It’s 2024 and Adaptive Team Leaders Excel in One Amazing Way

Our newest research study, The Adaptive Organization 2024, asked about new approaches to project management in three areas: the adoption of agile and hybrid project management, the use of PMAAS, and AI practices.

In the adoption of agile and hybrid, we were able to establish trends, since we had asked a very similar battery of questions in our 2018 version of the study. These questions, from a training and development perspective, show how the capabilities of team members and leaders have evolved over the past six years—a time of incredible change and challenges in project management and in the world.

One practice of team leaders stood out as the most improved over this period: the extent to which they were likely to celebrate team success had leapt by 17%. That’s big! And it underscores a key aspect that I think is sometimes overlooked about using adaptive approaches in the workplace: less rigid and predictive work approaches are more human-scale and have the potential to boost morale and bring out the best in us.

I’ll be exploring that idea more in a forthcoming white paper about how new approaches to project management can help us tame our resource management demons, but for now, just take a look at the top practices of high-capability team leaders in the 2024 study—they:

• Pave the way for the team to do its best work
• Promote safety, respect and trust
• Promote collaboration and conversation within and between teams
• Encourage teams to create an environment where everyone can succeed
• Work to streamline processes and remove impediments to the team’s agility
• Listen well.

These are the leaders who inspire teams to great achievements and make it fun along the way. They possess both skills and personal attributes that organizations should be working hard to identify and develop. When it comes to agile transformation—that buzzword of the century—it has to begin with … and within … this type of leader.

And then the celebrations can begin.