Agile leadership is a must for future business success
The fast pace of digital, people, political and economic change means leadership teams must respond quickly and positively to new challenges and opportunities. Eman Al-Hillawi, CEO of business change consultancy, Entec Si, explains what agile leadership looks like, and how leaders can encourage their staff to follow suit.
Embracing change is the main principle of agile leadership. Leaders across sectors constantly face unpredictable situations and known unknowns when faced with new opportunities or breaking new ground. Take the expansion of a business into a secondary market as an example. Leaders who approach the new customer base with the same sales and marketing strategies that have worked for their existing audience are unlikely to achieve the same level of success. Instead, leaders should embrace the change and adapt how their organisation engages with the new customers.
Agile leadership can also be viewed on macro and micro levels. For instance, how local authorities adapt to national planning reform will require long-term change. On a macro level, this might include restructuring the workforce and responsibilities to accommodate the introduction of new planning professionals. On a micro level, council leadership teams will have to update local plans older than five years to reflect changes to the National Planning Policy Framework. Ultimately, the size and scale of change is not what’s important – it’s the ability of leadership teams to assess the situation and put together a considered and tailored plan of action that matters.
Adopting a rigid leadership approach is often the downfall of positive growth. Leaders with a flexible and adaptable mindset are naturally better at handling internal and external changes needed to progress the business. Agile leadership is not just about adapting around customer needs but should also include listening and reacting to the workforce. This might be undertaking workforce modelling to identify skills gaps or assessing IT processes and software during an acquisition to streamline the migration of key IT systems.
Being an agile leader means being sensitive to the impact of change on workers and addressing barriers that might prevent team members from joining the journey. This starts with leadership buy-in. Leaders who are invested in change and clearly communicate the rationale behind it are more likely to encourage investment from their people too.
Developing buy-in from the workforce will help to ease any uncertainty that change creates; if people have a strong understanding of why change is occurring and what will be achieved through it, they are less likely to be averse to or fearful of it. Agile leaders will also ensure they collaborate with the rest of the team to identify and mitigate any pressure points. This can be an opportunity to adjust the approach to managing change by hearing diverse perspectives from the team and considering where improvements could be made.
In today’s complex business environment, it’s important that agile leadership is embraced at every level in an organisation. Whilst agility should be exemplified from the top down, empowering workers to think on their feet and work flexibly will ensure the business is adaptable across the board – from high-level, strategic decision making to the completion of everyday tasks.
One effective way of helping people to work with greater agility is a blended team approach. This requires leaders to show individuals how to be open-minded and think outside the box, exercise this skill with them and then allow them to flex this muscle without guidance. Think of this method as coaching a chain reaction – upskilling workers through demonstration, practice and adoption. People often default to habits and formulas in the workplace, so agility is something that needs to be taught and developed.
Introducing an options appraisal can also help to encourage agile decision making among the wider team. Developing a few slides and questions with different actions and objectives will enable workers to see the full picture of their decisions and choose the actions that will deliver the best outcomes. Equally, this approach will give workers more ownership over their decisions and work, making it easier for change to be faced and handled. For example, a project management team might use an options appraisal to determine the best way of delivering a project.
From the top down, agile leadership is an increasingly important skill for organisations across all sectors to embrace. No change for good happens without an open mind.
Eman Al-Hillawi is the CEO at business change consultancy, Entec Si.
