Agile vs. Traditional Leadership: Differences & 5 Tips

Many companies are changing their leadership principles and transforming from classic traditional leadership to agile leadership of their employees. But what are the differences and what does it mean for a manager? Here is the most important information and five tips for managers - whether you work according to Scrum, Agile or traditionally according to Waterfall.

In classic traditional management, it is assumed that decisions are made at the top of the hierarchy and implemented at the bottom. Managers use fixed reporting structures to ensure that all information from employees reaches them so that they can then make centrally informed decisions. The manager plans, controls and monitors the implementation of decisions.

Phew, for someone like me who hasn’t worked in such rigid “command & control” companies for a long time, that sounds scary and I feel sorry for simple employees “on the front line” in this classic traditional hierarchy. But what is different about agile leadership compared to traditional leadership? What are the differences?

Agile leadership (see Scrum, for example) attempts to implement decision-making that is as decentralized and iterative as possible. Managers should therefore not primarily collect information from their teams and report it upwards into the hierarchy, but should provide their direct reports with as much context as possible so that they can make decentralized decisions. Rigid hierarchies are generally a hindrance to creating transparency, flexibility and self-organization. This is why agile management tends to work with flat hierarchies.

Christopher Vardanyan can provide a concrete example of this (co-founder Rocket Moving Services), who says: “In a moving company, it is crucial to be able to make quick and well-founded decisions on site. We have started training our team leaders to make decisions directly during the move, such as adjusting loading plans if a truck is fuller than expected, or rerouting teams if traffic conditions change. This freedom meant fewer bottlenecks, faster problem solving, and a smoother experience for our customers.”

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Definition Agile Leadership

• Flat hierarchies, self-organization, decentralized decision-making
• Focus on flexibility, adaptability and team responsibility

In terms of leadership style, this means that classic leadership has a pronounced top-down communication, in which clear tasks and goals are communicated from the top down into the organization. Management tends to leave little room for feedback from below the hierarchy because it is assumed that the employees at the bottom of the hierarchy have too little contextual information to be able to question decisions in a meaningful way anyway. Managers see themselves as experts and decision-makers.

With agile leadership, the management style is different: the employees on the front line are the experts. Agile managers see their role as servant leader, coach and supporter. Teams are not only involved in decisions, but are also empowered to make decisions in a decentralized manner. At best, this not only leads to more flexibility and speed, but also to better decisions and higher productivity:

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  Outcomes of Agile Leadership

• Better decisions: The person at the bottom of the hierarchy or “on the front line” who has the most information about their own context can make better decisions than the boss who has not carried out an activity operationally for a long time.
• Higher productivity: A prerequisite for high motivation is autonomy. If I have more decision-making power and flexibility, I tend to be more motivated - and also more productive over a longer period of time.

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Iterative work

In addition, agile leadership is usually closely linked to iterative working methods. In iterative working methods, teams set themselves short-term goals, deliver a so-called increment and collect real customer and market feedback as quickly as possible in order to validate the added value of the increment. While in traditional hierarchies it is often managers who decide what is valuable and what is not, in agile companies this is ideally done by the customers as the actual beneficiaries of the team’s work.

In agile leadership, the leadership role is also often separated into its components. For example, there are often different leadership roles such as:

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  Typical roles in agile teams

• A product owner (or PO) who develops a product vision and roadmap with the teams,
• a Scrum Master who supports the teams in optimizing their working methods, 
• a Lead Architect who supports developers in further developing the technical infrastructure in a future-oriented manner and 
• a People Lead who takes care of the individual development of employees and also coordinates typical personnel matters.

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This is just an example of the division of responsibilities in agile management methods. They may look different depending on the company and context. However, the core idea is always the same: why should there be one manager (the team’s bottleneck, so to speak) who has to be able to do everything? Isn’t it much more likely that different direct reports have different strengths and should therefore each take part of the decisions in the area of their strength?

Classic leadership approaches have a long tradition. They come from the military, for example, which is based on obedience.

These traditional management styles continue to function in stable, highly regulated industries with clear processes in which adaptability and the attractiveness of the working environment for employees play a subordinate role.

The contexts in which this applies are becoming fewer and fewer in the business sector. This is because companies are realizing that with increasing digitalization and shorter innovation cycles, adaptability is becoming increasingly important for the long-term success of the company.

My prediction is therefore that agile leadership will continue to spread throughout the economy and increasingly replace traditional leadership. However, traditional leadership will never disappear completely and many transformations to agile leadership will be accompanied by relapses to traditional leadership.

Why does the agile transformation in leadership fail? The answer is often obvious: agile leadership offers great opportunities for the company, but it requires traditional managers to relinquish some of their power and rethink their role.

This is an extremely difficult situation for managers. It becomes even more difficult when Agile coaches try to cover up the resentment of traditional managers with enthusiasm for the brave new world.

You should take your time with the transformation and offer managers a dialog so that they can express their displeasure and doubts and feel heard. 

In the transformation, the impression often arises that the classic managers are evil forces that must be defeated. This is of course not the case. In the past, classic managers have taken on an enormous amount of responsibility and shielded their team from problems and decisions. In addition to fears about losing their own influence, they are often legitimately concerned about whether their team can cope with the added responsibility of agile working methods - and rightly so.

In the context of traditional leadership, teams have often learned that there are others who make decisions for them and take responsibility. In this respect, employees in particular need to be slowly introduced to the new working model and gradually take on more responsibility.

So much for the problems and challenges of switching to agile leadership. But how do you solve them? Here are our tips.

5 tips for managers who prefer an agile leadership style

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🧠 Tip 1 for switching from traditional to Agile Leadership: Transform iteratively

Some management consultants and coaches promise a rapid transformation, thereby creating unrealistic expectations. This doesn’t help anyone. The expectations of managers and employees tend to be disappointed, leading to initial frustration and possibly resistance to further change among employees.

Would you prefer to transform as quickly as possible, or do you want to transform properly and sustainably? A realistic scenario: If you transform sustainably, you will no longer need external coaches afterwards. If you transform quickly, you will regularly relapse into traditional leadership and then need expensive external consultants to help you out.

A transformation from classic to agile leadership within a year is always possible, but almost never makes sense.

Jean Michel Diaz, Co-Founder @ Echometer

The right way to introduce an agile management style: Take your time and initiate the changes step by step. At each step, you should create enough space for new reservations and concerns that have arisen to be addressed by employees.

If the transformation takes 3 years, but the change was sustainable and the journey was pleasant for everyone involved, you have most likely completed the change process above average.

Incidentally, this is a prerequisite that I am assuming here: The entire management team agrees on the need for change. If this is not the case, defiance is inevitable in some areas of the company.

🧠 Tip 2 for Agile Leadership: Try out clear roles and responsibilities

One of the first iterative steps when switching to a classic management style is to try out new roles and responsibilities. There are various frameworks such as Scrum & Co from which you can draw inspiration.

The same applies here: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Please slow down the HR department if they want to start working on new, final role concepts immediately. 

Give yourself time to try out different role divisions and find out which roles work for you. As long as you are still trying things out, no official role titles or new career and salary models should be implemented. This only creates false incentives and distracts from the core challenge. 

Give yourselves permission to iteratively re-cut the new roles and try out changes that are allowed to fail. What doesn’t work is simply tried again. The HR department has nothing to do with this for the time being - unless it wants to help you moderate the iteration process and the experimentation phase. As far as the formalities are concerned, it should only take action when you are sure that you have found a reasonably stable solution.

My tip: Meet once a month for 6 months to reflect on your roles and try out new changes. 

For inspiration, see also the organizational form in our startup: Holacracy as a form of organization .

By the way, smart tools can be a great help with all these challenges. The following video provides a brief introduction to the people development software tool Echometer:

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🧠 Tip 3 for Agile Leadership: Create space for feedback and coaching

In agile leadership, feedback should not only flow from the top down. Feedback should be given at all levels and in all directions. Feedback is not a one-way street. 

Establishing this bi-directional feedback channel is a lengthy undertaking. In addition to creating opportunities for feedback, you also need the psychological security to be able to express feedback and critical views. See also: Psychological safety in Agilen teams .

As an agile leader, you should ensure that there is both a personal setting to share and discuss mutual feedback, and a - at least within the team - public channel.

Regular one-to-one meetings are particularly suitable for personal bi-directional feedback. It doesn’t matter whether these are held digitally or virtually remotely or in person. You should arrange them with your direct reports every two weeks during change phases. Many managers also hold them on a permanent basis, usually for around 30 minutes. See also: One-to-one meetings.

By the way, we have developed a software tool for just such 1-on-1 meetings. It helps to keep your conversation productive and fun while making employee development measurable. Here is a sample template - feel free to take a look:

You should establish team retrospectives as a practice for exchanging feedback within the team. A two-weekly rhythm is also a good idea here. See also: “What is a retrospective” and Tips for team retrospectives.

With both formats, however, you as a manager must expect that the start can be a little bumpy. The direct reports may still lack self-confidence, psychological confidence or simply lack practice in expressing feedback well.

🧠 Tip 4 for Agile Leadership: Fail fast and fall forward

In traditional leadership styles, it is often assumed that mistakes should be avoided at all costs. Agile leadership is somewhat different. Sure, there are certain unnecessary mistakes that should be avoided. But there are also good mistakes.

If employees take a calculated risk to try out a new idea with a lot of potential and something goes wrong, this can still be a net positive event. Because you can learn something from every experiment. Learning is temporarily more important than results.

As an agile manager, you should encourage your employees to try out new approaches and ideas. Then reflect on the results with them and share the findings with the team and the company so that everyone benefits.

The first step, of course, is to remove the taboo from talking about mistakes. See also: Error culture in companies .

🧠 Tip 5 for switching from traditional to Agile Leadership: Exchange ideas with other managers

As a rule, you are not the only manager in the company who is switching from traditional leadership to agile leadership. So you are not alone when it comes to the challenges of this transition.

So-called “communities of practice” and other exchange formats can be an extremely valuable platform for conducting a dialog both in the team and in the company on how agile leadership should be lived.

This format also has a number of preconditions that need to be met in order to generate added value: An open error culture and psychological safety are the primary requirements.

It is therefore extremely helpful at the start if individual managers agree to open the exchange with a short experience report. This should not be embellished or censored, but should reflect the experiences and developments to date as authentically as possible. The chances are high that other managers will be able to understand the process well, develop an intrinsic interest in the exchange and feel encouraged to try out more themselves, take risks and make themselves vulnerable.

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I think it has become clear that I personally have a favorite when it comes to classic vs. agile leadership. Nevertheless, as a manager you have to judge which style is the right one in your context.

Even if you have not yet initiated a central transformation from classic to agile leadership, this article has given you practical tips and food for thought on how you can change your everyday leadership style in the direction of agile leadership. 

I can only encourage managers to gain some experience with agile leadership themselves before making their judgment. I am confident that the benefits of agile leadership will speak for themselves in most cases.

If you are still unsure, the digital online software tool Echometer can help you to introduce the most important leadership routines such as agile retrospectives and 1-to-1 meetings with your employees. You can find out more about the Echometer app here.

If you’re interested, you can also play around with one of our templates for one-on-one meetings here and try it out with one of your team members free of charge soon: