State of Agile Culture Report 2023
Businesses face challenging times.
The past few years have seen the fallout from Brexit, international unrest, and a global pandemic, along with successive changes in the UK government. Living in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world has contributed to the financial instability and subsequent cost-of-living crisis the country is currently experiencing.
This is shining a light on the ability of organisations to respond to sudden and unpredictable events. The pace of change has necessitated a transformation in how businesses operate, pushing them to adapt their leadership styles, embrace remote working models, and accelerate towards digitalisation.
Our third State of Agile Culture Report explores the impact of leadership styles on agile culture, business agility, organisational resilience and performance in a recession environment.
The research has revealed valuable insights about agile leadership and culture:
- A strong agile culture can increase commercial performance by 277%.
- Post-heroic leadership is highly correlated with a strong agile culture (0.82 correlation). *See page 5 for definition.
- Post-heroic leaders are closely associated to organisations which can respond more quickly and effectively to market challenges and opportunities (0.86 correlation).
- Only 10% of leaders demonstrate post-heroic leadership qualities.
- Perceived strength of leadership agility has stalled at 47% compared to 56% pre-pandemic.
- 71% of employees do not believe their leaders are capable of responding to market changes.
There is a significant gap in leadership’s awareness and understanding of agile behaviours:
- 97% of C-suite members believe they role model agile behaviours, but only 2% of delivery team members agree.
- 80% of C-suite members feel that leaders in their organisation can adapt and pivot, while just 15% of senior leaders agree.
- 91% of C-suite members feel experimentation is encouraged, compared with 35% of delivery team members.
The top three levers that leaders can pull to unlock improved commercial performance are:
- Investing in agile coaching and training for themselves and delivery team members.
- Providing greater clarity of intent / business focus and priorities.
- Creating and sustaining a safe agile working environment.
Post-heroic leadership is the way to build a strong agile culture, organisational agility, resilience, and improve commercial performance. The case for investing in leadership capabilities and moving to this style of leadership has never been stronger.
Authors
Agile Business Consortium
The Agile Business Consortium is the professional body for business agility. We’re all about community – whether you’re a multinational working through a large-scale transformation, a new start-up, or a contractor, we can support you to achieve more, to grow more, and to build your business agility. As a global not-for-profit organisation that’s been around for over 25 years, our knowledge and experience around agile competencies and behaviours can offer you the guidance you need to reach your agility goals. Together with our partners, we create and share agile research, case studies, resources and tools that help you compete in today’s uncertain world. A registered not-for-profit, we’re the world’s longest-standing agile-orientated organisation. We’re the brains behind AgilePM®, AgileBA®, AgilePgM®, AgilePfM™ and AgileDS™. Based in the UK, we have members in over 30 countries around the world.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 01233611162
- Twitter:
- @Agile_Biz
- Website:
- agilebusiness.org
- LinkedIn:
- https://linkedin.com/company/agile-business-consortium
JCURV
JCURV’s mission is to increase the agility of organisations so they can thrive in an increasingly uncertain world. As a management consultancy, we help organisations to radically change the way they work to deliver value faster, more efficiently and more effectively by combining data, lean and agile ways of working.
What we do
JCURV’s mission is to increase the agility of organisations so they can thrive in an increasingly uncertain world. As an award-winning management consultancy JCURV helps organisations radically change the way they work to deliver their business strategy faster, more efficiently and more effectively. Since being established, JCURV have supported clients such as Sainsbury’s plc, EY, News UK, Hargreaves Lansdown, Direct Line Group, Bank of Ireland deliver over £3bn of additional value and upskilled over 8,000 client colleagues.
Our strong track record comes from coaching Executives through to delivery teams on their transformation journey ensuring they both deliver value but also build internal capability to sustain the new ways of working. JCURV is an expert in scaling agile across organisations including introducing large scale planning, agile governance, budgeting and operating model re-design. JCURV co-leads the state of agile culture survey, the world’s largest of its kind, with the ABC and Truthsayers focused on understanding the intangible levers that can be applied to accelerate and sustain agile ways of working.
Our solutions
- Strategy mobilisation
- Enterprise agility
- Datagility
- Accelerating innovation
- Programme acceleration
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +4407843242464
- Twitter:
- @jcurvs
- Website:
- www.jcurv.com
- LinkedIn:
- https://linkedin.com/company/jcurv/
Truthsayers
Truthsayers Neurotech platform is a SaaS-based technology solution. They are an agile business with a global ambition to enable workplaces to become truly authentic. Truthsayers are a diverse team committed to minimising our environmental impact and maximising our positive social impact. Their shared values are simple: authenticity, courage and social purpose.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Twitter:
- @tneurotech
- Website:
- www.truthsayers.io/
- LinkedIn:
- https://linkedin.com/company/truthsayers/