Leadership and Culture

Leaders show expected behaviors through what they say and do. Their leadership style shapes the organization’s culture, whether positive or negative. The best way to create cultural change is for leaders to act in ways that help everyone succeed in today’s digital and AI world, allowing others to learn from them.

The Leadership and Culture Discipline (L&C) explains how leaders can build a positive and high-performing culture where people and teams can achieve their best. This discipline and its supporting competencies create the essential connections for successfully adopting SAFe as a way of working in the organization. Figure 1 outlines the critical elements leaders must embrace to successfully drive a SAFe transformation and build a positive, continuous learning culture, shifting the organization toward a Lean-Agile mindset and behaviors.

Figure 1. The elements of the Leadership and Culture Discipline

As shown in Figure 1, the ultimate goal of any SAFe transformation is to create a Lean-Agile Organization that can compete and thrive by responding quickly to market changes with innovative products and services. This requires leaders at all levels of the organization to lead differently, establish new ways of working, and ultimately change the culture.

Firstly, all of us as leaders must Become Lean Agile Leaders by actively modeling the mindset and behaviors required for business agility, aiming to shift the culture toward a generative, performance-focused one. To guide the organization on this journey, leaders must embody the Lean-Agile Mindset, consistently exemplify SAFe’s Core Values, and consistently apply the SAFe Principles.

Next, leaders act as the primary drivers of change in Building an Adaptive Operating Model with SAFe. A successful transformation requires strong leadership commitment. The first step is Implementing SAFe, which moves the organization from a traditional siloed department structure to one aligned around value streams with ARTs building products and solutions that delight their customers. Successful transformations go behind simply implementing new ways of working. They are also focused on solving real business problems and delivering measurable results. And to this end, context matters. And customizing SAFe to the organization’s specific needs is a critical step to fully unlocking value.

As the leaders and the organization change, the organization will Empower a Continuous Learning Culture over time. A culture of continuous learning leverages shared knowledge and rapid experimentation to thrive amid constant disruption. This is fostered through Communities of Practice (CoPs), where people with shared interests collaborate and exchange knowledge. A ‘measure and grow’ approach to everything we do ensures we take data-driven decisions to identify improvement opportunities, rather than relying on opinions alone. 

Implementing any large-scale change of this kind cannot be done by one person or department alone. A Guiding Coalition is a group of influential, respected, and knowledgeable individuals who are committed to leading and communicating the change effort. Their role is to build trust, secure necessary resources, align the transformation with strategic objectives, and ensure momentum is maintained throughout the journey, overcoming resistance and providing visible leadership support. It starts with the Executives and Leaders of the organizations as the primary drivers of change, empowering SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) as change agents. Additionally, a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is often established to coordinate the change efforts and continuously communicate the vision and rationale for the change. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, local champions from different levels and departments across the organization collectively ensure that these new ways of working stick and become just the way we do business.

Competencies of the Leadership and Culture Discipline

Each competency below describes a set of knowledge, skills, and techniques required to achieve mastery in an area of Leadership and Culture. They provide the necessary information, learning resources, and practical application guidance needed to support success. These competencies represent the most up-to-date understanding of the Leadership and Culture Discipline. As new ways of working emerge, the competencies will evolve over time.

Selecting the competencies to focus on at a particular time will depend on organizational context, team, and individual experience and knowledge, and the opportunities or gaps in current ways of working. Click on the competency below that you wish to explore.

NOTE: To accelerate value delivery, the competencies will be released in small batches. All those with a ‘blue heading’ are currently available, with the remaining ‘greyed out’ competencies to be released incrementally.

Assessing the Leadership and Culture Discipline

The Leadership and Culture Discipline assessment effectively measures competency in this discipline. Its results can guide the organization toward a generative leadership culture.

The Leadership and Culture assessment is available as either a downloadable spreadsheet or online through SAFe Studio, via our partner Comparative Agility. The Comparative Agility platform now includes integrated SAFe CoPilot functionality to enhance the analysis of your results. Access the online assessment from the Measure and Grow SAFe Studio page or from this link directly. The Measure and Grow article provides guidance on the best approach for collecting and interpreting data.

Leadership and Culture Overview

The section details the critical leadership and culture elements to becoming a Lean-Agile organization, with SAFe shown in Figure 1.

The Lean-Agile Organization

The goal of a SAFe is Business Agility, where the entire organization actively works to deliver innovative solutions faster than the competition. To achieve this, SAFe transforms the enterprise into a Lean-Agile organization that can respond quickly to today’s rapidly changing world. This involves a shift in structure and culture that prioritizes fast, continuous delivery of value to customers. A Lean-Agile organization breaks down silos, reduces hierarchy, promotes collaboration across different functions, and unites all teams around accelerating value delivery.

Alongside this, a Lean-Agile organization adapts its culture to one that constantly learns, with a desire to explore, try new things, and take smart risks. This shift decentralizes decision-making, giving employees the power to do their best work. It leverages the combined knowledge of everyone involved to drive change. This leads to faster delivery, better quality, and happier employees.

A SAFe transformation enhances customer satisfaction by addressing customer and business needs early and continuously. It also drives adaptability, allowing the organization to embrace change and turn market shifts into a competitive advantage. And it enables frequent delivery of value to customers and the development of innovative solutions through shorter cycles, ensuring continuous progress and timely feedback.

To navigate this change journey successfully, three critical changes are required: How We Lead, How We Work, and Our Culture. These are described in more detail below.

Becoming a Lean-Agile Leader

Through their words and actions, leaders establish patterns of expected behavior within the organization. The aggregation of those patterns determines the organization’s culture, whether good or bad. The most important and effective technique for driving cultural change is for leaders to internalize and model the behaviors and mindsets of business agility. Others can then learn and grow by their example. As author Simon Sinek underscores in “Leaders Eat Last”, leaders set the tone and direction: 

“The leaders of companies set the tone and direction for the people. Hypocrites, liars, and self-interested leaders create cultures filled with hypocrites, liars, and self-interested employees. The leaders of companies who tell the truth, in contrast, will create a culture of people who tell the truth. It is not rocket science. We follow the leader.”

By modeling the right behaviors, leaders can transform organizational cultures from pathological (negative, power-oriented) and bureaucratic (negative, rule-oriented) to a generative (positive, performance-oriented) culture, which is required for the Lean-Agile mindset to flourish (Figure 2). 

To truly set the right example and guide the organization to greater levels of business agility, leaders must become Lean-thinking manager-teachers. They utilize SAFe’s foundational elements: the Lean-Agile Mindset, SAFe Core Values, and SAFe Principles.

Adopting a Lean-Agile Mindset

The Lean-Agile Mindset combines beliefs, attitudes, and actions based on Lean Thinking and the Agile Manifesto (Figure 3). Too often, organizations adopt SAFe methods and utilize SAFe terminology without fully embracing the core principles and guidelines that represent a new approach to working. To adopt SAFe effectively, leaders need to learn the essential concepts of Lean Thinking and Agile to adopt SAFe principles and practices and shape the organization’s culture. This mindset, emphasizing continuous improvement and flexibility, is essential for driving successful organizational transformations. It involves being aware of and open to changing one’s mindset, which is how we perceive and interpret the world, influenced by our experiences and learning.

The Lean-Agile organization depends on leaders who not only understand Lean thinking and Agile values but also teach them to others in their day-to-day work. This means demonstrating the principles of Lean Thinking—such as delivering value, identifying and optimizing the value stream, and pursuing perfection—and embodying the values of the Agile Manifesto through their actions and decision-making process. The resulting Lean-Agile Mindset is integral to who a leader is and what they do. It informs every aspect of their approach to helping teams throughout the organization work in a Lean and Agile manner as the expected norm.

Modeling SAFe Core Values

Leaders must communicate, exhibit, and emphasize SAFe’s Core Values to guide the organization’s Lean-Agile journey. Leaders lead by example by actively modeling these values:

• Alignment: Leaders demonstrate alignment by constantly reinforcing the vision, mission, and strategy, and connecting them to the portfolio work through well-formed strategic themes and epics. They actively participate in events like PI Planning and ensure backlog visibility, regularly checking for understanding across the teams.
• Transparency: A leader models transparency by visualizing all relevant work and taking ownership for errors and mistakes, using them as learning moments. They create an environment where “the facts are always friendly,” admitting their own missteps while supporting others who acknowledge and learn from theirs. Crucially, they never punish the messenger and, instead, celebrate the learning that comes from candor.
• Respect for People: Leading by example means treating all people with authentic trust and respect, valuing diverse opinions and viewpoints. Leaders exhibit genuine care and concern for others’ growth and development by providing coaching, mentoring, training, and enriching experiences. This respect also applies to internal and external customers, as well as partners and suppliers.
• Relentless Improvement: Leaders prioritize, provide visibility to, and resource improvement efforts. This includes encouraging consistency in conducting retrospectives, following through on improvements identified during the Inspect & Adapt (I&A) event, and protecting dedicated time and space for innovation, especially during the Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration.

Applying SAFe Principles

The SAFe Framework is based on ten underlying principles that inspire and inform all roles and practices. Leaders use these principles to fulfill their organizational responsibilities and make critical decisions. By routinely demonstrating and applying these principles, leaders provide a consistent example of the Lean-Agile way of working.

For instance, they demonstrate systems thinking by ensuring that optimizing individual teams or ARTs does not undermine the broader system. They exemplify decentralized decision-making by moving decision-making authority to where the information is. This change enables teams to make timely, high-quality choices within organizational guardrails. 

These behaviors, along with the internalization of the Lean-Agile Mindset, Core Values, and Principles, are critical to business agility. If leaders fail to adapt to the rapidly changing demands in the age of AI, their organizations will be significantly disadvantaged.

Building an Adaptive Operating Model with SAFe

Leaders are not simply sponsors of a transformation; they are the chief agents personally responsible for driving and sustaining it. This fundamental shift in how we work is formalized through the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, which requires leaders to commit to the journey, establish new structures, and champion the change. To successfully change the organization, leaders must implement SAFe to build the new system, customizing SAFe to adapt the Framework to the organization’s unique needs, and use SAFe and its competencies to solve their real business problems by relentlessly connecting transformation activities to measurable, beneficial business outcomes.

Implementing SAFe

Leaders are responsible for driving and sustaining an organizational transformation. In a SAFe adoption, leaders are not simply sponsors. This responsibility is formalized through the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, which provides a proven set of steps for rolling out SAFe. Figure 4 shows the first steps of the SAFe Implementation roadmap. Leaders must commit to leading the transformation as their engagement is critical throughout the Roadmap, particularly in these early, critical steps as described below.

• Go SAFe: Leaders must commit to guiding the transformation from the very first step, which begins with deciding to “Go SAFe” and progresses through training, launching the first Agile Release Trains (ARTs), and expanding the adoption.
• Train Lean-Agile Change Agents: Leaders actively participate in identifying and training SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs), who serve as internal coaches. They empower the SPCs to drive the transformation, while maintaining ultimate accountability.
• Lean-Agile Center of Excellence: Leaders are responsible for establishing necessary organizational structures, such as creating the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) and defining Value Streams and ARTs (Organize Around Value in Figure 4). They must secure necessary resources and eliminate organizational impediments.
• Train Executive, Managers, and Leaders: Leaders champion training all executives, managers, and other leaders to become SAFe Lean-Agile Leaders, internalizing the new mindset and principles.
• Organize Around Value: Leaders are the only individuals with the authority to change the systems. Their active support is critical to addressing the cultural, political, and other challenges of shifting from a department to a value stream organization.

Leaders support the other steps in the roadmap by relentlessly communicating the vision and rationale for the change. They are visible champions, reinforcing new behaviors by participating in key events such as PI Planning, Inspect & Adapt (I&A), and System Demos, and by celebrating early successes.

Customizing SAFe to Your Context

Customizing SAFe is a critical leadership responsibility in the Agile transformation, enabling organizations to adapt the Framework to their unique constraints while preserving its underlying principles. Customization becomes necessary because SAFe is a framework, not a fixed blueprint, and organizations often tailor it to support industry-specific needs, organizational size and structure, technological landscapes (including the rise of AI), and unique business goals and challenges. Leaders are the only individuals with the authority to change the systems that govern work, including policies, processes, and roles. 

Leaders enable safe, effective customization through disciplined governance and a supportive, generative culture rooted in psychological safety. This empowers change agents, in particular Advanced SPCs (ASPCs), to explore and recommend modifications without fear of blame. Any customization must enhance agility, not contradict the mindset, values, or principles. Furthermore, leaders insist customizations are validated as the right systemic solution—not the easiest fix—and actively amplify business outcomes across the organization.

Leaders connect the SAFe transformation outcomes to business outcomes by creating business-aligned OKRs and communicating the business benefits of SAFe throughout the organization. This activity helps build alignment, shared language, and partnership between business and IT leaders.

Solving Business Problems

Leaders ensure that the SAFe transformation is not an end in itself but a means to an end: solving the organization’s most pressing business problems. This requires moving beyond a focus on process compliance with practices and certifications to deliberately connecting all transformation activities to measurable, beneficial business outcomes. By adopting the SAFe competency approach, leaders reframe the transformation narrative, focusing the organization on mastering the specific knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to drive real, tangible results.

This critical focus is driven by the Guiding Coalition. They are accountable for the organization’s overall health and systemic change. Their initial responsibility is diagnosing the systemic ‘wicked problem’ preventing the organization from achieving its strategic goals. They then define measurable business outcomes, align the transformation plan with the overarching business strategy, and sequence the necessary SAFe Competencies to resolve the systemic issue.

Leaders translate this strategy into execution by creating the SAFe Competency Journey Map. This roadmap sequences the highest-impact competencies, ensuring foundational prerequisites are met before moving to more advanced changes. Finally, they select and empower credible Competency Champions to drive the local application, quick wins, and continuous improvement (Plan-Do-Check-Adjust) cycles. This model ensures that improvement is both top-down for systemic issues and bottom-up at the team level, making continuous problem-solving a permanent part of the organizational culture.

Empower a Continuous Learning Culture

Organizations today face rapid technological innovation and continuous political, economic, and environmental turmoil. To survive and thrive in this age, organizations must become learning organizations and leverage the collective knowledge, experience, and creativity of their entire workforce. They replace commitment to the status quo with curiosity, exploration, invention, entrepreneurship, and informed risk-taking, while still providing stability. Rigid, siloed structures transform into fluid constructs that optimize the flow of value, and decentralized decision-making becomes the norm, enabling organization members to achieve their fullest potential.

Learning organizations continuously invest in and facilitate their employees’ growth. This ongoing learning fuels the enterprise’s ability to dynamically transform, anticipate, and exploit opportunities for competitive advantage. They excel at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge while modifying practices to integrate new insights, fostering people’s intrinsic desire to learn and gain mastery.

This is a stark contrast to a traditional project management approach, where learning is restricted to management, while others simply follow policies. Learning drives innovation, enhances problem-solving, increases information sharing and the sense of community, and surfaces opportunities for greater efficiency.

SAFe promotes a generative organizational culture in three ways. It creates an environment of continuous learning and innovation. It champions communities of practice where people with shared interests collaborate and exchange knowledge. And it ensures organizational health through Measure and Grow. Each is described further below.

Continuous Learning and Innovation

For an organization to cultivate continuous learning and innovation, it must create an environment that encourages creative thinking, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. It fosters innovative people by encouraging risk-taking, coaching, and integrating innovator growth into goals. It provides time and space for learning and innovation through dedicated work areas and activities like hackathons. And it encourages teams to observe customer problems firsthand and to embrace experimentation and feedback without fear of failure.

Sustained innovation is managed via a continuous learning portfolio, where the SAFe portfolio operates as a learning system. The Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycle is executed through epics and hypothesis statements focused on validated learning. Continuous review of OKRs and KPIs against the portfolio vision enables dynamic adjustments, allowing the organization to flexibly shift investment and resources toward the most successful initiatives based on learning.

Communities of Practice

To foster a continuous learning culture, organizations must actively create forums for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are voluntary groups of people with a shared interest who come together to solve problems, share best practices, and deepen their knowledge in a specific domain. In a Lean-Agile organization, CoPs serve as crucial social circuits, leveraging the collective expertise across different teams and organizational boundaries. They are a primary mechanism for cultivating shared knowledge and driving the continuous learning that is essential for thriving amid constant disruption.

By creating these learning networks, leaders ensure that individual contributions and insights combine into a collective effort toward a common organizational purpose and innovation. CoPs provide a systematic and opportunistic environment for sharing new insights and modifying practices. They can range from formal groups focused on a specific technology to informal forums for ongoing conversations about Lean-Agile principles. Their success is a key indicator of a generative culture, as they promote decentralized problem-solving, build mastery, and ultimately enable the organization to evolve into the adaptive engine of change required for business agility.

Measure & Grow

Measure & Grow is a vital part of fostering a continuous learning culture, ensuring that the transformation is guided by empirical data. It leverages a structured approach to measuring the health of the organization’s Lean-Agile implementation across three key SAFe metrics dimensions: Competency, Flow, and Outcome.

Competency metrics assess how well the organization has adopted the Lean-Agile mindset and practices, focusing on the progress of the SAFe competencies. Flow metrics provide visibility into the speed, efficiency, and predictability of value delivery, helping to identify and eliminate bottlenecks. Outcome metrics connect the work to measurable business results, validating hypotheses and ensuring that the transformation is driving the desired economic and customer value. By continuously collecting, reviewing, and acting on these metrics, leaders can make informed decisions, drive relentless improvement, and sustain the organization’s evolution towards an adaptive engine of change.

The Guiding Coalition

The guiding coalition is a powerful, cross-functional leadership group that drives the SAFe transformation. This group is responsible for establishing urgency, creating a vision, and guiding the entire organization’s adoption of SAFe principles, often involving leaders, managers, and key change agents. The coalition is formed by bringing together a mix of leaders who can set the transformation’s vision and remove impediments. It also includes practitioners and managers who can champion and implement the specific process changes within their parts of the organization. To be successful, the group must possess sufficient organizational influence and credibility to be taken seriously, as well as the expertise to make quick, informed decisions. ASPCs and SPCs help build this coalition by organizing the LACE into a team that drives the transformation.

The guiding coalition plays a critical role in the three organizational changes necessary to create a Lean-Agile organization -how we lead, how we work, and our culture. The guiding coalition is multifaceted and consists of executive and other leaders, local champions, the LACE, and the organization’s community of SPCs and ASPCs. Their roles are detailed further below.

Leading by Example

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“We don’t need an executive sponsor. We need someone who models the change. You cannot delegate that to the team. It will not stick. You have to roll up your sleeves. And you have to live the change.”

— Marty Garza, Vice President Air Operations Technology, Southwest Airlines

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The guiding coalition serves as the primary model for the behaviors and mindsets required in a Lean-Agile organization. Culture generally changes only after new ways of operating have successfully demonstrated value. Therefore, the coalition leads by operating as an effective team that processes information quickly and commits to key decisions. By modeling Lean-Agile values and principles in their daily interactions, these leaders set the standard for the new way of working, inspiring others to adopt a similar approach and establishing the trust necessary to change. Their collective example helps shift the organizational culture from traditional or pathological patterns to the “generative culture” required for business agility.

An effective transformation relies on a network of local champions. This broader group consists of respected and knowledgeable individuals, including practitioners and managers across the organization, who act as grassroots change agents. Their role is crucial in implementing the specific process changes, championing the Lean-Agile mindset, and providing visible leadership support within their immediate work environments. By consistently modeling the new values and principles, these champions create the necessary trust and momentum, enabling the organization to rally around the strategic vision and successfully transition to SAFe.

Sustaining the SAFe Transformation

The guiding coalition is responsible for initiating and sustaining the SAFe transformation. Large-scale change cannot be achieved by a single leader or a low-credibility committee. This group creates a sense of urgency and articulates a strategic vision that clarifies how the future will differ from the past, motivating everyone in the organization to rally around this common goal. The coalition actively maintains the transformation backlog and removes barriers—such as inefficient processes or hierarchies—enabling the organization to shift from traditional project management to Lean-Agile methods effectively. 

The coalition commits to leading the journey from the decision to Go SAFe onward. They establish the necessary structures, such as the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), and help define the portfolio’s value streams and ARTs by running the Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop. They are responsible for securing resources, removing systemic impediments, and relentlessly communicating the vision and rationale for the change to the entire organization. This ensures the transformation has the necessary executive support and visibility to succeed.

Fostering a continuous learning culture

The guiding coalition plays a critical, sustaining role in the culture change activities by providing both the necessary resources and the essential behavioral model. This powerful, cross-functional leadership group models the new Lean-Agile values and principles. They set the foundation, establishing the psychological safety required for innovative people to take risks and for teams to embrace experimentation and feedback without fear of blame. Furthermore, the coalition enables the innovation environment by securing resources and establishing structures that provide time and space for innovation. Ultimately, the coalition’s influence ensures the organization evolves into the adaptive engine of change necessary to achieve business agility.

Summary

Leadership and culture are inseparable—each shapes the other. Leaders who grow others, drive change, and foster adaptability don’t just improve performance; they influence the values, beliefs, and behaviors that define an organization’s culture. By leading with integrity, modeling continuous learning, and creating an environment of trust, they inspire high-performing teams and a culture of innovation. When leadership and culture align, organizations become more resilient and adaptable and are well-positioned for lasting success.  

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References

[1] Westrum, Ron. A topology of organizational cultures. 2004. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 13(Suppl II):ii22–ii27. doi: 10.1136/qshc.2003.009522

[2] Beswick, Cris, Derek Bishop, and Jo Geraghty. Building a Culture of Innovation: A Practical Framework for Placing Innovation at the Core of Your Business. Kogan Page, 2015.

Last update: 23 March 2026