the company. Without great (or at least good) servant leadership, organizations fail.

As a member of an Agile Team, have you ever had one of the following complaints about management?

• Their deadlines are too tight.
• Their expectations are unfair because they don’t follow Agile processes.
• They don’t take time to learn more about the work that’s being done.

It’s true, management can be a pain sometimes...so what have you done about it?

How does a Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) Transformation stick and sustain? An important key to success is having communicative leaders who commit to organizational culture change. While this commitment is best obtained from the C-suite or VPs early in the sales cycle, it is also the hardest. SAFe Transformations tend to start and stop in the IT department, where the primary goal is to produce a faster software development lifecycle.