What Agile Teams Taught Me About Leadership – And How It Applies to Traditional Organisations


Over the past two decades supporting financial institutions through transformation, I’ve had the opportunity to work with both traditional and agile teams. The contrast between them has taught me some of the most valuable leadership lessons of my career.

Agile, as a mindset and methodology, is often seen as relevant only for tech or product teams. But I’ve found its principles can—and should—be applied far more broadly. In fact, in today’s world of continuous disruption, the characteristics that make agile teams effective are exactly what traditional organisations need to stay competitive.


Leadership Is a Shared Responsibility

One of the biggest insights I’ve gained from agile teams is the shift in how leadership is distributed. In agile teams, leadership is not limited to a single figure. It’s shared—fluid, dynamic, and situational.


When I looked back on the times we were most successful as a business/team the common aspect was that we were working “agile” but did not know it at the time.


In a study by Moe, Dingsøyr & Dybå (2010), agile team performance improved when leadership became a collective responsibility. As teams matured, individuals naturally stepped into leadership roles depending on context, rather than title.


Applying this to teams requires alignment and recognition of how your team functions, and importantly how you want it to function.  Like a sporting team or an orchestra, the leader is not the expert in all areas, but the person who can bring together everyone else’s best and remove roadblocks for their team.

Lesson for traditional organisations: Leadership isn’t about hierarchy—it’s about influence and initiative. Encourage team members at all levels to lead from where they are.


“The best leaders are those who enable others to lead.” – Harvard Business Review, Leadership for the Long Term, 2019


Trust and Psychological Safety Are Essential

Agile teams thrive on open communication and psychological safety—where members feel comfortable sharing ideas and admitting mistakes. This culture accelerates learning, innovation, and adaptability.


Working for a large US Financial Institution early in my career we found that most of our staff hated the weekly meetings.  They felt that the meeting were a reporting session were they needed to justify their work.  This was not ideal, so we shifted our meeting to a more relaxed lounge setting, and created a focus around what was going well and where were the roadblocks.  We encouraged everyone to share experience and potential solutions to the roadblocks, and to look at ways to replicate what was going right across the business. The meeting dynamic changed from what have you been doing to how can we help you.


Research supports this, Google’s “Project Aristotle” found that psychological safety was the most critical factor in determining team effectiveness—even more than skill level or experience.

Lesson for traditional organisations: Create environments where people feel safe to speak up. You’ll unlock creativity, surface risks early, and improve decision-making.


Small Teams, Clear Purpose, Faster Results

Agile teams are small and mission-driven. This structure fosters alignment, reduces bureaucracy, and enables faster decision-making. A classic paper by Hackman (2002) on team effectiveness emphasised that smaller teams with a clear purpose outperformed larger, less focused ones.


This does not mean you can’t tackle organisational wide challenges.  During my time with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia the organisation drove several group wide cultural changes around Customer Service and Productivity.  These were top down transformations were the implementation occurred through small team engagement.  What made these highly successful was a shared common purpose and individual empowerment 


McKinsey’s 2018 report, How to create an agile organization, reinforces this, showing that agile structures enable faster time-to-market and higher employee engagement—even in large enterprises.


Lesson for traditional organisations: Rethink the size and shape of your teams. Empower small, multidisciplinary groups with a clear mission and the autonomy to execute.


Servant Leadership Drives Performance

In agile environments, leaders act as coaches and enablers. The Scrum Master, for example, serves the team by removing impediments—not by directing tasks.


The best leaders I worked with encouraged and empowered me, and facilitated engagement with all levels of the organisation.  As a relatively junior banker I proposed a solution for one of our clients,  after discussing it with the broader team, my manager said “This is a great idea, let’s get the CEO on the line and see how we can help you make this a group initiative”


The worst managers positioned themselves as gatekeepers and collators of information to feed up the line, leaving you unempowered and disconnected.


A 2021 Springer study found that teams with servant-style leadership were significantly more effective in problem-solving, especially in high-complexity environments.


Lesson for traditional organisations: Shift from command-and-control to support-and-enable. Your role as a leader is to set direction, clear obstacles, and help your team succeed.


Bringing Agile Principles Into Traditional Organisations

You don’t need to restructure your entire organisation to benefit from these lessons. Here are three practical steps leaders can take today:


Final Thoughts

Agile is more than a methodology—it’s a mindset that values adaptability, collaboration, and purpose-driven leadership.


These are not only relevant in fast-paced tech environments—they’re essential in regulated, high-stakes industries like financial services.


Traditional organisations that adopt agile principles—not just in process but in culture—will be better positioned to navigate the complexity of today’s world.


The question is no longer, “Should we go agile?”

It’s: “How can we lead more like agile teams—wherever we are in the organisation?”

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