Agile Team Leadership Training Course

Duration 5 days 10 modules · 33 contact hours
Level Intermediate Certificate on completion
Who attends Team Leaders, Functional Managers and others
Fee from USD 1,100 KSh 95,000 for Kenyan organisations
Where 52 cities + online See dates by city
Next start 16 Nov 2026 Course code SD-LD-293

Before you join: Participants should have experience supervising a team, leading a workstream, coordinating projects, or influencing colleagues without formal authority.

Dates & prices

Two start dates a month in every city, and live online on weekdays or weekends. Fees are per participant; classroom fees include tuition, materials, lunch and refreshments, and the certificate.

Suggest a date or city

Showing the next six months. Later dates, other cities and private deliveries for your team are available on request.

Course overview

Agile teams are expected to deliver reliably while priorities, customer needs, regulations and operational constraints change. Leaders must create enough structure for accountability without slowing decisions, manage work flowing across specialist boundaries, and address uncertainty without resorting to constant escalation. This requires more than running stand-ups or adopting a board: it requires clear purpose, explicit decision rights, constructive challenge and disciplined learning from delivery evidence.

This course equips leaders to build and guide adaptive teams that can respond to change while protecting quality, service commitments and employee wellbeing. Participants learn to establish team charters and working agreements; set outcome-based goals; manage flow with visual systems and work-in-progress limits; make decisions in complex conditions; and use coaching, feedback and retrospectives to improve performance. The course also covers stakeholder expectations, dependency management, conflict, organisational change and practical team health measures.

Instruction combines concise faculty briefings with cases drawn from public services, banking, technology, operations and programme delivery. Participants work through team scenarios involving shifting priorities, blocked dependencies, service disruptions and competing stakeholder demands. They leave with a practical Agile Team Leadership Toolkit containing templates, decision aids, team operating models and a 30-day application plan for their own team.

The course is suited to managers already responsible for a team, workstream or cross-functional group. It is particularly relevant where teams must coordinate specialists, respond to changing demand, and make delivery decisions close to the work.

What you will be able to do

  • Create a team charter defining purpose, roles, interfaces, decision rights and success measures
  • Apply Cynefin to select appropriate leadership responses under different levels of complexity
  • Set outcome-based goals using OKRs, rolling-wave planning and explicit trade-off decisions
  • Manage workflow using Kanban visualisation, work-in-progress limits and flow measures
  • Structure recurring decisions using RAPID, decision logs and escalation criteria
  • Conduct coaching, feedback and retrospective conversations using GROW and SBI methods
  • Align stakeholders through expectation-setting, dependency conversations and information radiators
  • Produce a 30-day team leadership application plan with measures, sponsors and review points

Benefits of attending

For you

  • Lead changing priorities without relying on constant senior escalation
  • Run clearer team meetings focused on decisions, flow risks and commitments
  • Handle conflict and difficult feedback conversations with structured techniques
  • Build a credible evidence base for stakeholder trade-off discussions
  • Leave with a focused 30-day plan for improving team performance

For your organisation

  • Faster resolution of blocked work and cross-functional dependencies
  • Clearer ownership for decisions, escalations and service commitments
  • Reduced overload through visible work limits and capacity conversations
  • More reliable delivery forecasts based on flow evidence and explicit assumptions
  • Stronger retention and performance through constructive feedback and team learning

Course modules

10 modules over 5 days

Participants can select leadership responses that fit team needs and levels of uncertainty.

  • Agile values translated into observable leadership behaviours and team decisions
  • Complexity domains diagnosed using Cynefin before selecting management responses
  • Command-and-control habits compared with servant leadership accountabilities in teams
  • Leadership stance adjusted between direction, coaching, support and delegation
  • Agile leadership anti-patterns identified through delayed decisions and hidden work
  • Personal leadership assumptions tested against volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity

Participants can establish a team operating model with clear purpose, roles and working norms.

  • Team purpose articulated through a purpose-to-outcome statement for delivery
  • Working agreements specify meeting norms, response times and decision rights
  • Team charter defines customers, boundaries, roles, interfaces and success measures
  • RACI used selectively without replacing collective ownership of outcomes
  • Cross-functional dependencies mapped with supplier-input-process-output-customer analysis for service design
  • Definition of Done aligned with quality criteria and stakeholder expectations
  • Team norms reviewed after incidents, handovers and membership changes

Participants can plan work around outcomes, capacity, evidence and changing priorities.

  • Outcome-based goals framed with OKRs and measurable key results
  • Product backlog ordering distinguishes value, risk, urgency and effort
  • Rolling-wave planning separates near-term commitments from longer-range options
  • Capacity plans account for leave, support demand, learning and interruptions
  • Explicit trade-offs communicated using cost-of-delay and simple impact mapping
  • Planning horizons refreshed when evidence invalidates assumptions or priorities

Participants can make work visible, identify constraints and improve delivery flow.

  • Kanban boards visualise workflow states, policies, blockers and ownership
  • Work-in-progress limits expose overload, queues and blocked handoffs
  • Service delivery reviews examine throughput, cycle time and ageing work
  • Daily coordination focuses on flow risks rather than status reporting
  • Blocker escalation paths assign owners, response times and resolution authority
  • Visual management distinguishes committed work, discovery work and unplanned demand

Participants can allocate decision rights and make timely, evidence-based choices under uncertainty.

  • Decision rights allocated using RAPID for recurring cross-functional choices
  • Cynefin distinguishes clear, complicated, complex and chaotic decision contexts
  • Safe-to-fail probes designed with hypotheses, boundaries and sensing measures
  • Consent decisions separate objections from preferences during time-sensitive choices
  • Decision logs record rationale, owner, review date and reversibility
  • Escalation criteria clarify when teams require executive intervention

Participants can create conditions for challenge, feedback and disciplined team learning.

  • Psychological safety assessed through speaking-up patterns, not engagement scores
  • After-action reviews separate learning questions from blame and performance appraisal
  • SBI feedback structures observations, effects and agreed next actions
  • Retrospectives generate experiments with owners, dates and measurable signals
  • Conflict conversations address interests, evidence, options and working agreements
  • Recognition practices reinforce collaboration, learning and responsible challenge

Participants can coach team members, delegate appropriately and build resilience through shared capability.

  • Coaching questions move discussions from diagnosis toward team-owned action
  • GROW conversations clarify goals, reality, options and committed actions
  • Delegation levels matched to competence, risk, confidence and decision reversibility
  • One-to-ones surface workload, development needs, barriers and motivation
  • Skills matrices identify single points of failure and learning priorities
  • Pairing and rotation plans build coverage without disrupting delivery

Participants can align stakeholders, manage dependencies and communicate delivery evidence clearly.

  • Stakeholder maps classify influence, interest, impact and engagement needs
  • Expectation-setting conversations define outcomes, constraints, cadence and decision boundaries
  • Scrum reviews demonstrate increments, gather evidence and renegotiate priorities
  • Dependency conversations use requests, promises, conditions and acceptance criteria
  • Escalate systemic impediments with evidence, options, consequences and recommended decisions
  • Information radiators report progress, risks, decisions and forecast changes

Participants can address resistance, pressure and conflict while maintaining delivery focus.

  • Change impact assessments identify affected roles, routines, systems and incentives
  • ADKAR conversations diagnose awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement
  • Resistance treated as data about loss, risk and unmet needs
  • Team resilience routines manage sustained pressure, recovery and workload signals
  • Scenario planning prepares responses to funding, policy and demand shifts
  • Conflict escalation protocols protect relationships while addressing repeated breaches

Participants can measure team health and implement a focused leadership improvement plan.

  • Team health measures combine flow, quality, stakeholder and people indicators
  • Leading indicators distinguish emerging delivery risk from retrospective performance results
  • Review cadences connect metrics, retrospectives, decisions and improvement experiments
  • Balanced scorecards prevent local optimisation of speed, utilisation or output
  • Thirty-day application plans sequence leadership experiments, sponsors and evidence
  • Peer accountability commitments specify check-ins, obstacles and adaptation triggers

Exercises and examples are adapted to each cohort's sectors and roles.

What you take back to work

  1. Team Charter Template
  2. Working Agreements Checklist
  3. RAPID Decision Rights Matrix
  4. Kanban Flow Management Board
  5. Retrospective Action Tracker
  6. 30-Day Agile Leadership Application Plan

Who should attend

  • Team Leaders — need practical structures for guiding delivery through changing priorities
  • Functional Managers — coordinate specialists whose work depends on other teams
  • Project and Programme Managers — manage cross-functional work, risks and stakeholder commitments
  • Product Managers — align product outcomes, delivery capacity and customer evidence
  • Operations Managers — improve service flow while protecting quality and employee workload
  • Newly Appointed Managers — establish credible leadership routines with an existing team

Skills and tools covered

Adaptive team leadershipFlow managementCollaborative decision makingCoaching conversationsStakeholder alignmentContinuous improvement

Tools and standards

Kanban, Scrum, Cynefin framework, GROW model

How the course runs

Training methodology

The course uses short instructor briefings to introduce methods, followed by case analysis, group exercises, leadership simulations and structured reflection. Participants apply tools to realistic situations such as a delayed service launch, a regulatory change, a strained cross-functional relationship or a team facing unplanned demand. Faculty feedback focuses on leadership choices, communication quality and operational consequences. Each participant builds an application plan using their own team context, supported by peer review and practical templates.

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have experience supervising a team, leading a workstream, coordinating projects, or influencing colleagues without formal authority. They should be familiar with routine workplace planning, performance conversations and stakeholder communication. Some exposure to Agile ways of working, such as stand-ups, backlogs, Kanban boards or retrospectives, is useful but not essential. This is not a software development course and does not require coding, Scrum certification, formal project management credentials or prior use of a specific Agile framework.

A typical training day

08:30 – 10:30First session
10:30 – 10:45Refreshment break
10:45 – 12:30Second session
12:30 – 13:30Lunch and networking
13:30 – 15:00Third session
15:00 – 15:15Refreshment break
15:15 – 16:30Workshop and daily review

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in East Africa Time, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

  • Instruction by a practitioner facilitator
  • Full course workbook and materials
  • Exercise files, templates and case studies
  • Refreshments and lunch on classroom deliveries
  • Certificate of completion
  • Post-course application plan

Frequently asked questions

Participants should have experience leading people, coordinating work or influencing delivery across a team. Prior Agile exposure is useful but not required; the course explains the methods used before applying them.

Participants should bring a current team challenge, such as shifting priorities, a blocked dependency, unclear roles or recurring conflict. A laptop or tablet is useful for completing templates and the application plan.

It is designed for team leaders, functional managers, project and programme managers, product managers and operations managers. It suits leaders working with cross-functional teams where priorities, customer demand or delivery conditions change regularly.

This course focuses on the leadership behaviours and operating systems required to guide an Agile team, rather than certification preparation or a single delivery framework. It addresses coaching, delegation, conflict, stakeholder alignment, decision rights and team health alongside workflow methods.

Participants leave with templates and a 30-day application plan based on their own team context. They can use this to introduce clearer working agreements, improve flow visibility, establish decision rights and run better learning reviews.

Each training day runs from 08:30 to 16:30 and provides about 6.5 contact hours. Time is divided across ten modules, with instructor input, case work, group exercises, simulations and application planning; classroom and live online participants receive the same syllabus.

Questions about this course?

Ask about dates, fees, group bookings or running it for your team. Our training team replies by email.

Ask on WhatsApp info@skillsetdevelopment.com

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