How Agile Leadership Can Be Learned – A Quick Guide

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There are many organizations need or would like to achieve greater agility. However, in order to achieve it, leadership style and corresponding principles need to be revisited. Therefore if we want agility, we need to demonstrate agile leadership as a result. But how exactly? A global study delivers a behavior-based competency model. The good news is that competencies can be learned.

how agile leadership can be learnedThe Global Center for Digital Business Transformation wanted to find out, what exactly does agile leadership look like. The IMD Business School in Switzerland teamed up with metaBeratung, a specialized consulting firm in Germany, to conduct a global study (Neubauer, Tarling & Wade, 2017). Leaders from all over the world participated while having one thing in common: they operate in a highly disruptive market, which is where organizational agility is considered to be needed the most.

The theoretical foundation relies on IMD’s concept of Digital Business Agility (Bradley et al., 2015) that defines three behaviors that help companies in highly disruptive markets to survive. This study confirmed the relevance of these three behaviors.

Overall 19 expert interviews with digital leaders and data from a global survey with 1042 leaders where analyzed. Beside the three behaviors, four core agile leadership competencies were identified.

Digital Business Agility – The Three agile Leadership Behaviors:

1. HYPER-AWARENESS

This would entail constantly monitoring and evaluating changes in market conditions, developments in technology, and customer needs. It would also include observing trends, identifying and watching dominant factors. Consequently this means that there would be a need to set up supporting processes and investing the necessary resources.

2. INFORMED DECISION-MAKING

This would entail making decisions based on facts and real-time data. Ensuring information is available, analyzed and considered in strategic and day-to-day operative decision making on every level.

3. FAST EXECUTION

This requires prioritizing speed over perfection. Prioritizing faster delivery value over planning and documenting, while ensuring fast decision making and preventing the organization from overburdening bureaucracy.

These three behavioral aspects will equip the leader to steer diligently in volatile markets. However, to lead people and create agility in the workplace, four related competencies are necessary to define the core of agile leadership (HAVE model; Wade et al., 2017; elaborated by Puckett & Neubauer, 2018/ 2020).

Four Competencies of Agile Leadership – The “HAVE” Model

1. ADAPTABILITY

This requires that leader not shy away from changing directions and revising decisions taken when circumstances change, or when new information becomes available. Further, this requires making sure processes, products, and/or services remain flexible enough to include feedback and adaptability to changing circumstances.

2. HUMILITY

This competency values feedback and input from others while being aware one’s own limitations. At the same time this requires the need to keep learning and treating others with equal footing while ensuring inclusion.

3. VISIONARY

This would require leaders to think big, find their vision and wear it on their sleeves while setting the direction and inspiring others.

4. ENGAGEMENT

This competency requires the need to stay connected, to grow and strengthen networks inside and outside the organization. At the same time this would require keeping in regular contact with customers and stakeholders while staying connected to the pulse of the market, such as relevant expertise and knowledge.

Agile leadership can be learned and demonstrating the three behaviors is a matter of effort and focus. Smart leaders will get their teams on board and together will find ways to create and sustain hyper-awareness, to ensure informed decision making and enable fast execution.

Competencies by definition can be learned. Step-by-step leaders can achieve mastery in playing the leadership role and spectrum. Leading agility does not necessarily mean every good idea or measurement has to come from or be managed by the leader. In face it’s quite the opposite. Good agile leaders understand their limitations and they might be highly visionary and very engaged but have difficulties adapting fast enough. Or they might be very humble and adaptable but not highly visionary. Yes, good leaders invest in their own development and grow in each of the four competencies. However, it must be understood that no one can be a star in all four dimensions. Agile leadership means to enable and inspire your people to step up and help build these competencies in your organization overall.

In order to excel in this most important leadership task, agile leaders must invest in their company’s culture to prepare the right conditions for people to grow – and through them attain agility (for more see “The agile Culture Code” Puckett, 2020 b).

Sources:
Bradley, Loucks, Macaulay, Noronha & Wade (2015). The Digital Vortex. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/industry-solutions/digital-vortex-report.pdf
Puckett (2020). THE AGILE CULTURE CODE – A guide to organizational agility. BusinessVillage.
Puckett & Neubauer (2020). Agile Leadership – Leadership competencies for the agile transformation. BusinessVillage.
Wade, Tarling & Neubauer (2017). Redefining Leadership for a Digital Age. Copyright: IMD, metaBeratung, Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. https://www.imd.org/dbt/reports/redefining-leadership/

Contributing Author

Dr. Stefanie Puckett has lived and worked globally for several consulting firms, in management and global roles for a Fortune 500 company and ran her own business. She is a psychologist that turned to agile once she saw that decades of organizational psychology research are basically summed up in the agile manifesto. Since then, agile transformation has become her passion as a consultant and executive coach. Stefanie is author of “The agile culture code – a guide to organizational agility” (BusinessVillage, 2020) and co-author of “Agile Leadership – leadership competencies for the agile transformation” (BusinessVillage, 2020).

[Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

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