Leadership Academy — Week 6 Study Guide: Agile Leadership, Ownership, and Deciding Under Pressure
A condensed summary of Week 6 for assessment prep — agile leadership, ownership, MoSCoW, deciding under pressure, and RAPID.
Part of the Leadership Academy series — a condensed study guide ahead of the assessment. Full detail lives in Session 6.
The core idea — agile leadership has two meanings: leading delivery with clarity (priorities, risks, decisions, who decides, who’s informed) and owning outcomes, not tasks (a leader is accountable for the result regardless of who did the work).
Ownership, concretely: know the status of key deliverables without being asked · raise risks before they’re problems · decide fast within your authority, escalate fast the moment something sits outside it · fix and communicate without blame · still own outcomes you’ve delegated. The single most common ownership failure: escalating too slowly, because it feels like admitting failure. Correct instinct: escalate early — it gives the other person more time to respond.
MoSCoW: Must (non-negotiable, everything stops if at risk) · Should (high value, workaround exists) · Could (cut first) · Won’t-have-this-time (explicit, not rejected). A Could never delays a Must; a Should never delays a Must either. Decision rights: the customer decides Musts on their own requirements; the leader proposes and owns the split for internal team allocation. An MVP can contain many Musts, not just one.
Under two urgent things at once: take charge, delegate what can genuinely be delegated, decline or defer without guilt as long as you say so out loud. The most common mistake under overwhelm is going quiet — the fix is proactively telling whoever’s expecting something that you can’t deliver on the original timeline, and offering what you can instead.
Decision quality drops under pressure. Rule: any decision made under pressure that would be hard to reverse gets a ten-minute pause and a second opinion first.
RAPID (from the official attendee pack — not yet taught live, but listed as assessed content): Recommend (proposes) · Agree (must sign off, used sparingly) · Perform (executes) · Input (informs, doesn’t vote) · Decide — exactly one person; RAPID fails the moment Decide is shared or unclear.
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