Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

10.5. Developing the Next Leaders

Leading learning and change can be rewarding. In creating change, you'll engage in your own learning and change as you do it. But there's always more than you can do yourself: you can't be everywhere at once; nor can you be there forever. True change needs to survive beyond any one individual.

So, developing the next set of leaders is part of your work to introduce change. You need these people as your lieutenants, to carry on learning and changing in your absence. You need these people because yours must not be the only voice making the case for change and learning: you start the change journey alone, but you need to find your supporters. You need these people because you don't have all the solutions – other people have good ideas and you need to include them.

Put together, these three reasons mean that your lieutenants will carry the change programme into parts of the organization you can never reach and embed the ideas of the programme into the day-to-day functioning of the organization. If you're trying to introduce change to others and won't necessarily be present all the time, you need these change champions even more.

But perhaps most of all, you need to develop more leaders because they too will experience the learning and growth from being part of the change programme. This will in turn propel them to continue your programme and go beyond your original ideas.

One method is to delegate wherever possible. Rather than trying to do everything, ...