Certified Agile Leadership (CAL)

New: All past participants join all future online CAL-1 trainings for free!

Next Dates for CAL Trainings

See how it was at a previous Certified Agile Leadership Course I in November 2019 in Belgrade – we published a Facebook album.

“how can I make Agile come to life

and make its benefits real and tangible

in the contexts I lead or can influence?”

“This course does a beautiful job of weaving the Agile ethos – respect for people, dynamic diverse teams, rapid learning – with an enlightened, broader view of leadership frameworks. It has just the right mix of access to an elegant weave of frameworks without being at all pedantic. In two days we learned a lot, with many doorways opened for further exploration.”

(Scott Downs, London)

About Agile Leadership

Impressions from the first course

More testimonials and experiences

I want to be challenged and discover what kind of leader I am.

What does leadership mean for me?

What kind of leadership will help me achieve what I want?

No matter if you are a manager with decades of experience or if leadership or agile is fairly new to you, this course creates a container for that diversity and ambiguity to fuel growth and learning for all. This is what you’ll take away: how to create containers for greatness to happen. And how you personally want to improve to be able to do that.

“Agile” is the stance and journey of consciously improving.

In that spirit, we believe that agile leadership is the conscious improvement of how we lead and follow, given

• a clarity of intention (what we want),
• an awareness of context and our current habits and behaviours of leading and following, with the
• purpose to grow the system we work in and the people working in it to fulfil our needs and realise our individual and joined potential.

“I learned what leadership actually means.”

This course will kick your personal leadership journey to the next level. An organisation changes in ways its people change.

Your take-aways

• Start your journey to your next level of leadership
• More clarity of who you are and what you want
• More awareness of how you manage contexts and develop relationships
• Clear focus on a growth challenge for the upcoming 6 month with a clear sense of progress
• A set of principles which apply to leading your life, your team and your organisation
• You will have experienced the effect of a container of trust, which leads people to show up and integrates ambiguities and diversity into a driving force
• Knowing how it feels when you co-lead as a WE
• A long list of inspirations and recommendations 🙂
• New friends!

What to expect?

We believe that the most valuable and sustainable leadership learning happens in human interactions, in the development of relationships. We minimise the time you spend sitting and listening to us. We maximise the depth and breadth of experience and provide mental models to make sense of what you discover.

The course starts with a survey and some preparation work before we meet, helping you to analyze your current knowledge in relation to the course. This helps you and the group to decide where to dive deeper and how to invest our face-to-face time. There will be a video call upfront where we will get to know each other. You focus on what to prepare and share your objectives for the course. We set you up for taking full responsibility for your learning journey during the two days we spend together.

We might ask you also to take the lead for a topic in the course. Everybody in the course will be challenged, independent of how long you’ve already been leading or how experienced you are in the agile context. Christine and Olaf will co-create the content with all of you, modelling the agile way of leading together: from the start of creating a container of trust until diving into successful examples of agile transformations. The most effective agile methods and tools as well as the TrustTemenos leadership model will be used to work with the content of the course. It is an art to know when to lead and follow. This course is special in that Olaf and Christine will be taking part as well and contributing their own personal stories. This fluent change of roles and responsibilities, deciding what to do in which context and situation is adding to your experience.

On the first day the focus will be on your personal journey. On day two we will apply our learnings and principles, along with our model and other tools to the frame of agile organisations. Be prepared to be surprised and challenged. You may bring your comfort zone but you might not spend much time in it 🙂

Who is it for?

• Executives, Manager and Leaders of all levels
• Scrum-Master, Product Owner, Agile Coaches
• Project and Team Leads

Our participants say:

“I think the main impact this course made on me deals with my own integrity and internal priorities. I don’t see how one could lead himself without fixing that first. And, of course, no way you can lead others if you can not lead yourself. You’ve seen those V1 survey results over the years with culture and the main impediment, right..? Who is responsible for setting culture – leaders. So, I would rephrase that main problem with agile adoptions deals with leadership. This class could be first step towards improving that in you. This way, it could actually work and make a difference.”

(Kirill Klimov, Singapore)

“Unsurprisingly there was no ‘step-by-step official guide’ to Agile Leadership handed out that we had to swear to never divulge. There was, however, an immaculately created ‘safe’ space for learning a bunch of great techniques, models and ways of thinking backed by the trainer’s practical expertise and experience. The learning was enhanced by group participation, which is both a credit to the participants and a credit to the ability of the trainers to elicit the best from them. This is very much a leadership course for those who need to lead and influence, it is not a summary of Agile frameworks. It would be completely impractical and a detriment to the course to attempt to make it so. If you want to know about the specific details of any Agile framework, take additional courses which are specifically designed for that purpose.”

(Ray Whiting, London)

“There are many CAL courses, each one slightly different with the facilitators own style imprinted onto the course; knowing this is why I specifically chose this course facilitated by Olaf & Christine who are both world class in their abilities and sensitivities. The Trust Temenos CAL course is also one of the rare CAL course to be delivered by a pair, it is especially beneficial that they are a mixed pair (Male/Female) as the blend of energies is a great compliment and they have a great sense for knowing what energy to bring in at what time to help uncover multiple perspectives. Olaf & Christine and their Temenos (Containers of Trust) experience helps set up an environment not just conducive to learning, but one which is designed for “Showing Up” whole so we can truly connect on a deeper human level with each other. Learning within this incubator is accelerated as we are able to drop the masks early on and talk about how Leadership has failed us, and how we have failed Leadership. In an enlightening personal exploration of our Leadership styles and the positive/negative impact it has on both others and ourselves, we learn more about ourselves and give ourselves new choices on how we want to show up as the Leaders of our own journey. An honest, truthful and beautiful experience with an open group of fellow explorers, all enabled by Olaf & Christine’s effortless facilitation and compassion.

Highly recommended, even for those not seeking a CAL Certification.”

(Ash Sheikh, London)

“The facilitators are first-rate: deeply knowledgeable without a hint of arrogance, clear in their viewpoints while maintaining curiosity, striking just the right balance of structure and responsiveness. They were, as they say, “surprisable” , and they successfully invited us to be surprisable, too.”

(Scott Downs, London)

Our Thinking: The TrustTemenos Leadership Model

Our workshop is built around our three-dimensional model of leadership:

1. Context management.
2. Relationship building.
3. Growth.

Context Management is the foundation.

It lets us create and hold space and time.

Good context management leads to presence and clarity.

Structure and process belong here, as well as awareness.

Relationship building integrates two sides:

Attention and honesty. Listening and Feedback are key activities, with authenticity, curiosity and integrity as key skills to grow and become aware of. Openness and invitation are stances that use attention and honesty to build trust. Empathy and compassion belong here, as well as honest and healthy expression of anger, love and fear.

Growth is the tree that is build on identity and intent. Wherever (in which context) I have clarity of who I am and what I want, I can let something develop and grow. Creating vision, catalysing purpose, setting goals, aligning the emergent functionality of the interactions in my team to create emergent value – all of these leadership activities are strongly correlated with this dimension of leadership.