Digital Accelerator

There are many perspectives on the origins of agile leadership, some of which align with the advent of the Agile manifesto. With the rise of Agile software development also a new leadership style arose. When markets are becoming more and more VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) organizations have to be able to respond quickly and handle all the uncertainties. In these markets, traditional management is often seen as too slow. Agile promotes giving the teams the mandate and freedom to make their own decisions. Making teams able to respond quickly to new market changes and technological opportunities. This transformed the style of leadership, towards creating the right context and environment for self-managing teams. See Workers' self-management.

The framework for business agility has also created a set of Agile Leadership principles. These principles have been adopted by a number of universities across the globe. These principles also form the basis of the agile business consortiums views on Agile culture.

This leadership style fits well in today's culture of giving autonomy to employees to do their work and not tell people what to do. Instead, create clarity on the objectives or desired outcome and let people and team discover the best ways to achieve. Next it also fits with the importance of customer-focus or customer-centricity. With the rise of [mobile phones] and [internet] more and more organizations are becoming digital (internet culture). Software is eating the world [9] Where there primary contact with customers isn't face-to-face but through a digital device. These organizations have to respond quickly to customer feedback and make sure that their customer-satisfaction is high. By giving teams access to NPS (Net Promoter) and CES (Customer success), they can quickly respond and adapt.A team leader is a person who provides guidance, instruction, direction and leadership to a group of individuals (the team) for the purpose of achieving a key result or group of aligned results. Team leaders serves as the steering wheel for a group of individuals who are working towards the same goal for the organisation.

The team leader monitors the quantitative and qualitative achievements of the team and reports results to a manager. The leader often works within the team, as a member, carrying out the same roles but with the additional 'leader' responsibilities – as opposed to higher-level management which often has a separate job role altogether. They may also be considered line management.[1] In order for a team to function successfully, the team leader must also motivate the team to "use their knowledge and skills to achieve the shared goals". When a team leader motivates a team, group members can function in a goal-oriented manner.[2] A "team leader" is also someone who has the capability to drive performance within a group of people. Team leaders utilize their expertise, their peers, influence, and/or creativeness to formulate an effective team.

Scouller (2011) defined the purpose of a leader (including a team leader) as follows: "The purpose of a leader is to make sure there is leadership … to ensure that all four dimensions of leadership are [being addressed].” The four dimensions being: a shared, motivating team purpose or vision or goal, action, progress and results, collective unity or team spirit, and attention to individuals.[3] Leaders also contribute by leading through example.

Rapid application development (RAD), also called rapid application building (RAB), is both a general term for adaptive software development approaches, and the name for James Martin's method of rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to software development put less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on an adaptive process. Prototypes are often used in addition to or sometimes even instead of design specifications.

RAD is especially well suited for (although not limited to) developing software that is driven by user interface requirements. Graphical user interface builders are often called rapid application development tools. Other approaches to rapid development include the adaptive, agile, spiral, and unified models.