This knowledge-based certification is valuable to leaders and aspiring leaders at all levels in the organization. It was designed for professionals seeking to learn about the paradigm shifts necessary to lead in adaptive environments and to develop relevant leadership capabilities.

Every ICAgile-accredited course includes hands-on learning. You’ll need to actively participate in a live class to earn this certification.

When you successfully complete your class and your post-class survey, you’ll earn a certificate that you can share with employers and your professional network. Certificates are downloadable PDFs configured for uploading and sharing on LinkedIn.

For most of the 20th century, organizations have been optimized to increase efficiency and maximize production in large part by exploiting economies of scale. Organizations need to optimize for increased innovation and accelerated learning to survive and continue to remain relevant. Examples of effective capabilities used for agility are:

• An innovative culture: An organization-wide mindset to seek and explore, and a cross-functional ability to quickly spark, develop and implement new ideas.
• A nurturing collaborative environment: a work environment where workers are inspired, and they can thrive and create.
• The ability to continuously adapt: The ability to adaptively respond to rapidly changing external conditions, including the ability to continuously evolve value streams, product and strategy. Continuous adaption extends beyond incremental improvement of discrete processes to include broader, deeper, enterprise-wide change.
• Organizational learning and sense-making: A systemic capability to sense the unfiltered, often-chaotic external environment and then make sense of it by synthesizing diverse perspectives into coherent accounts capable of driving decisions, innovation and policy. Traditionally leadership instructs the rest of the organization. In the learning organization, the rest of the organization instructs leadership.
• Continuous engagement: The ability to stay engaged and aligned with employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders, even as internal and external conditions continuously change. Relying on a few, fixed communication pathways for the sake of efficiency no longer suffices when conditions are emergent, the source of meaningful signals is unpredictable and structure is dynamic.

Organizations must transform to develop the new capabilities required to face the challenges of the world we live in today. To lead our transformed organizations effectively, we must also transform ourselves as leaders. The leadership and management practices developed to manage efficiency and production-focused organizations are not suitable for leading learning organizations or for cultivating innovative cultures. Transformation is continuous and never-ending — there is no end-state, rather the organization is continually improving and evolving.

Provide an opportunity for leaders to discuss how traditional approaches to management and leadership don’t always meet the needs of our transforming organizations. In particular, leaders will self-assess to determine how they might need to change their own behavior and attitudes to properly serve the needs of 21st century organizations.

Understanding Power & Influence

There is a difference between the vested authority of a title and the ability to influence by other means. Understanding the situational factors is key to applying the appropriate style of power and influence. Provide ways of assessing the need for power in various situations to understand the difference between positional and natural authority, especially in regards to influencing people. Ground this discussion in the culture of innovation that agile leaders strive to create and the ways various forms of power and influence could undermine or promote that. For example; how do you know what kind of power or influence to exercise at any given time? What are the variables to consider as you make your choice?

Even if you have to take direct control, how do you enable people to engage and transition to greater empowerment over time? Be clear about the difference between the vested authority of a title and the ability to influence through other means. How effective is coercion or force as a means of persuasion in today’s workplace?

Leadership Styles

Leaders often associate effective leadership with particular leadership styles. However, even though a given leader may have a predominant leadership style, the agile leader understands the need to expand their range and bring in new styles depending on the situation. Also, it is essential to bring awareness to the impact of certain leadership styles on the goal of cultivating agility and a culture of innovation. Introduce different approaches and/or models for leadership to foster awareness of the participants’ personal leadership style and help them develop awareness of how to expand their leadership range. Discuss different types of leadership styles and the impact they have on motivating behaviors to increase learning, innovation and collaboration

Leading from the Future and the Larger Context

To paraphrase a famous quote, you get what you pay attention to. If you attend to the present, you get a variation on the same thing. If you think from a future possibility, you are much more likely achieve something new. As Peter Senge has written, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” Describe and experience what standing in the future is like and how that impacts one’s assumptions and behavior, as opposed to focusing on future goals while standing in the present state. Creative tension is the gap created when one stands in a desired future, while at the same time honestly works with a clear picture of current reality.

Leading vs. Managing Change

It is sometimes said that you can’t manage transformation but you can learn to lead it successfully. Discuss how the emergent quality of transformation makes it inherently difficult to predict precise outcomes. Discuss the differences between managing and leading change and why and how leadership grows more important as uncertainty increases (i.e. co-creation of strategies and desired outcomes, bolstering a learning culture by shortening feedback loops and celebrating failure, etc.). Introduce tools and techniques to help gather and distill important information in the face of uncertainty.