Author of
The Gauntlet
As technology continues its rapid, incessant evolution, complexity and unpredictability grow in the marketplace, causing your customers to constantly assess and react to shifting market trends. Your ability to remain a valuable partner to them depends on how accurately and consistently you anticipate their changing needs, and then, how quickly, efficiently and profitably you adapt to them.Anticipating change, challenge or opportunity, and then responding with urgency and certainty when they appear, is what defines agility. It’s more than being flexible; agility implies an intentional, proactiveapproach.
An agile business is customer centric; enduring relationships, built over time, shape a company’s ability to anticipate changing needs by providing insights about trends or challenges. The leaders of an agile business also rely on their culture to keep promises and contribute to the company’s progress. They appreciate that the values, behaviors and expertise which comprise their culture enable their people to be more creative and resilient when responding to complexity, uncertainty and change; customer-focused, value-creating outcomes are the result.
Embedding agility into a company’s culture requires leaders who embrace the agile philosophy, and model it themselves. Agile leadership competencies include:
- Facilitating healthy, productive dialogue about alternative solutions for a challenge or opportunity to identify the best way forward, particularly when vital outcomes are at risk;
- Engaging directly with their teams to improve performance or a process that creates value for customers and the business, while building team confidence, commitment and shared accountability;
- Encouraging proactive change initiatives with cross-functional impact to sustain growth and value creation in a turbulent environment.
Amidst a time of perpetual change, agile leaders are needed to build agile organizations. Increasingly, leadership agility is a key competency for business success.
How developed is your agile leadership competency?
