Why leadership agility is important?

What is the future of leadership? It is observed that the survival of any organization is based on a number of important factors –including its agile capability. The market rewards organizations having the willingness and capacity to adapt to modern technologies and trends. Market leaders have come up with management approaches and cultures for encouraging creativity along with rapid innovation. The respective cultures or approaches, known as agile, encourage market leaders to scale faster in response to the highly complex, volatile, ambiguous, and volatile world.  

Most organizations out there are attempting agile transformation. However, without the shift in conventional leadership abilities, mindset, development, organizations will be unsuccessful. This is where the role of leadership agility comes in.  

What is Leadership Agility?

We live in a fast-paced, ever-changing, and disruptive era. It is not going to slow down. We are currently experiencing ongoing innovation and technological advancements along with digitization. Consumers constantly keep changing their overall desires and needs in the ever-evolving market. We are currently living in the ‘now’ generation.  

What will be its implications? Employees, teams, and organizations need to be attentive than ever. As such, leaders are expected to be agile for creating agile teams and organizations.  

In simpler terms, leadership agility can be defined as the ability to successfully lead organizational change, develop strong teams, and browse challenging business innovations and conversations.  

Key Drivers of Leadership Agility

An agile leader is expected to possess the ability to assess the overall risk, make decisions affirmatively, and ensure quick reactions for meeting the rapidly evolving business environment. An agile market leader is also expected to produce rapid results while developing the capacity of others to ensure the same.

Some of the core drivers of leadership agility are:

• Integrity: It serves to be the foundation of the concept of agile leadership. Actions are driven by principles and values. This makes modern leaders trustworthy and reliable. They have come up with a notion of character, purpose, and self-awareness for naturally inspiring others around.  

Integrity is one of the most important attributes of modern leadership. The combination of accountability and self-awareness accelerates leadership development.  

• Innovation: Agile leaders are expected to have an agile approach. They present a natural instinct of curiosity about the respective environments –launching and boosting new ideas while developing a learning culture. The role of an agile leader is to exercise less command and ensure more facilitation.

• Urgency: Agile leaders emanate a sense of urgency. They help in bringing focus to the entire organization. It is achieved by setting challenging goals while maintaining a steady stance throughout. Agile leaders are also capable of making decisions quickly with inefficient data to ensure that the organization keeps moving forward.  

Agile leaders ensure decentralized decision-making by letting go of hierarchy towards favoring cross-functional, self-organizing teams.  

• Engagement: Agile leaders are capable of creating engagement throughout the organization. They remain inclusive across geographies, generations, and boundaries. They eventually span out –throughout networks of high-end stakeholders for encouraging cross-functional capabilities in order to generate efficient performance.  

Another element of talent optimization is the notion of developing leaders at different levels. Agile leaders help in leveraging multiple levers for building engagement in individual scenarios.  

• Direction: Agile leaders come up with proper direction for the entire organization. They help in aligning resources and people to fulfill direction. Leaders also focus on the elimination of impediments and empowering teams to take charge of the overall work. They remain transparent in the respective communication while encouraging the free flow of information for rapidly adapting to change.  

Agile leaders help in the creation of an agile culture depending on shared organizational values for aligning your business and strategies.  

Importance of Leadership Agility in Organizations

Mostly, in instances of change, complexity, threat, and stress, leaders might retreat to the comfort zones by over-relying on the respective strengths and habits having served them well previously. At its core, leadership agility is concerned with taking ‘reflective action.’ It should be made towards stepping back from the current focus, gaining a broader & deeper perspective, and then, refocusing and taking informed decisions with the help of the larger perspective.  

Agile leadership should not be regarded as just a mere tool in the leadership checklist. It is a leadership super power. It serves to be a fundamental capacity determining how leaders tend to express the respective skills, knowledge, values, passions, and abilities. Here are some ways that will help in growing and nurturing your organization’s leadership agility:

• Define the Leadership Purpose: Most leaders out there understand the importance and value of goals. Leaders will have different types of goals throughout the organizational journey –including organizational goals, team goals, and individual goals. Goals are important because they offer clarity and focus on how a leader is expected to invest time, energy, and resources for achieving the greatest success.  

• Align the ‘In Moment’ Objectives: Leaders should learn to quickly assess the respective mindset and ensure a reset to the intention for producing behaviors that serve the leadership goals and purposes. They should take ample time to deliberately choose the best intentions during challenging situations. As they name the intentions, it offers a better purpose in the given moment of time.  

• Ask Questions to Know About Varied Perspectives: When leaders wish to achieve sustained success in the constantly changing environment, they are expected to develop the ability to leverage the understandings, perspectives, and expertise of others for solving complex problems.  

The overall success of an organization is tied to the abilities of the leaders to effectively engage others in solving challenges. It can only be achieved by developing strong skill sets in different aspects of the industry.  

Conclusion

An agile leader helps in creating a safe and stable environment for allowing experimentation, failures, and risks without any repercussion. Developing leadership agility through the definition of leadership purpose, alignment of the intentions, and asking relevant questions will help in guarding leaders against common pitfalls. It will also equip the leaders to successfully drive meaningful results while developing strong relationships.  

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