The Good News About Leadership Agility

What’s happening in your business that is calling for greater agility? Where might you have to pivot, adapt and flex your approach, adjust speed to more appropriately meet the moment, or strengthen and stabilize your core? What changes can you make to become a more agile leader yourself? To more effectively lead others who are working in increasingly agile ways?

These are questions most every leader I work with is asking these days. And the coaches and leadership development professionals who support them also ask, “How can we support these shifts while becoming more agile ourselves?”

The good news is that every day, the world around us provides opportunities and circumstances to learn about agility. Why is that good news? Because becoming more agile also means getting more creative. And learning to consciously combine agility and creativity is fast becoming one of the most sought-after leadership capabilities.

Sometimes you are pushed into agile and creative responses by challenges and constraints, like supply chain disruption, unanticipated complexity that leads to delay, or a competitor’s unexpected success. Other times, you are pulled by opportunities and possibilities. Emerging technology in another industry unlocks new efficiencies in yours. An opportunity to integrate products or solutions delivers more value to customers. A redesigned process helps your team accelerate with greater ease. These are examples of circumstances that pull you into agile and creative inventions.

Whether you and your team are pushed into agility by circumstances or pulled by possibilities, combining leadership agility with creativity will be your most important superpower.

Five ways to strengthen agility and creativity

Here are five arenas for leaders to strengthen to activate both agility and creativity:

1. Develop shared purpose. When it’s just your purpose, it’s not as durable when the going gets tough, or the circumstances call for agility and decentralized innovation. Instead, develop shared purposes together with others. That’s when they have power beyond your reach. You still advocate for your vision and are willing to adopt others’ perspectives, support their priorities, and let someone else make the call. In today’s world of work, ‘standing together’ is more impactful than ‘bringing people along.’
2. Know when to let go and when to lean in. Sometimes, you’ll need to let go to foster agility and creativity. That might look like deferring a decision to people and teams closer to work and or giving up what’s good for your “shop” in service to the broader enterprise. It could mean sharing more rapidly and transparently and even giving credit away more generously to others. Other times, you’ll need to lean in—like making a decision without all the information, taking a smart risk, or advocating for an unpopular approach. Getting the timing right for letting go and leaning in will make all the difference.
3. Give feedback to empowered teams. Delegating decision rights—and navigating what happens next (and down the road) is one of the greatest challenges to agile leadership. That’s because your credibility is on the line. Do you claw back decision authority if things go wrong? Accept solutions and approaches that are different than your own? Are you a skillful coach when the team hits an obstacle—or do you step in to save the day? Your most powerful tool will be how you give your input and feedback to the team. Practice giving it as either an “appreciation” for something you like or as a “consideration” for the team to decide if/how to incorporate. That way, the power in the ‘empowerment’ remains squarely in the team’s hands.
4. Manage “perceived” unclarity. People want clarity. I hear it every day. But in an agile world, clarity doesn’t come from knowing with certainty every step on the path ahead. It arises when people understand and share a clear, meaningful destination. One where you can feel the tangible benefit and value experienced when you get there. The key is to craft a value narrative—together—that’s focused on outcomes instead of activity. A clear outcome provides stability when the team hits obstacles or the path is obscured.
5. Foster experimentation and iteration. Agility is founded on the principles of iteration, experimentation, and early, frequent “customer” input. So, what does that mean for you as a leader? First, you’ll have to let go of ‘perfect’ in service to ‘fit for purpose.’ Then, you’ll need to adopt a “Yes, and…” approach to providing input along the way while keeping the team focused on desired outcomes. And finally, you’ll want to have clear, transparent criteria in place for prioritizing and evaluating experiments and prototypes—and making ‘go-no go’ decisions about further investment.

These are powerful and important shifts as we all grow our leadership agility. But they are not easy to adopt. More often than not, leaders will need support to guide the way.

Three learning and development focus areas

Here are three key areas of focus for coaches and learning and development professionals—to amplify your approach for developing agile and creative leaders:

1. Flex your offer to meet the circumstances. Coaches often offer services in six-month “packages” or sit in with teams over time. L&D teams often build programs that require time out of business. What changes to your own service delivery model would help demonstrate agility?
2. Help leaders build confidence and effectiveness in the five practices above.
3. Ensure L&D assets (leadership programs, tools, etc.) are flexible, easily combined in new ways, and simple to adapt. Leaders should be able to derive value when you’re there to support them, but also on their own at the moment of need.

The good news is we are all on this learning journey together. We don’t have to go it alone. We can learn from each other, get creative together, and generously support each other on the path to developing personal and leadership agility.