Roman Lobus Vice President of Agile Product and Portfolio Management, Singapore Airlines

About Roman Lobus

Roman Lobus is a Vice President of Agile Product and Portfolio Management at Singapore Airlines and a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org based in Singapore. He is passionate about working with people and helping organisations to stay relevant and competitive. Roman focuses on achieving greater enterprise agility by designing adaptive and resilient work cultures, processes and structures.

Roman is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, The Leadership Circle Profile and ORSC practitioner. He is a regular speaker at conferences and has been invited to talk to internal teams across the country.

The State of Agile Coaching Report (2021) mentions ‘Leadership as a barrier to implement agility’ as the challenge #1 Agile coaches face in their work. Disengaged leaders do not just distantiate from the change but block or undermine efforts to bring it to life. Resistance frequently manifests as a demonstration of beliefs and deeply ingrained mental models contradicting Agile values and principles. Leaders often receive less focus in Agile transformation, and engagement with them is bounded to processes, structures and technology. The missing link between leadership effectiveness and achieving the success of Agile adoption undermines its efforts and produces limited outcomes.

In this talk, Roman Lobus will share a story of coaching two senior leaders who had to work together and support Agile adoption. A politically entangled environment presents challenges to a coach’s impartiality and independence, thus it will also be a story of successes and failures: what worked and didn’t work in setting up a coaching relationship; what made a shift in their behaviour, and what can make Agile coaches more impactful when they work with leaders.