How to Be an Agile Leader

To help organizations to succeed in agile transformation, leaders at all levels need to be role models to encourage agility, and focus on developing four main capabilities of agile leadership: learning agility; empathy; thoughtful decisiveness; and digital literacy.

1. Learning agility: learning agility is a mindset and a collection of practices that allow leaders to continually develop, grow, and adopt new strategies to deal with the increasingly complex problems. It encompasses not only a leader’s curiosity and ability to make sense of his experiences, but also his capability to convert his gained insights into helpful actions that increase his organization’s performance.

How can a leader increase his learning agility?

- Learn from diverse experiences: a leader needs to seek more opportunities for learning from diverse experiences by exposing himself to various ideas and ways of working that are different from those in his current role. Taking non-executive roles is a common way to do this, especially in organizations that operate in multiple sectors. After that, the leader also needs to create space and time for making sense of this learning, through reflection, making notes, discussions with colleagues or creating a presentation to share with them.