Business Agility Leadership Coaching (BALC) emerged as a consequence of asking leaders and managers across HSBC how they wanted to improve their agile leadership. Our proposed solution hit a sweet spot because we were 100% oversubscribed at the start and interest just kept growing during the three months of the structured learning events.
The 'secret sauce' of BALC is that it is an immersive and silo-busting experience and not a leadership program, which is why I discourage calling it a program. All delegates are supported by executive and agile coaches, making it a very rich experience and we intentionally create the conditions for self-organised group learning. I designed the curriculum to combine the benefits of 'leader as coach' with the Lean-Agile knowledge of the 'manager as mentor'. The learning modules are Coach, Leader, Manager, Mentor with each role building on the practice gained. For instance, Coach uses safety-creating and listening skills, then Leader uses their coaching competencies to facilitate outcome-driven collaboration.
We created modules as the learning progressed, informed more by the competence and confidence developed within the learning groups than by our expertise. We did this transparently, role-modeling agility and providing an authentic agile experience. When we got something wrong with one group, we re-worked the session for the next two learning groups and provided a repeat for those who had experienced the one that had not worked. That level of commitment and service to our internal stakeholders was really appreciated.
The materials (slides and reference links) are available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This gives leaders and managers freedom to use and share the material, whilst making it difficult (or unethical) for consultancies and corporations to exploit it for their own purposes.
You may download the complete material as PDF for free from: Business Agility Leadership Coaching.
Enjoy!
