The concept of servant leadership is nothing new in the agile community. Servant leadership shifts the focus of leaders from managing teams to empowering and supporting teams. But as the world continues to evolve, are we really forming the connections we need to have truly high performing teams? Empathy forms the foundation of connections between individuals, teams, and organizations, and is the key to successful in supporting the needs of our customers and society. To have truly high performing teams, we need to move beyond servant leadership to a more empathetic leadership mindset. So how do we recognize, nurture, and grow empathy and grow from Servant Leadership to Empathetic Leadership?

This workshop will guide participants through several topics. We'll explore how empathy changes our thinking, how empathy and agile success relate, and how to build empathy within ourselves, our teams, and our organizations.

In the latest "State of Agile" report lack of management support was still near the top of the list in what stalls or even derails successful agile adoptions. Managers are often confused on exactly what their role should be and how to transition from a 'project management' mindset to 'agile support' mindset. In my experience - as a former project manager turned agile support leader and now training/coaching agile teams - I have found managers need, but often don't receive, support and guidance on how to avoid being a roadblock or burden to a highly functional agile team. I'll discuss the importance of switching focus from projects to people, and on developing- their people and modeling Lean culture while still performing important and necessary corporate or compliance functions.

This talk will explore the myths surrounding managers for agile teams and team members, show why we still need them and highlight what I have called the "4G's of being a great manager" supporting agile teams.

If you are a leader or manager and are working with agile teams, or a scrum master trying to support the team interactions with their larger organization, or anyone interested in the role of managers and how it changes in an agile enterprise then this talk will provide guidance and tips for what a manager should (and shouldn't!) do.

Having substantial experience working with larger agile programs in the Federal government, it has been challenging at times to support an agile culture when scaling across multiple teams. Having several teams means agile practices often have to change slightly from team level practices, which sometimes mean the team practices have to change or shift focus to fit within the larger enterprise. There is a need for teams to maintain their own style and approach while sharing common language and some processes and understandings across several teams.

In this talk, I will cover how teams have successfully developed and maintained individual identities and culture while working within a larger group of teams and the shared culture that comes from that environment. This talk will examine how I have used team kickoff training, such as SAFe for Teams, and early coaching opportunities to create the shared thoughts and behaviors to build an agile culture.

If you are a scrum master working across teams, or a leader trying to scale your agile adoption to multiple teams, I will provide practical tips for developing not just team culture, but larger scaled culture.

In the Federal space, it is often a mix of government staff, multiple contractors and subcontractors making up an Agile projects and teams. While collaboration is a key pillar of an Agile mindset, it can be a challenge to build a collaborative environment in such a multi-entity environment. This talk will cover several case studies and will present:

• How we successfully trained many teams of blended entities through a robust learning roadmap that covered everyone regardless of employer
• How we worked to establish a ‘one team’ mindset through team building workshops and collaboration exercises
• How we worked to establish cross functional collaborative teams, team norms, etc in a multi-contractor environment.
• Successes, failures and lessons learned