What is Leadership Agility?

In today's complex, turbulent, and competitive business and technology environment, leaders need to master the skills required to become more proactive, collaborative, creative, and agile. Leadership agility is the core competency of agile leaders to make effective decisions, inspire others, bring others along, build the best team, be proactive, develop a culture of teamwork, define objectives, and contribute to strategic initiatives for the enterprise.

Leading with agility is an ability to step back, retrospect, gain a deeper perspective, make smart decisions, and take effective action. Leadership agility is not one single skill such as making effective decisions or inspiring people. Rather, it is a combination of skills working together that allows leaders to create the best customer and colleague experiences.

"Agility is fundamental to leading a team through times of change." - Sandra E. Peterson

What drives Leadership Agility?

Leaders' agility is the core reason behind the success of any enterprise or business. Some of the common behaviors that drive leadership agility are listed as below:

Being a change agent

With this fast-paced environment, leaders need to accept that change is inevitable and be prepared to embrace change. For an organizational change to be effective, leaders should initiate and respond to change quickly. If people believe in your decision-making skills, they will trust your ability to drive the change.

Employees need leaders who are committed to their success, seek feedback, make tough decisions, and communicate openly. Leaders who show personal commitment to change and inspire others to accept change play a critical role as change agents for the organization.

"If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." - Jim Rohn

Leading with Purpose

The Covid-19 pandemic has created an economic crisis in the world and has disrupted supply chains. The pandemic led to a global labor shortage as people started to quit their jobs or resign early. The thought of returning to the office and the daily commute is discouraging for many people. People are willing to walk away from their jobs, switch employment, or take early retirement. Many businesses have now permanently embraced remote work while others are preparing for a hybrid model of working. During these times, it has become essentially important to encourage a sense of shared purpose that brings meaning to their work.

Agile leaders lead with a purpose that inspires and brings people together. Their vision is manifested in their actions and their goals. Leading with purpose energizes people, attracts top talent, and builds a strong sense of community.

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." - Jack Welch

Leaders should strongly believe in their vision. The vision should reflect organizational purpose, motivate colleagues, display the organization's values, and explain the WHYs.

Creating a culture of openness, collaboration, and trust

Every agile leader must foster an open environment of trust and collaboration where people can freely discuss their ideas, experiment with their designs, collaborate, have the freedom to make mistakes, and have fun together.

The collaboration methods have changed tremendously due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, people could no longer have casual water-cooler conversations and thus started to explore available online tools that promote spontaneous ideation and collaboration. Most organizations adapted to new ways of working either remotely or in a hybrid environment. Some virtual collaboration tools that I found quite useful are Slack, Trello, Mural, WebEx Meetings, Zoom, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, One Drive, etc.

"You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins." - Jim Stovall

Practicing faster decision-making

Faster decision-making is an important skill to make choices that have the best chance of leading to a favorable outcome. For making decisions faster, you need to set a deadline or block your calendar to help you focus on the problem while avoiding distractions. Second, stop being a perfectionist and try to be more realistic in your problem-solving approach. The truth is that you will most likely not have all information you think you need and will need to embrace uncertainty.

Next, you should understand when and which decisions can be decentralized to reduce unnecessary delays. Decentralized decisions reduce unnecessary delays and improve the flow of work. Agile leaders must understand when and which decisions they must decentralize. Frequent or time-critical decisions that need local context should be decentralized. Other decisions that are long-lasting and have a huge impact should remain centralized.

Sometimes, the problem is having too much data or too many options to choose from. With so much data available at our fingertips, we tend to overthink and have analysis paralysis also called FOBO (Fear of Better Option). In his Ted Talk, Patrick McGinnis explains how to overcome FOBO and make faster decisions.

Embracing Lean-Agile Principles

The Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes of leaders who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking. Leadership agility requires leaders to embrace lean thinking and lean principles outlined by the House of Lean such as Kaizen (continuous improvement), respect for people, teamwork, innovation, sustainable flow, and Genchi Genbutsu (go and see). Lean thinking encourages leaders to embrace core values such as respect, integrity, empathy, collaboration, and teamwork.

“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent." - Bill Gates

Agile leaders embrace the values written in the Agile Manifesto and promote the 12 Agile principles across their teams. If you are interested to read about 12 Agile Principles, check out this article on Medium.

Check out my published books on Agile and Lean:

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You might have noticed that there are some people around you who are a pleasure to be with. They have a magnetic personality. They attract people and share their positive vibrations with others. Such people find it very easy to strike a conversation with anyone. They are usually your ‘go-to’ people at work or elsewhere. That's the power of positive thinking.

On the other hand, there are other people who seem worried and depressed. They like to stay with themselves. They usually find it difficult to start a conversation and feel comfortable when they are alone. The difference lies in the energy that they possess and radiate. Thoughts play an important part in creating this energy. Every moment, one is receiving and radiating thoughts. Thoughts define our character and influence our destiny.

Positive thoughts are formed if you have self-confidence. If you think you are strong, confident, accepted, successful, and loved, you will radiate positive energy to others. On the contrary, if you think that you are weak, unaccepted, defeated, unsuccessful and unloved, you will possess negative thoughts and radiate negative energy.

Swami Vivekananda once said, “All power is within you. Do not believe that you are weak. You can do anything and everything.”

The Human Mind: A Powerful Source

The human mind is always full of thoughts. It is very difficult to retain the positive thoughts in the mind. Negative thoughts will try to enter your mind all the time, but the key is to replace those thoughts with positive ones. If you start to think that you are weak, painful or tired, immediately replace those thoughts with those of strength and recovery. If you think you have failed, replace your negative thoughts with positive memories; when you brought a smile to others, when you wiped off the tears of your loved ones, or when you made them proud.

Fill your mind with thoughts that make you happy. Remember the moments when somebody thanked you for your generosity, when you received an honest appreciation for your hard work, or when your colleagues admired your skills. Realize the power of positive thoughts. With positive thoughts, you can attract positive energy towards you.

Do not doubt your abilities. Don’t forget that you are the creation of the almighty God and have a unique purpose in life. You are a masterpiece. You have been carefully made by the creator of this universe. You can achieve whatever you want.

The Power Of Positive Thinking: Real Examples

Nick Vujicic is an Australian Christian man who is born with no arms and no legs. It was very easy for him to think negative. Imagine how helpless he would have felt in his childhood. He must have received countless comments about his inadequacy. But, instead of thinking negative, he chose to stay positive. Despite his disabilities, he didn’t find reasons to give up. He not only wrote seven successful books but is also a motivational speaker across the world.

One of Nick’s quotes is, “God won’t allow anything to happen in your life, if it’s not for your good.”

Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant scientist in the world, was expelled from school. One of his teachers called him ‘a lazy dog’. After being expelled, he was very disappointed in himself. Even then, he refused to live his life under the shadows of poor self-esteem. He went on to become a professor at the University of Zurich, introduced his theory of relativity, and won the Noble Prize for Physics.

One of his quotes is, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Zig Ziglar was raised in a little house in the outskirts of Alabama. When he was five years old, both his dad and his younger sister died. In his childhood, he used to milk the cows, sell vegetables on the street, and work in the grocery store. He was underweight and had poor self-esteem. His dream was to own a large house with an acre of land, and a big garden. He attended the University of South Carolina, married at the age of seventeen, dropped out of college, and worked as a cookware salesman for WearEver Aluminum Company. He feared rejection and did not sell much.

During one of his sales meeting, Mr. P. C. Merrell, the divisional supervisor of the company, encouraged him to believe in himself and trust his potential. He gave him advice on how to succeed. This was the turning point in Zig’s life. As soon as his self-esteem improved, he became one of the best salesmen and got promoted to the divisional supervisor position. Later, he became a bestselling author and a motivational speaker. His first book ‘See you at the Top’ was published in 1975. He wrote several books, including his autobiography, and even received the prestigious Cavett award by the National Speakers Association. Such was the result of an improved self-esteem and positive thinking.

You may be interested to read:

- Harness The Power Within
- Think Positive, Speak Positive, Act Positive

Other Books:

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Leadership Agility: What You Need to Know