Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

33 Agile Servant Leadership Is Not Fluffy

Jennifer Paylor

Jennifer Paylor is currently the Head of Learning & Development, Talent, and Culture for Capgemini in North America. She is an influential and provocative business thought-leader, and she holds a published patent for inventing a coaching system for guiding interactions. Jennifer is widely known for creating and operationalizing the largest internal corporate coaching practice in the world at IBM.

Jake Kirby was a key executive leading an agile team responsible for developing the next-generation cloud technology at a struggling enterprise. He was passionate about the technology and even more so about the mission of improving the work environment by shifting to an open and agile culture, from one of bureaucracy, control, and fear. Jake envisioned an agile workplace that was nimble, collaborative, open, and innovative where teams were self-empowered, taking risks, and learning from failure. After a long, hard fight, Jake realized that it would be nearly impossible to change a regime where bureaucrats are promoted to perpetuate a culture of fear.

During my executive coaching sessions with Jake, I was amazed at how much resilience he had to fight the many battles in order to serve the needs of the people. Every day, he would wake up to make work better for the hundreds of thousands of people in the company. Jake’s peer leaders did not seem bothered about the employee disengagement, HR complaints, lack of innovation, red-tape, ...