How do you measure and improve your agility as a leader?

> Regularly assess your own leadership style and seek feedback from colleagues, subordinates, and superiors. > Identify areas where you can improve your agility and adaptability. > Be open to experimentation and learning from your experiences. > Try new approaches, embrace change, and be willing to adjust your strategies as needed. > Invest in your own professional development to enhance your agility skills. > Attend workshops, conferences, and training programs that focus on leadership, adaptability, and change management.

To boost your leadership agility, start by using a self-assessment tool. It helps you see your strengths and areas to improve in learning, interacting, creating, and performing.

Collect quantitative and qualitative data to determine how agile you are as a leader. Take the Agile Leader Self-Assessment to see your score as an agile leader. Complement those results with feedback from people in your network. Ask them questions like, "How would you describe my agile leadership style? Can you tell me about a time when I was an agile leader; how did you know? What did I do that showed agility?"

Once, a leader wanted to grow. They used an Agile Leader Self-Assessment to understand their strengths and areas to improve. This guided their journey to agility.

To enhance your leadership agility, seek honest feedback from peers and managers. Also, get coaching to set clear goals and create action plans for new insights.

In previous years, I used to look at objective outcomes as the primary indicator of my agility. That was a mistake. In my work today, I can see that even rigid and disconnected leaders can sometimes point to objective results to support their attitudes and work styles. It is only through other people that the picture becomes clearer. When I seek feedback, I aim for four sources of feedback, whenever possible: upward (mentors, supervisors, coaches), parallel (coworkers, peers), downward (direct reports), and measurable results over time (e.g., the past year). These four should provide a fairly accurate picture of my agility.

Feedback and coaching is fine. But adjusting behaviors is more ideal. If you can analyze your own behaviors that aren't "agile," evaluate and shift your environment or tools to fit the new desire.

Várias s?o as alternativas, porém a que mais me agrada é testar minhas ideias e experimentos por meio de projetos piloto. Em três décadas de experiência profissional, sempre consegui avan?ar com algo realmente inovador quando tiro de minha mente a press?o por terminar alguma coisa nova que seja muito sofisticada. Questiono o que fa?o, mudando sempre o foco para entregas que agregam valor e resolvam problemas reais e que sejam comprovadamente testadas por meio de iniciativas menores para só depois movê-las para larga escala.

Uma boa prática é adotar uma mentalidade de crescimento e incentivar uma cultura de aprendizado. Utilize ferramentas como revis?es pós-a??o, retrospectivas e debriefs para refletir sobre a??es, resultados e li??es aprendidas. Além disso, implemente projetos-piloto, protótipos e produtos mínimos viáveis para testar ideias e hipóteses de forma rápida e iterativa. Isso ajuda a medir e melhorar sua agilidade como líder, promovendo um ambiente que valoriza a experimenta??o e o aprendizado contínuo.

To boost agility, embrace a growth mindset and encourage learning from experiments. Use tools like after-action reviews and pilot projects to reflect, test, and improve quickly.

A leader valued agility. They embraced learning and encouraged their team to experiment. Using reviews and pilot projects, they grew stronger with each experience.

It's a cliché, but it is very important to remember that we don't have all the answers. The Dunning Kruger Effect is alive and well; those with less competence often think they know it all, while the experts consistently doubt themselves. I've experienced a multitude of rejections, failures, and humbling experiences before I settled into a growth mindset where I think of myself as a life-long learner. Ironically, that mindset shift propelled me toward expertise. Today, I try to approach many situations as a scientific experiment: let's see if this works! We set the parameters, divide the work, and constantly communicate during the implementation process. When we have the results, a postmortem meeting is critical. Never skip them!

I’ve learned that no one grows in isolation. By building strong relationships with peers, and industry experts, I stay updated on the latest trends and challenges. Engaging with diverse perspectives gives me the ability to pivot quickly when market dynamics shift. To me, agility is not just about speed—it's about leveraging collective wisdom to make better, faster decisions. Always keep your network close; it’s your biggest asset.

I measure my agility as a leader by how quickly I can adapt to changes and make decisions that align with both short-term and long-term goals. Feedback from my team plays a huge role; I regularly ask for input on how I handle challenges and pivot when needed. I improve by staying curious and embracing continuous learning. I also invest in building strong, diverse teams—because a leader’s agility is often tied to the collective flexibility and resilience of those around them. Finally, I reflect on past decisions, evaluating what worked and what didn’t to stay sharp in future situations.

Agility naturally exists at what I like to call Spring-Summer cultures (Startups to Small Business). The same is also true for collaboration and networking. When medium to large enterprises (Autumn/Winter cultures) try to engage in these traits, there's often tension. So it's important to know what your natural traits are, and map it against the wider organization's culture and the behaviors you seek.

You can also use emerging LLMs (such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to help you adapt and innovate faster. And if you want to adapt better, put yourself into situations that force you to; stress-testing is the best way to move beyond planning and into action. Look up "monkey testing" from software engineering circles - this same principle can be applied to any team.

In my observation, agility is often about openness. Being open can mean a multitude of things: openness to new experiences/ideas that are novel and foreign, being open to admitting that we need help or have made a mistake, being open to learn and change our ways of being or working, and being open to hearing the truth about ourselves, even when it's not pleasing. Leaders often struggle with one or all of these openness areas, which leads to defensiveness, rigidity, and disconnection. Openness as a personality trait is fairly stable, but openness as a mindset can and should be enhanced among those in leadership positions.