Go Forth and Be Agile!

June 5, 2024
Communication Skills, Experiential Learning, Human Resource Training, Leadership, Learning
HRDQ-U

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Due to greater demands for performance, complex issues, and limited resources, doing more with less is an everyday reality for leaders in today’s organizations. The good news is that you can stay ahead of the competition – if you know how to expand your brain bandwidth. With the proper tools, it is possible to build your agile leadership skills and thinking so you can tackle tough mental demands and develop a more strategic mindset.

But there is a challenge to get more done with less.

We live in VUCA World. Established by the US Army War College over a decade ago, VUCA was created to define the critical factors of the future. Turns out it was very accurate:

V – Volatile
U – Uncertain
C – Complex (dense layers or organizations)
A – Ambiguous

Recommended training from HRDQ-U

Leadership Agility: Four Steps to Getting More Done with Less

All four of these elements have a direct impact on leaders and the organizations they serve. The idea of Organizational Agility is the “capability of a company to rapidly change or adapt in response to changes in the market.” Organizational Agility is the anecdote to the VUCA world. It requires Leadership Agility.

A recent study by Forbes estimated that only 10% of employees have the appropriate levels of leadership agility. That is simply not enough.

Warren Bennis, author of Rethinking the Future wrote, “to grow and transform . . . executives have to have extraordinary adaptability.” Leaders need to be able to flex on leadership. This is not just executives. It applies to all leaders.

How do we define Thinking Agility? It is the ability to consciously shift your thinking when the situation requires it. Our brains reactively shift our thinking all the time.

To understand Leadership Agility, we need to to discuss why leadership development programs fail:

Overlooking context
Decoupling reflection from real work
Failure to measure results
Underestimating mindsets

Our mindset drives what we see.

Our perspective changes what we see and how we see it. As a leader, that is key.

To learn about the 4 Q approach that can help leaders solve many problems by seeing a variety of solutions, watch Leadership Agility: Four Steps to Getting More Done with Less presented by Ann Herrmann-Nehdi. In this webinar, she talks about leadership agility and how to expand your thinking agility to stay ahead of the curve.