Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
How to Cultivate Leadership Agility In Your Organization
ICYMI, leadership agility is a flexible, adaptable, mindful leadership mindset that empowers businesses to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and take meaningful action with incomplete information.
Agile leaders can ground themselves in their values and purpose—and connect them to that of the company—in the face of a crisis. They operate from a place of genuine alignment, curiosity, and exploration when things go wrong, encouraging others to do the same.
Agile leaders create the conditions necessary for calm collaboration and communication during tumultuous times through their composure and high EQ.
Agile leaders are always trained on all the latest tech, recognizing that having access to the right data and tools can help them solve problems more effectively and efficiently in the moment.
Most importantly, after a decision is made, agile leaders tend to reflect and figure out what they could do better next time. They recognize that continued practice is imperative to manage risk better and improve their jobs.
Agile Leadership Is a Trainable Skill
But agile leadership is not simply something certain employees are born with; it’s a skill—a mindset—that can be learned and taught. And it’s a skill that companies need to start developing in their leaders today.
Companies rife with agile leadership function more as living systems equipped to respond to an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment. These organizations are stable and dynamic; they fluidly adapt to environmental changes and are open, inclusive, and non-hierarchical. They embrace uncertainty and ambiguity, making them far better equipped than traditionally structured businesses for the future.
In a recent McKinsey study titled, Leading Agile Transformation: The New Capabilities Leaders Need to Build 21st-Century Organizations, leading economists argue that “to build and lead an agile organization, senior leaders must develop new mind-sets and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization.”
Below are some ways to cultivate leadership agility at your organization.
Provide Leadership Training and Coaching to Managers
We recently surveyed HR leaders (C-suite, managers, administrators, and procurement specialists) from across the country, in industries ranging from financial services to construction to fine arts, at companies of all sizes ranging from three employees to 7,000 to take a pulse on the current state of HR and what HR departments are gearing up for in 2024.
Interestingly, the collected data shows that HR leaders are interested in providing focused leadership development to improve manager performance in the new year, among other findings.
Recent Gallup research shows that 70% of engagement can be traced to an employee’s manager, validating that instinct. It proves that you should solve leadership agility from the top down through learning and development opportunities for managers, which will have a transferable effect on direct reports.
Leadership training refers to programs or courses that improve employees’ leadership skills, like decision-making, communication, problem-solving, and adaptability. Agile leadership training helps managers better understand their role in enabling agility and can be delivered through workshops, online courses, conferences, and mentorship opportunities.
Lean Into Company Purpose and Values
Company purpose and values are the foundation upon which businesses are built. They provide a common language for employees to speak to one another and offer a moral blueprint to guide decision-making—especially when things change rapidly.
To cultivate resilient, agile leadership within your organization, you should find more ways to bring company purpose and values into the conversation.
Encourage managers to orient feedback and mentorship around the company vision. Put your values and purpose on the website, in recruiting and onboarding materials, in the office, in email signatures, and company decks so that everyone learns to speak the same language company-wide–and so that employees remain connected to your long-term goals when the short-term outlook is rocky.
Encourage Tech Adoption
As a modern company, you’re likely adding best-in-class software, tools, and services to your tech stack each year to unlock new efficiencies, increase productivity, improve data-driven decision-making, and drive the bottom line.
However, that technology will do more harm than good if employees don’t know how to use it, especially when the going gets tough. Agile businesses have healthier relationships with tech, allowing them to respond quickly and nimbly to unforeseen challenges.
To encourage tech adoption and improve leadership agility, thoroughly vet and carefully select the right solutions for your business before signing any new contract—choosing the right tools will make employees more likely to embrace the change.
Be sure to offer focused, fun, mandatory training to employees when you roll out a new tool so that everyone knows how to use it (and employees aren’t scrambling to learn it when they need it most).
Providing clear timelines and roadmaps for when training must be completed will also help keep everyone on track and hold everyone accountable. Of course, connect the rollout back to your values and purpose so everyone understands why learning the new tool is important.
Create Channels for Communication and Collaboration
Traditional organizational models are based on the idea of an organization as a machine, with a static, siloed, structural hierarchy that operates through linear planning, communication, and control to execute.
Agile businesses with agile leaders are fluid; they’re matrixed and network-based. There’s more delegation and people are operating more from their authority and empowerment.
But that kind of flexible, adaptable model doesn’t just happen; companies need to carve out channels for productive communication and collaboration—and teach employees how to use them.
Sharing department goals and results publicly at all-company meetings can help teams find synergies and foster cross-department alignment. Communication and collaboration tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Figma can also create clear opportunities for networking and teamwork. Hosting regular social events for different departments to mingle can prevent silos and fortify cross-team relationships.
The goal is to strengthen employees’ communication and collaboration muscles every day so that when issues arise, employees are more likely to problem-solve together—ultimately getting to the right answer faster.
Create a Culture of Reflection
Perhaps the most important quality of an agile leader is the impulse to reflect—to look back at how things were done and how they could have been executed better. Encouraging this behavior in company leaders will improve leadership agility as employees embrace a mindset of continuous learning and improvement.
Consider setting up retrospectives after major company initiatives and projects come to a close, answering the questions: what went well? What went wrong? What should we change for the future? This kind of formal reflection enables actionable team learning and encourages team members to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge to equip them for the future.
You should also bring self-reflection into employee review periods and mentorship checkpoints, helping employees identify—for themselves—what they need to work on to become more agile, resilient leaders.
For a deeper dive into agile leadership and how to cultivate it at your organization, check out this week’s episode of America Back to Work with expert guest, Joe LaDuke.