CAL1
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CAL1
CAL1 equips professionals with the foundational mindset, leadership styles, cultural insights, change‑management techniques, and personal development tools needed to lead agile transformations effectively in today's fast‑changing environment.
Who Should Take This
Mid‑level managers, team leads, and emerging leaders in technology, product, or operations who have at least two years of people‑management experience and aim to drive agile adoption will benefit. They seek a structured framework to align culture, structures, and personal growth with agile principles.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Agile Leadership Mindset
2
Domain 2: Leadership Styles for Agility
3
Domain 3: Organizational Culture and Structures
4
Domain 4: Leading Change
5
Domain 5: Personal Leadership Development
6
Domain 6: Agile Values and Principles in Leadership
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
62 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Agile Leadership Mindset
4 topics
Foundations of agile leadership thinking
- Identify the core principles of agile leadership including servant leadership, empowerment, and trust as contrasted with traditional command-and-control management approaches.
- Describe how complexity theory and the Cynefin framework inform agile leadership decision-making across simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic contexts.
- Apply the distinction between leadership and management to determine when agile leaders should direct, coach, facilitate, or step back to enable team autonomy.
Psychological safety and trust
- Describe the concept of psychological safety and explain its role in enabling team experimentation, learning from failure, and continuous improvement.
- Apply techniques for building psychological safety within teams including modeling vulnerability, responding constructively to mistakes, and creating inclusive participation structures.
- Analyze team dynamics to identify indicators of low psychological safety such as silence during retrospectives, blame patterns, and reluctance to raise impediments.
Embracing uncertainty and experimentation
- Describe how agile leaders create conditions for experimentation by establishing guardrails, defining acceptable risk boundaries, and encouraging hypothesis-driven approaches.
- Apply fail-safe-to-learn practices by designing small experiments, establishing feedback loops, and helping teams extract actionable insights from both successes and failures.
- Analyze the outcomes of team experiments to determine whether hypotheses were validated or invalidated and evaluate what adjustments the team should make to their approach.
Growth mindset and learning culture
- Identify the characteristics of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset and describe how agile leaders cultivate growth-oriented attitudes within their teams.
- Apply strategies to foster a learning culture including encouraging knowledge sharing, supporting communities of practice, and creating time and space for deliberate skill development.
- Analyze organizational signals that indicate whether a learning culture exists, including how the organization responds to failures, allocates time for learning, and rewards experimentation.
2
Domain 2: Leadership Styles for Agility
4 topics
Leadership style frameworks
- Identify key leadership style models including transformational, servant, adaptive, and situational leadership and describe their relevance to agile environments.
- Apply situational leadership principles to select the appropriate leadership stance based on team maturity, task complexity, and organizational context.
- Analyze the impact of different leadership styles on team autonomy, motivation, and delivery outcomes to evaluate which approaches best support agile team performance.
Servant leadership in practice
- Describe the characteristics of servant leadership including listening, empathy, stewardship, commitment to growth of people, and building community.
- Apply servant leadership behaviors to remove impediments, shield teams from organizational interference, and create enabling conditions for self-managing teams.
- Analyze scenarios where servant leadership conflicts with organizational expectations to evaluate strategies for maintaining a servant-leader stance under pressure.
Empowering teams and delegation
- Describe delegation models such as Delegation Poker and the seven levels of delegation and explain how they support gradual team empowerment.
- Apply delegation frameworks to determine the appropriate level of authority to grant teams for specific decisions, balancing autonomy with accountability.
- Analyze the consequences of over-delegation and under-delegation on team performance, identifying patterns that indicate misaligned authority distribution.
Influence without authority
- Identify techniques for influencing without formal authority including building alliances, framing arguments in stakeholder terms, and leveraging social capital.
- Apply influencing strategies to gain support for agile practices from skeptical stakeholders, middle management, and cross-functional partners.
3
Domain 3: Organizational Culture and Structures
3 topics
Understanding organizational culture
- Identify cultural assessment models including the Competing Values Framework, Laloux's organizational paradigms, and Schneider's culture model and their application to agile contexts.
- Describe the relationship between organizational culture and agile adoption success, explaining why cultural alignment is a prerequisite for sustainable agility.
- Analyze an organization's cultural characteristics using assessment frameworks to identify cultural enablers and impediments to agile transformation.
Organizational structures and agility
- Describe common organizational structures including functional hierarchies, matrix organizations, and team-based structures and their impact on agile team effectiveness.
- Apply principles of organizational design to recommend structural changes that reduce handoffs, minimize dependencies, and enable cross-functional team autonomy.
- Analyze how reporting lines, incentive systems, and governance structures either support or undermine self-managing teams and agile principles.
Systems thinking foundations
- Identify the basic concepts of systems thinking including feedback loops, emergence, interconnectedness, and unintended consequences in organizational systems.
- Apply systems thinking to identify leverage points where small leadership interventions can produce significant positive changes in team and organizational behavior.
- Analyze organizational impediments using causal loop diagrams to distinguish root causes from symptoms and evaluate systemic intervention strategies.
4
Domain 4: Leading Change
4 topics
Change management fundamentals
- Identify foundational change management models including Kotter's eight-step process, the ADKAR model, and the Satir change model and their applicability to agile transformations.
- Describe the psychological stages of change including denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment and explain how leaders can support people through each stage.
- Apply change management models to design an approach for introducing agile practices into a team or department that has not previously used iterative methods.
Understanding and addressing resistance
- Identify common sources of resistance to agile adoption including fear of job loss, loss of control, comfort with existing processes, and misalignment of incentive structures.
- Apply empathetic engagement techniques to acknowledge resistance as valid feedback, understand underlying concerns, and co-create solutions with resistors.
- Analyze patterns of resistance within an organization to differentiate between individual, team, and systemic resistance and evaluate targeted intervention strategies.
Building coalitions and sponsorship
- Describe the role of executive sponsorship in agile transformations and explain how sponsors provide air cover, remove organizational impediments, and model desired behaviors.
- Apply stakeholder mapping techniques to identify allies, sponsors, and potential resistors and develop engagement strategies tailored to each stakeholder group.
- Analyze the effectiveness of a coalition-building strategy by evaluating sponsor engagement levels, stakeholder sentiment shifts, and organizational readiness indicators.
Sustaining momentum
- Describe strategies for sustaining transformation momentum including celebrating early wins, communicating progress transparently, and anchoring new practices in organizational norms.
- Apply techniques for making agile successes visible through metrics dashboards, success stories, and community-of-practice showcases to reinforce organizational commitment.
- Analyze the risk factors that cause agile transformations to stall or regress, including leadership turnover, competing priorities, and initiative fatigue, and evaluate mitigation strategies.
5
Domain 5: Personal Leadership Development
3 topics
Self-awareness and emotional intelligence
- Identify the components of emotional intelligence including self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills and describe their relevance to agile leadership.
- Apply self-reflection practices including journaling, soliciting 360-degree feedback, and mindfulness techniques to increase awareness of personal leadership patterns and biases.
- Analyze personal leadership strengths and development areas using emotional intelligence assessments to create a targeted growth plan for agile leadership effectiveness.
Communication and feedback
- Describe effective communication techniques for agile leaders including active listening, nonviolent communication, and framing messages for different audiences.
- Apply feedback models such as SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) and feedforward to deliver constructive feedback that promotes growth and maintains trust relationships.
- Analyze communication breakdowns in team settings to identify root causes such as power dynamics, cultural differences, or unclear expectations and recommend corrective approaches.
Personal agile leadership growth plan
- Describe the components of a personal leadership development plan including vision, goals, practices, accountability mechanisms, and reflection cadences.
- Apply goal-setting frameworks to create a personal agile leadership development plan with measurable outcomes, time-bound milestones, and peer accountability structures.
- Analyze progress on a personal leadership development plan by evaluating behavioral change indicators, feedback trends, and alignment with long-term leadership aspirations.
6
Domain 6: Agile Values and Principles in Leadership
3 topics
Agile Manifesto through a leadership lens
- Identify the four values and twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto and describe how each translates into leadership behaviors and organizational decisions.
- Apply agile values to leadership decision-making by prioritizing individuals and interactions, working solutions, customer collaboration, and responding to change in strategic planning.
- Analyze organizational policies and practices to evaluate their alignment with agile values and identify gaps where leadership action could improve value congruence.
Ethics and integrity in agile leadership
- Describe ethical considerations for agile leaders including transparency in reporting, respecting team boundaries, avoiding manipulation in influence tactics, and maintaining integrity.
- Apply ethical decision-making frameworks to navigate situations where organizational pressure conflicts with agile values, team well-being, or professional integrity.
- Analyze case studies of ethical dilemmas in agile transformations to evaluate the trade-offs between short-term organizational compliance and long-term cultural health.
Continuous improvement as a leadership discipline
- Describe how agile leaders model continuous improvement by regularly inspecting and adapting their own leadership practices, seeking feedback, and experimenting with new approaches.
- Apply continuous improvement practices at the leadership level by establishing personal retrospectives, leadership peer groups, and deliberate practice routines.
- Analyze the maturity of an organization's continuous improvement practices by evaluating the frequency, depth, and follow-through of retrospectives, experiments, and learning cycles.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership I (CAL1) learning objectives: foundational agile leadership mindset, leadership styles for agility, organizational culture and structures, leading teams through change, and personal leadership development.
- Agile leadership mindset including servant leadership, empowering teams, fostering psychological safety, embracing complexity and uncertainty, and shifting from command-and-control to collaborative leadership models.
- Leadership styles and their impact on agility including transformational leadership, adaptive leadership, situational leadership, and understanding when to apply directive versus facilitative approaches.
- Organizational culture fundamentals including how culture shapes agile adoption, cultural assessment models, the relationship between organizational structure and team agility, and identifying cultural impediments to agility.
- Leading change in organizations including change management frameworks, understanding resistance to change, building coalitions for agile transformation, and sustaining momentum through organizational transitions.
- Personal leadership development including self-awareness, emotional intelligence, active listening, giving and receiving feedback, and developing a personal agile leadership growth plan.
Not Covered
- Advanced organizational transformation strategy, systems thinking at enterprise scale, and multi-year transformation roadmaps covered by CAL2 certification.
- Detailed Scrum framework mechanics, events, artifacts, and accountabilities covered by CSM and A-CSM certifications.
- Technical engineering practices, DevOps, CI/CD, and software architecture decisions.
- Product management, product strategy, business model development, and product discovery techniques covered by the PO track.
- Specific scaling framework implementation details for SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, or Scrum@Scale beyond awareness level.
- Professional coaching competencies and ICF-aligned coaching skills covered by CTC and CEC certifications.
Official Exam Page
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