‘Agile Leadership’ - is it simply Change Leadership amplified?

We want to raise some questions about leadership agility and the part that middle managers can play in making it work out for the best. As you skim through this, keep the title in mind.?

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Brought more to the forefront by the pandemic, ‘leadership agility’ is recognised as something good. It’s easy to see why. Recent and current events require leaders and managers to be able to react swiftly in order to keep their organisations surviving, let alone working efficiently.

As former Cisco CEO John Chambers says in an interview with Rick Tetzeli in

?? McKinsey Insights (07 March 2023), we now not only face an increasing number of variables but the speed of change across them is increasing as well.

Therefore, as Chambers says, agility is key and if you don’t reinvent yourself, you’ll be left behind.

Absolutely! Who am I to contradict someone who increased his company’s sales from $1.2 billion to $47billion.

As much as I enjoy this type of 3 minute read, I worry about the early adopters, the bandwagonists, the knee-jerk responders. Am I wrong to assume that some that will read the article and think that they have to keep reinventing themselves and have a hair-trigger agility response?

I know the sort --

In work that I do with Education Leaders on a Master’s Degree module I deliver, we use a case study where staff say they are often “in a fog” because the school principal has a history of picking up on the latest initiative and asking them to run with it – without telling anyone precisely what it’s about.

Or the sales manager who would see a shiny new strategy in a sales and marketing magazine and impose it on us the day after. He would have said he was being agile. Whilst he was feeling agile, we were feeling bemused.

And without breaking any confidentiality agreements, our clients often mention how difficult it is when a leader is constantly changing direction in response to events or a course they've been on. Surely this can’t be right?

Anecdotal evidence is well and good for a while, but it can lack weight. We can all tell a good story but these can get exaggerated over time. That’s why it was good to find:

?? “Beware the Pitfalls of Agility” in MITSloan Management Review. 03 March 2023.

Here Dykes, Kolev, Ferrier and Hughes-Morgan refer to research they have carried out where they look into leaders’ abilities to shield against disruption by being able to “rapidly adapt to changing conditions”.

If you are under pressure as a leader to be agile, it will be useful to look at this.

Whilst they say how important agility is, they warn against some of the possible drawbacks and pitfalls that trying to be agile can bring. I would add, especially if you are ‘trying to be seen’ as an agile leader.

I recommend looking at the whole article because there are some useful links and references. But this is what jumped out at me.

?? They warn about being influenced by too much over-confidence because things have gone well before. This can give you a distorted idea of how things will look this time around.

?? What about impulsiveness? This can take hold when we are expected to “do something now!” If we are trying hard to be agile – because it is the thing to be - then this could be inevitable. Have you got the timing right? Is the direction clear?

?? They suggest that when you speed up decision making, the quality of those decisions will drop.

?? Short-termism can be another effect. Please read their piece to see the examples they give such as the JCPenny company. Here, a new CEO made changes that didn’t match the company’s capabilities.

? Have you been in a position where a swift change has been made but your team hasn’t got the skills or the budget to do things properly?

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There’s good advice given and it needs to be applied to any leadership situation. And to be fair, it is well known. For example, leaders should not use top-down instruction to impose their ideas but look for a wider consensus.

As middle leader advocates, it’s good to see that up, down and horizontal communication is suggested. This is where the middle layer of the hierarchy can embed the culture.

Middle leaders can let top managers know how well previous changes have gone and the pressures they put on the rest of the workforce. In the middle, you’ll have a sharp understanding of the skill sets that exist and how realistic a swift change will be.

They can also communicate the senior leadership’s messages to their team in ways that are meaningful.

It strikes me that all he advice we have given about leading change needs to be amplified to avoid ‘agility’ being ineffective.

? Or am I getting this wrong?

? What experiences do you have of agile leadership – from either side of the coin?