The Agile Leader

What if leadership wasn’t a title but a way of thinking—a mindset you could choose to embody? In The Agile Leader: Leveraging the Power of Influence, Zuzana Šochová invites you to imagine leadership as a state of mind rather than a hierarchical role. She argues that agility has transformed how organizations operate in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, requiring a radical shift in how we understand authority, collaboration, and change.

Šochová contends that traditional command-and-control models, built for stability and predictability, crumble under complexity. The solution isn’t more control—it’s leadership agility: empowering teams to self-organize, fostering transparency, and cultivating trust. The agile leader doesn’t direct work through positional power; they inspire alignment through influence and service. This idea aligns with similar frameworks in Stephen Denning’s The Age of Agile and Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, both of which emphasize adaptive, human-centered leadership as essential to thriving amid constant change.

Why Agile Leadership Matters

Šochová begins her journey with a personal story. In 2010, she was tasked with merging three departments—software development, testing, and hardware design—into one cohesive unit. Facing resistance from executives committed to hierarchy, she proposed a radical idea: no managers, only networks of self-organizing teams led by Scrum Masters. To her surprise, the chairman approved. By aligning her experiment with the company’s strategic goal—creating 'added-value solutions'—she proved that agility wasn’t a fad or idealistic dream but a practical path toward flexibility and innovation.

This case sets the tone for the book’s thesis: agility is not the goal; it’s the means to achieve your goals. Without a compelling reason to change—a sense of urgency—organizations simply won’t budge. As Šochová reminds readers, change begins with asking three simple but difficult questions: Why do we need to change? What’s the need behind it? What happens if we don’t?

The Mindset Shift

In her analysis, agility isn’t a framework or set of tools—it’s a mindset built on four principles derived from Modern Agile (Joshua Kerievsky): make people awesome, experiment and learn rapidly, deliver value continuously, and make safety a prerequisite. These principles fundamentally rewire how you see success, power, and leadership. For example, 'make safety a prerequisite' means fostering psychological safety where failure is an opportunity to learn—a concept echoed in Amy Edmondson’s research (The Fearless Organization).

When you apply these principles, leadership transforms into an act of facilitating creativity rather than enforcing compliance. You learn to replace detailed plans with inspection and adaptation, to value learning over control, and to encourage autonomy instead of micromanagement. In essence, agile leadership means letting go of certainty and replacing it with curiosity.

Living in a VUCA World

Šochová situates agility in historical context. She contrasts the static 'Taylorist' management of the Industrial Era, which optimized for efficiency and predictability, with the fluid, interconnected, digitized reality of today’s global business. As globalization and technology accelerate change—through AI, machine learning, and decentralization—organizations can no longer rely on fixed hierarchies or exhaustive planning. Instead, they must learn to thrive in uncertainty, just as complex adaptive systems do in nature.

“Stop creating plans—inspect and adapt,” Šochová urges. “Agile isn’t about predicting the future but responding to it with speed, learning, and trust.”

When you understand your environment through the lens of VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—you begin to see why traditional management structures fail. Leaders can’t rely on static plans but must create organizations capable of continuous learning. Agile organizations become networks of empowered teams united by purpose. Instead of pushing knowledge top-down, they cultivate awareness bottom-up.

From Managers to Leaders

At the heart of the agile movement lies a distinction: managers have positional power; leaders have influence. A manager’s authority comes from their title. A leader’s authority comes from their ability to inspire trust. In an agile context, leadership is not assigned—it’s chosen. It’s accessible to anyone who decides to take responsibility and lead through service. As Šochová says, “Everyone can become a leader; no one can be promoted to one.” That statement reframes leadership as a state of consciousness—an intentional way of engaging with your world.

Her story of resisting the temptation to use positional power—spending long hours helping others make decisions instead of dictating them—illustrates the discipline required to lead with influence. It’s less efficient at first, but it generates creativity and innovation. In her organization, once the collaborative culture took root, the department began running itself, producing 'added-value solutions' organically.

Why Change Must Start with Leaders

Leadership agility isn’t optional—it’s survival. Organizations may initiate agile transformations with new processes or technologies, but without leaders embodying the mindset, the result is 'fake agile': process change without real empowerment. Šochová emphasizes that leaders must change first; the organization will follow. She echoes Harvard’s Deborah Ancona (Nimble Leadership): “Nobody has really recommended command-and-control for a long time—but no fully formed alternative has emerged.” Agile leadership is that alternative.

Ultimately, Šochová’s message is a call for courage. Becoming an agile leader requires vulnerability, patience, and resilience. It means trusting systems rather than controlling them, embracing change rather than fearing it, and serving people rather than commanding them. In doing so, you transform not only how you lead but how people experience work—creating organizations that are flexible, creative, and humane.

Šochová maps organizational maturity through three paradigms—traditional, knowledge, and agile—each suited to a different era of complexity. Just as species evolve to fit their environment, organizations evolve their structures to match the world’s speed and unpredictability. Understanding these paradigms helps you see where your company stands and how to move toward adaptability.

Organization 1.0: The Hierarchical Era

In Organization 1.0, the workplace functions like a pyramid. Leaders command; employees obey. Born during the Industrial Age, this structure emphasizes control, bureaucracy, and standardization. People are treated as resources to be optimized, motivated by the carrot-and-stick approach. This era achieved efficiency in repetitive tasks, but in today’s complex, fast-changing environment, it’s a dinosaur—strong but inflexible.

Managers in this model believe that workers are lazy and need pressure. Roles are rigid, creativity suppressed. As a result, these workplaces breed unhappiness and disengagement—what Douglas McGregor labeled 'Theory X' behavior. (Note: Niels Pflaeging calls this mindset 'organizational physics': machines pretending to be human systems.)

Organization 2.0: The Knowledge Era

The 1990s ushered in specialization and process optimization. Organizations became networks of experts divided into silos—database teams, testing teams, analysts, marketers—each managed by its own hierarchy. This knowledge-driven structure treated problems as complicated rather than complex, solvable with highly skilled individuals and elaborate coordination. It worked for linear growth but failed at innovation.

Competition increased, and so did internal metrics and pressure. KPIs, performance reviews, and career paths incentivized individuals to outshine peers rather than collaborate. Lencioni’s 'Five Dysfunctions of a Team'—absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results—were born here. Managers micromanaged employees, fostering defensive communication and blame.

Organization 3.0: The Agile Era

The third paradigm—Organization 3.0—emerges naturally when complexity exceeds the capacity of control. Agile organizations thrive on autonomy, cross-functional collaboration, and decentralization. They’re organic networks rather than rigid hierarchies. Teams function like connected organisms—independent but aligned by shared purpose—similar to Laloux’s 'teal organizations' or Niels Pflaeging’s Organize for Complexity.

These companies believe people are inherently creative and trustworthy. Leadership becomes emergent rather than positional. Teams experiment, learn, and adapt faster than competitors. The organization’s role is not to control individuals but to create the conditions for collaboration—safe culture, transparency, and evolutionary purpose.

“Imagine ants building a colony,” Šochová writes. “Each part moves autonomously, yet together they create incredible resilience.”

Moving toward Organization 3.0 doesn’t mean erasing hierarchy overnight—it means gradually balancing structure with autonomy. Every organization coexists in a mix of paradigms; some departments operate traditionally, others are agile. The challenge for leaders is to sense which model dominates their system today and evolve accordingly.

Šochová explains that agile leadership is an internal transformation. Before you can influence others, you must change yourself—your mindset, habits, and way of seeing power. She distinguishes three archetypes inspired by Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility: the Expert, the Achiever, and the Catalyst.

From Expert to Catalyst

Experts lead by doing. They rely on their technical skills, prefer control, and manage tasks directly. They thrive in predictable environments but fail in complex ones. Achievers move one level up: they shape strategy, influence others, and chase results—but often remain competitive and impatient. Catalysts, by contrast, create environments where collaboration and creativity flourish. They excel at coaching, listening, and empowering others. They understand that growth is transformation, not instruction.

According to Joiner’s research (and echoed by Šochová), only about 10% of leaders today operate at the Catalyst level. Moving up requires self-awareness—and humility. Pete Behrens, a leadership coach featured in the book, admits that his own Catalyst intentions were often perceived as manipulative. To bridge this gap, he learned to clarify intent and invite feedback early. Awareness and transparency create trust.

Servant and Leader-Leader Models

The servant leader, described by Robert Greenleaf and adapted by agile thinkers like Jeff Sutherland and Patrick Lencioni, is the foundation of agile leadership. You lead by serving—listening, empathizing, and enabling others’ growth. Šochová refines this into the 'leader-leader' model (David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!): instead of followers obeying, everyone leads. On a nuclear submarine, Marquet turned command hierarchy into distributed leadership, proving that autonomy works even under extreme conditions.

In the agile world, acting as a leader-leader means sharing vision and transparency, not instructions. You trust that teams will make sound decisions when goals are clear. This model demands courage—letting go of control and accepting that others may choose different paths. 'Letting go,' writes Šochová, 'isn’t weakness; it’s wisdom.'

Purpose and Positivity as Fuel

Agile leadership begins with purpose—the internal reason that makes you get up each morning. Without it, there is no energy for transformation. Šochová’s purpose was simple: to “change the world of work.” Through coaching, training, and writing, she pursued this cause relentlessly. Her advice: write down your purpose and check whether it energizes you. If you wouldn’t show up for your company without a paycheck, you may be missing alignment with purpose.

Positivity complements purpose. Like a mental bank account, positive experiences guard you against setbacks. Celebrating small wins and reframing failure as learning create resilience—the foundation of agile culture. Daniel Pink’s Drive echoes this idea: intrinsic motivation (autonomy, mastery, purpose) surpasses external rewards like money.

Listening and Autonomy

Finally, Šochová connects leadership to listening at three levels: 'me' listening for self-awareness, 'we' listening for empathy, and 'world' listening for systems awareness. Great leaders hear not only words but dynamics—energy shifts, emotions, and unspoken signals. Trust emerges from deep listening, and autonomy grows when you stop telling and start coaching.

“Autonomy,” she writes, “is the courage to let go and trust the system to find its way.”

Throughout your journey, remember: you are both student and teacher. Every failure teaches humility; every success deepens trust. Becoming an agile leader is less about doing agile—it’s about being agile.

Šochová introduces a practical framework for acting as an agile leader—the Agile Leadership Model—built on Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI). It rests on three cyclical steps: Get Awareness, Embrace It, Act Upon. This model trains leaders to perceive and influence organizations as complex living systems rather than mechanical hierarchies.

Step 1: Get Awareness

Before solving anything, you must understand what’s happening. Every team emits signals—frustration, silence, laughter, defensiveness—that reveal system health. Getting awareness means stepping back, observing patterns, and listening to the collective voice. Imagine standing on a watchtower overlooking the organization: you can’t see individual details, but you can sense energy flow. Šochová compares this to snowboarding in a whiteout—you trust your instincts when visibility fails.

Step 2: Embrace It

The second step asks you to accept what’s happening without judgment. In complex systems, right and wrong blur; everyone is right but only partially. What looks like a problem may hide growth potential. A failed project might reveal hidden learning. When you stop evaluating and begin embracing, you replace fear with curiosity. This habit builds trust and clarity. For example, when a product team at Šochová’s company struggled with a flawed vendor contract, she reframed it not as incompetence but as multiple valid perspectives—each exposing system imbalance. Acceptance opened the door for creative solutions.

Step 3: Act Upon

Once awareness and acceptance settle, you act in small but intentional ways—like tapping a spinning wheel. Acting upon doesn’t mean imposing large-scale change; it means choosing an experiment that nudges the system. You can trigger alignment by visualizing issues, facilitating retrospectives, organizing Open Space events, or just asking coaching questions. The system will respond creatively on its own if given room. Actions are cyclical—you observe, accept, and act again.

“Awareness determines your ability to embrace reality,” says Šochová, “and embracing opens the space for wise action.”

Complexity Over Evaluation

Traditional management thrives on evaluation—deciding what’s right or wrong—but agile leaders work with complexity. Instead of forcing linear analysis, they facilitate convergence among perspectives. This reframing prevents reactive blame and encourages systemic learning. The model borrows from systems coaching (CRR Global): relationship systems are naturally intelligent; leaders must trust their creativity. Through feedback loops, the organization evolves organically, like a living organism learning from each iteration.

Leadership Through Non-Judgment

A vivid story illustrates this approach: at one company, product owners received a bonus to split among themselves. They agreed on equal distribution, then two demanded more, igniting conflict. A traditional leader might intervene or punish dissent. Šochová applied her model instead—listening, reframing, and helping all sides see partial truths. In the short term, chaos ensued; in the long term, the team confronted hidden tensions and built stronger unity. Complex systems evolve through friction—if courage and mindfulness hold space for learning.

The Agile Leadership Model reminds you that leadership isn’t about fixing people—it’s about sensing systems. When awareness, acceptance, and gentle action flow together, change happens naturally. You become a catalyst, not a controller.

To lead with agility, you need a specific set of competencies: vision, motivation, feedback, decision making, collaboration, facilitation, coaching, and the ability to implement change. Šochová organizes them into a map that guides your growth as a leader.

Vision and Purpose

Vision isn’t a slogan—it’s a dream that inspires emotional connection. Šochová describes how she revived a meaningless corporate statement ('Added-Value Solutions') by rediscovering its essence through conversations. Vision emerges not from logic but from exploring the three levels of reality (Arnold Mindell): sentient essence (feelings), dreaming (possibilities), and consensus reality (practical decisions). Asking, 'Who are we, and who are we not?' turns abstract goals into shared meaning. When people co-create vision, they commit organically.

Motivation and Engagement

Agile organizations rely on intrinsic motivation—autonomy, mastery, purpose (Daniel Pink). Šochová dismantles the myth that money motivates; once basic needs are met, incentives erode curiosity and teamwork. Instead, she encourages creating workplaces driven by trust, learning, and safety. Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y defines people as naturally responsible and creative, contrasting with the cynical assumptions of Theory X. Agile leaders must design cultures that reinforce Theory Y behavior.

“There are no Theory X people—only Theory X environments,” Niels Pflaeging reminds us, echoing Šochová’s message.

Feedback and Decision Making

Feedback drives agility. Too often, organizations collect it annually through performance reviews—ineffective and demotivating. Agile teams exchange feedback daily through retrospectives and open conversations. Šochová proposes the COIN model for structured feedback: Context, Observation, Impact, Next. This formula transforms vague criticism into actionable coaching. She also advocates sociocratic decision making—consent-based, inclusive, and transparent—over top-down commands. Effective decisions arise from dialogue, not decree.

Collaboration and Facilitation

Collaboration in agile teams replaces delegation. True collaboration means shared ownership—'We do it together.' Facilitation is the technique that keeps dialogue balanced. Using David Kantor’s Four-Player Model (Move, Follow, Oppose, Bystand), you ensure all voices are heard: movers initiate ideas, followers support, opposers challenge, and bystanders provide perspective. Healthy conversations combine advocacy (move/oppose) and inquiry (follow/bystand). Leaders must cultivate this dynamic to unleash creativity.

Coaching and Change

Finally, coaching connects all competencies. Agile leaders don’t teach—they ask. They create awareness, hold space for reflection, and let teams find their own path. Change, unlike instruction, happens through empathy and patience. Drawing on Esther Derby’s 7 Rules for Positive Change, Šochová reminds you that transformation occurs through micro-shifts, not mandates. Begin with yourself—model curiosity, courage, and resilience. The rest will follow.

Leadership agility, she concludes, is a lifelong practice. You never master it fully; you continually evolve through learning, feedback, and experimentation.

Meta-skills are higher-order abilities that shape all other competencies. Šochová divides them into three domains—Me, We, and World—that reflect the inner, interpersonal, and environmental dimensions of leadership. These meta-skills make you adaptable across any context.

The Me Domain: Self-Awareness

Here, curiosity, playfulness, respect, and patience form the foundation. Curiosity pushes you to listen deeply before reacting. Playfulness lightens your mindset, turning problems into opportunities for experimentation. Respect prevents judgment by reminding you that everyone’s perspective is partial truth. Patience helps you accept slow progress in complex systems. Šochová shares how practicing curiosity and patience transformed her experience with a toxic team—by focusing on her reactions rather than changing others, she eventually rebuilt trust and collaboration.

The We Domain: Relationships

The We domain includes collaboration, trust, openness, and diversity. These qualities sustain healthy teams. Collaboration replaces hierarchy with co-creation. Trust allows vulnerability, which eliminates fear and defensiveness. Openness ensures transparency, and diversity multiplies perspectives. Diverse teams, she notes, are more creative and innovative (echoing research by Margaret Heffernan’s 'super-chickens' experiment). Leaders must design spaces where differences become assets, not barriers.

The World Domain: Impact

The World domain expands influence through commitment, focus, truthfulness, and courage. Commitment keeps you aligned with purpose; focus sustains flow and prevents distraction; truthfulness breeds integrity; and courage empowers experimentation. These traits anchor leaders facing uncertainty. As Šochová puts it, “There is no leadership without courage, and no agile without courage.”

Together, Me, We, and World remind you that leadership spans inner growth, social dynamics, and environmental adaptation. Developing these meta-skills transforms not only your behavior but your being. They are the invisible architecture of agile mastery.

Šochová expands beyond individual leadership to explore organizational transformation. She asserts that agility must grow from the inside out—values first, processes second. When organizations treat agile as a method to implement rather than a culture to live, they create 'fake agile.' The real journey transforms mindset, structure, and purpose.

The Inside-Out Change

Real agility starts with a compelling vision and strong evolutionary purpose—a shared answer to why the organization exists. This purpose unifies decentralized teams and prevents chaos by giving them direction. Agile organizations change not through command but through conversation. They build networks of autonomy bound by trust, not control.

Emergent Leadership and Culture

In agile organizations, leadership is emergent—anyone can step up with an idea and lead initiatives temporarily. Google embraces this concept through “emergent leadership,” where team members lead when context demands. Power shifts dynamically rather than hierarchically. Culture becomes the invisible structure that sustains agility. Following Edgar Schein’s rule, leaders must shape and manage culture consciously; if they don’t, culture manages them.

Šochová uses the metaphor of a clam: mindset and structure are the two halves of the shell. Too rigid a structure kills creativity; too loose a structure breeds chaos. Balance enables adaptation. In one story, a team rewarded by lines of code produced competition and burnout—their system strangled collaboration. Agility required dismantling that metric and shifting focus to team learning.

Tribal Leadership and VUCA Alignment

Borrowing from Dave Logan’s Tribal Leadership, Šochová explains how organizations evolve through five cultural stages: 'Life Sucks,' 'My Life Sucks,' 'I’m Great,' 'We Are Great,' and 'Life Is Great.' Agile begins when teams transition from individual pride ('I’m Great') to collective identity ('We Are Great'). The pinnacle, 'Life Is Great,' mirrors business agility—organisms collaborating across boundaries for shared purpose. Shifting tribes requires patience and shared stories of success.

Competing Values and Teal Evolution

Using the Quinn–Rohrbaugh Competing Values Framework, Šochová maps cultures from 'control/compete' to 'collaborate/create.' Traditional organizations favor control and competition—hierarchy and profits. Agile organizations live in collaboration and creativity—trust and innovation. As they mature, they move from orange (performance-driven) to green (empowered, values-led) to teal (evolutionary, self-organized). The shift redefines the CEO as shared leadership—an organizational Product Owner for purpose and a ScrumMaster for culture.

Transformation takes time, empathy, and courage. The culture can’t be pushed—it must grow organically, like a pearl inside the clam. With enough patience, structure and mindset align, and the organization becomes truly agile.

Agile leadership extends to enterprise and governance. Šochová describes how businesses evolve from agile teams to agile organizations and eventually to agile boards. Each level must embody the mindset of experimentation, transparency, and empowerment.

Agile Beyond Teams

While most organizations start with agile software projects, true transformation requires cross-functional agility—HR, finance, marketing, executive teams. The Business Agility Institute (Evan Leybourn) reports that organizations embracing agility outside IT achieve higher outcomes. When leaders apply Scrum principles to strategy and governance—short iterations, feedback, adaptability—they create responsiveness to market change.

Reimagining Executive Roles

Šochová proposes replacing the CEO role with two agile counterparts: the Organizational Product Owner (focus on vision and external impact) and the Organizational ScrumMaster (focus on internal culture and systems). This dual leadership mirrors Scrum’s balance of business and people. Howard Sublett and Melissa Boggs at Scrum Alliance embodied this experiment—co-leading through partnership instead of positional hierarchy. The result was a flatter, more transparent organization delivering faster value.

Agile Boards of Directors

Even boards can be agile. Šochová and Sandra Davey show how boards shift from static reporting to strategic problem-solving through OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Traditional boards fixate on outputs—deadlines and deliverables. Agile boards focus on outcomes—meaningful impact. They convene frequent, transparent 'sprints' to inspect and adapt rather than simply review financial reports. As Davey writes, “OKRs liberated our board from telling to listening.”

Radical Self-Organization

Stories like Lunar Logic’s transformation underline the power of decentralization. CEO Pawel Brodzinski removed managerial layers, enabling everyone to make decisions—even salary setting. Radical self-organization demands trust, accountability, and persistence. The payoff: engagement soared, financial results skyrocketed, and employees found meaning. Agility at scale isn’t about more control—it’s about distributed sovereignty.

Ultimately, business agility redefines leadership as collective consciousness. When executives, teams, and boards all live agile values, the organization evolves into a responsive ecosystem—creative, humane, and resilient.

Šochová applies agility to two notoriously rigid domains—HR and finance—transforming hiring, evaluation, compensation, and budgeting into collaborative, adaptive practices. The message: internal departments must embody the same agility they expect from teams.

Agile HR: Recruiting for Mindset

Agile HR shifts focus from evaluating resumes to understanding values and curiosity. Skills can be learned; mindset cannot. In place of traditional interviews, Šochová recommends team-based conversations, work simulations, and open invitations to 'join for a day.' Google’s hiring philosophy—'hire for learning ability, not IQ'—reflects the same idea. Engaged employees contribute creatively because they align with purpose, not position.

Performance and Growth

Instead of annual reviews and KPIs, agile organizations use coaching for growth and peer feedback. Šochová introduces the COIN method (Context, Observation, Impact, Next) and quarterly reflection rather than evaluation. Transparency and trust replace judgment. Feedback becomes developmental dialogue, and career progression turns into continuous learning, often visualized through competency maps and self-assessment scales.

Career Paths and Salaries

In fluid organizations, fixed positions lose meaning. Teams generate emergent roles based on need. Salaries decouple from titles and become transparent, governed by consensus. The Mayflower software company illustrates this: employees collectively determine raises through open dialogue, balancing organizational interests with fairness. Radical transparency fosters trust and accountability.

Agile Finance: Beyond Budgeting

Traditional annual budgets stifle responsiveness. Agile finance, guided by the Beyond Budgeting principles (Bjarte Bogsnes), replaces command-and-control with rolling forecasts, dynamic resource allocation, and peer feedback. Nevine White’s story at tw telecom shows how eliminating rigid budgets unleashed agility: decision making sped up, bureaucracy disappeared, and the company achieved 40 consecutive quarters of growth—even through the Great Recession. Continuous adaptation became its competitive advantage.

Together, agile HR and finance may seem unorthodox, but they form the backbone of cultural agility. When people processes and financial systems align with trust, transparency, and purpose, the organization becomes truly dynamic.

In her final chapters, Šochová dives into practical tools for cultivating trust, transparency, and collaborative learning across organizations. She shows how system coaching, facilitation, Open Space, and World Café techniques unlock creativity, and how radical transparency becomes the ultimate leadership tool.

System Coaching and Facilitation

Agile leaders coach not individuals but systems. Using Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), they listen to what happens between people, not just to people. Facilitation becomes the bridge between perspectives. Marsha Acker describes facilitation as 'the art of listening neutrally and creating spaces where all voices are heard.' When leaders facilitate rather than dictate, alignment emerges organically.

Open Space and World Café

These structured dialogues allow large groups to self-organize around shared challenges. Open Space operates by one simple rule—the Law of Two Feet—and four principles ('Whoever comes are the right people', 'Whatever happens is the only thing that could have', and so on). World Café uses small table discussions with rotating participants to surface collective intelligence. Šochová describes using these approaches to redesign HR processes and envision future workplaces. Diversity fuels innovation—the wisdom of the crowd solves complex problems faster than any manager could.

Radical Transparency

Transparency is the ultimate trust builder. When information flows freely, politics vanish. Examples like Buffer’s open-salary policy, Dodo Pizza’s public dashboards, and Menlo Innovations’ open 'Levels Board' demonstrate that visibility creates accountability and growth. As Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates says, “Radical truth and transparency create meaningful relationships.”

Building Trust and Communities

Trust begins with vulnerability. Teams can foster it through simple rituals—appreciation loops, personal maps, or shared learning experiences. Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team identifies trust as the foundation for commitment and results. Communities of practice extend this trust beyond teams, aligning people by passion and purpose rather than hierarchy. Evan Leybourn’s Business Agility Institute exemplifies this collaborative network model—mobilizing hundreds of volunteers globally around one vision.

Šochová closes with a powerful reminder: agile leadership isn’t a method to follow but a mindset to live. Trust is its heartbeat; transparency is its oxygen. When you lead with openness and courage, your organization becomes not just efficient—but alive.