Book excerpt: Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing. The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done. Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster. "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it." --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.