ICP LEA - Leading with Agility

1. WHY AND WHAT OF LEADING WITH AGILITY

1.1. New Organizational And Leadership Capabilities We Need Today

1.1.1. Organizational Agility Capability

For most of the 20th century, organizations have been optimized to increase efficiency and maximize production in large part by exploiting economies of scale. Organizations need to optimize for increased innovation and accelerated learning to survive and continue to remain relevant. 

Examples of effective capabilities used for agility are:

• • • An innovative culture: An organization-wide mindset to seek and explore, and a cross-functional ability to quickly spark, develop and implement new ideas.
    • A nurturing collaborative environment: a work environment where workers are inspired, and they can thrive and create.
    • The ability to continuously adapt: The ability to adaptively respond to rapidly changing external conditions, including the ability to continuously evolve value streams, product and strategy. Continuous adaption extends beyond incremental improvement of discrete processes to include broader, deeper, enterprise-wide change.
    • Organizational learning and sense-making: A systemic capability to sense the unfiltered, often-chaotic external environment and then make sense of it by synthesizing diverse perspectives into coherent accounts capable of driving decisions, innovation and policy. Traditionally leadership instructs the rest of the organization. In the learning organization, the rest of the organization instructs leadership.
    • Continuous engagement: The ability to stay engaged and aligned with employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders, even as internal and external conditions continuously change. Relying on a few, fixed communication pathways for the sake of efficiency no longer suffices when conditions are emergent, the source of meaningful signals is unpredictable and structure is dynamic.

1.1.2. Why Agility in Leadership is Needed

Organizations must transform to develop the new capabilities required to face the challenges of the world we live in today. To lead our transformed organizations effectively, we must also transform ourselves as leaders. The leadership and management practices developed to manage efficiency and production-focused organizations are not suitable for leading learning organizations or for cultivating innovative cultures. Transformation is continuous and never-ending — there is no end-state, rather the organization is continually improving and evolving.

1.2. Behaviors That Increase Agility

1.2.1. Understanding Power & Influence

There is a difference between the vested authority of a title and the ability to influence by other means. Understanding the situational factors is key to applying the appropriate style of power and influence.

1.2.2. Leadership Styles

Leaders often associate effective leadership with particular leadership styles. However, even though a given leader may have a predominant leadership style, the agile leader understands the need to expand their range and bring in new styles depending on the situation. Also, it is essential to bring awareness to the impact of certain leadership styles on the goal of cultivating agility and a culture of innovation.

2. DEVELOPING PERSONAL AGILITY

2.1. Developing Self as Instrument

2.1.1. Self-Awareness & Self-Management

Self-awareness refers to how aware an individual is of their own emotional state and how it may impact their behavior in a given moment. Self-awareness also refers to the kinds of behaviors one defaults to in different situations. Self-management refers to one’s ability to apply insights gained from self-awareness to act from one’s intention and leadership stance.

2.1.2.  Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the ability to focus in the present moment and take in everything that is happening around you and within you, including your own thoughts and feelings. When fully aware, we enable ourselves to act deliberately in the present moment rather than impulsively, thereby magnifying our efficacy. This also enables us to make decisions calmly in a thoughtful, non-reactive way.

2.1.3.  Growth Mindset for Leadership

Personal and professional growth involves believing that we can change, then examining and deliberately advancing our patterns of thought, feelings and behavior. We can develop new mental and emotional capabilities.

2.1.4.  Personal Purpose and Values

Leaders are most effective when they lead in alignment with their personal purpose and values. The first step is to make the effort to reflect upon and identify one’s own purpose and values. This helps ensure that leaders lead organizations from a place of authenticity with respect to how they align to the organization’s purpose.

2.2. Developing Self As Leader

2.2.1. Assessing Yourself as a Leader

The ability to assess oneself as a leader using a variety of measures is a crucial step in leadership development.

2.2.2. Skills of Self Development  

Personal development for leaders has often been considered only “nice to have” in leader development. More and more research, however, is revealing a correlation between the level of personal development and organizational efficacy.

2.2.3. Mental Models

The term “mental models” refers to the deeply ingrained assumptions, beliefs, and stories we hold about ourselves and the world. Agile leaders regularly practice surfacing and examining their own and others’ mental models. They also recognize that others have a different experience of situations, sometimes radically different, and that we cannot assume a common frame of reference.

2.2.4. Committing to and Practicing Agile Values

On the personal leadership journey, aspiring agile leaders are called upon to serve as role models for the values they encourage their organizations to espouse.

3. DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP AGILITY

3.1. Introduction To EQ: Social Context

3.1.1. Emotional Intelligence in Relationships

Emotional intelligence also refers to an individual’s social awareness and relationship management. Social awareness is a person’s ability to sense and empathize with another. Relationship management is a person’s ability to interact with another on the basis of what could best serve that other, or the relationship you have with that other, as opposed to interacting with another on the basis of one’s emotional reaction or habitual behavior.

3.1.2. Thinking About Organizations as Human Systems

Effective Agile leaders need to understand organizations as multi-leveled human systems. The roles that people play in organizations are complicated by the fact that they simultaneously participate in multiple systems and sub-systems. The implication for leaders is that policies or decisions that are perfectly acceptable in one system’s context may generate an unintended consequence or conflict in a different system’s context.

3.2. Exercising Agility In Key Conversations

3.2.1. Conversations as the Key Vehicle of Communication in Agile Leadership

Communication skills commonly emphasized in leadership courses imply a one- way exchange, with the intention of making the communication successful enough that it is fully received and accepted. A conversation, on the other hand, is by definition at least a two-way exchange, and is the primary mode of communication for an agile leader. This implies that a variety of points of views will be exchanged and allows for the possibility of a meeting of diverse minds. The quality of conversations is therefore key.

3.2.2. Telling Compelling Stories as a Leader

Story telling is a key skill for leadership – stories are inspirational and make a message personal and relatable. Also, careful use of metaphor and understanding of the power of what language conveys is key to stories and conveying intent.

4. LEADING TO AGILITY

4.1. Organizational Transformation And Agility

4.1.1. The Nature of Organizational Transformation

Organizational transformation differs significantly from more limited organizational change initiatives. Often, transformation teams mistake organizational transformation for a series of limited change initiatives.

4.1.2. Why Transformation is needed for Agility

Development of capabilities needed for sustainable organizational agility involves much more radical and systemic changes.

4.2. Leading Change And Transformation

4.2.1. Leading from the Future and the Larger Context

To paraphrase a famous quote, you get what you pay attention to. If you attend to the present, you get a variation on the same thing. If you think from a future possibility, you are much more likely achieve something new. As Peter Senge has written, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.”

4.2.2. Leading vs. Managing Change

It is sometimes said that you can’t manage transformation but you can learn to lead it successfully.

4.2.3. Leader as Agent of Transformation

Leaders can only take an organization as far as they themselves are willing to go and must always see themselves as role models for and agents of the transformation they wish to catalyze in the organization.

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