Unlock your business potential with open leadership

When a leader of any kind begins to take on transforming or modernizing their business, whether it’s a small team or an entire organization, it requires change in multiple directions. What was successful in the past might not work in the changing volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world anymore. Leadership can be practiced at every level of an organization irrespective of the role, title or position, by both people managers and individual contributors alike. Leadership is not the same thing as management,especially in organizations using open leadership, where everybody has the opportunity to be a leader.

What is open leadership?

Open leadership is a mindset and set of behaviors that anyone can adopt. According to The Open Organization, open leaders think and act in service to another person, group, team or enterprise to accomplish something together. They are people with character, who give agency to those around them. Open leaders are especially adept at building organizations that embody transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and community.

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs hosts open leadership engagements during residencies to provide leaders the opportunity to cultivate open and agile competencies required to successfully lead their product teams. Assisting them in developing more effective sponsorship and advocacy to foster an environment conducive to transformation and progress.

When implemented correctly, open leadership develops a healthy and open organizational culture of engagement based on the open source way. In complex, volatile and ambiguous business environments, leaders must learn to translate open values and principles into practices and behaviors, while also leading and organizing distributed and remote teams to enhance trust and psychological safety and inspire their people.

About "Open Leadership for Product Teams" workshop 

The Open Leadership for Product Teams workshop is an integral part of a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency and provides leaders with practical hands-on examples of different styles to establish high-performing product teams. Our approach to customer engagements is guided by our core leadership principles of collaboration, transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, community, agile and lean ways of working and design thinking. The workshops are customized and designed to be interactive and relevant to customers' current reality and helps participants gain a practical understanding of open mindset, open ways of working and leading product teams. The practices introduced in the workshop establish a common language between leaders/managers and the residency team. 

Red Hat Open Leadership workshop outcomes

Through open leadership engagement workshops, we aim to assist our participants in achieving four key objectives:

• A good understanding of open ways of working that provides participants with specific ideas on how to improve themselves as  open leaders.
• Understanding the intent behind open practices and how to promote transparency, inclusivity, collaboration, community and adaptability through the use of the practices.
• Knowledge of how to support teams in their journey to adopt open, agile, DevOps and lean product development.
• Ability to reflect on the participants' current reality and gain new insights for improving their culture by incorporating new ways of working.

Red Hat, FIWARE, and Hopu powers eco-smart cities: 

"A combined team of experts from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, FIWARE and HOPU collaborated over six weeks to create an open source platform on Red Hat Openshift, that would host FIWARE’s innovative smart cities solution and HOPU’s IoT (Internet of Things) technology. The goal of this cross-sector collaboration was to create a data solution that any city in the world could use to be smarter and more sustainable. Being able to implement an IoT solution in an easy-to-deploy, more secure and scalable way will allow any city to gather relevant data points and will give them the power to use technology for the benefit of all global citizens." 

Additional resources 

Learn more about open leadership principles through our on-demand  Open Leadership Enablement Program to increase your team’s ability to guide, assist, motivate and inspire positive change while accelerating innovation in an open way.