Why Leadership Agility Is A Superpower and How To Develop It

Leadership will expose your flaws. The Darwinian rule applies to modern leaders: adapt, migrate or die. As the uncertainties and complexities of our world continue to increase, leadership agility has become a foundational attribute for organizational success.

Leadership agility is the ability for a leader to take effective actions in the midst of complex and rapidly changing conditions.?One of the hardest lessons a leader must learn is how to challenge, update, and change long-standing beliefs and behaviors that have served them well in the past but aren't sufficient for future success.?The Applied Learning Cycle below provides a roadmap for leaders to accelerate their ability to learn, adapt, and evolve.

GOAL

A goal is any desired behavior change, perspective, or approach that wouldn't otherwise happen without direct focus, commitment, and plan. Leaders set goals when they need to do something that hasn't happened yet and isn't likely to happen on its own. Establishing an effective development goal provides the benefits of clarity, focus, and accountability. A meaningful goal is a magnet for maximizing one's effort to achieve an intended behavior change.?

Below are some guidelines to help leaders move from learning from their experiences to establishing new habits and behaviors that enable them to grow and evolve.

One Goal At A Time -?Too many goals will ensure you will lose focus and not succeed at accomplishing the desired behavior change.

Plan For Obstacles?- You should define what obstacles will get in the way of your success in achieving your new development goal and what actions you will take to mitigate those obstacles.

Accountability Appointment- The American Society of Training and Development studied accountability and found that you have a 95% chance of completing a goal, if you set up an accountability appointment with someone.

PRACTICE

Setting goals is easy; achieving them is hard. Practice is required!

Think of a time in your professional life when you learned an important lesson that positively impacted you to become a more successful leader. Now consider where and how you discovered this valuable lesson. As adults, our most important lessons are not acquired through participation in a training program; our most impactful lessons, growth, and learning come to us through experience.

The popular 70/20/10 model many organizations use to develop talent demonstrates this concept. This model is a general framework stating that leaders obtain 70 percent of their knowledge from job-related experiences, 20 percent from interactions with others, and 10 percent from formal educational events. Practice is a critical component of learning new habits and behaviors.

FEEDBACK

When leaders actively seek honest feedback, they create a vulnerability and authenticity that demonstrates that everyone is a work in progress. This example helps to establish a culture where continuous improvement is encouraged and expected from all employees (Growth Mindset).

Honest feedback helps leaders address blind spots and evolve their leadership behaviors to achieve their goals. Sharing feedback with a leader is often risky. The practices below will help leaders minimize potential threats while encouraging others to provide honest feedback.

Be Specific with Feedback Requests?– If a leader asks general questions like "What can I do better?" it makes it difficult for the employee to understand what type of feedback is "okay" to provide. A more specific feedback request would be, "I am working on improving how I lead our team meetings. What am I doing that is getting in the way of our meetings being more collaborative?".

Ask for Feedback Often?– As this becomes part of a leader's routine, people begin to feel safe about providing upward feedback.

Avoid Defensiveness?– If a leader is perceived as being defensive, they are making a statement to others that it isn't safe to provide, nor do they value constructive feedback.

REFLECT

We do not learn from experience….We learn from reflection on experience.

John Dewey, Educational Reformer

Reflection is a humbling yet powerful tool that helps leaders improve their performance. But it is not easy, as it makes leaders look honestly at themselves, their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require improvement. When reflecting, a leader considers an experience and tries to understand it. This reflection often leads to insights, learning, and ideas to test with future experiences.?

Research shows that a regular practice of reflection increases a leader's capacity to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social skills, and learning agility. Rolfe et al.'s (2001) reflective model is probably one of the simplest reflective models because it centers around asking three simple questions: What? So what? Now what? This practical approach provides a framework to assess experience, make meaning of the experience, and decide what the experience means for future action. Below are some example questions for you to use to customize your reflection process:

What?

• What was the opportunity or challenge?
• What happened?
• What did I notice (five senses)?

So What?

• So what worked or did not?
• So what was confirmed?
• So what do I still not know?

Now What?

• Now what actions will I do differently or the same next time?
• Now what is the best way for me to move forward from this experience?
• Now what are my goals moving forward?

CONCLUSION

Now more than ever, organizations are relying on their leaders to make the necessary adjustments to meet new challenges. Agility is not just another leadership tool it is a leadership superpower. Leaders must recognize that they are often the last person to know when their behaviors and actions are causing issues that negatively impact their team's motivation and performance. The Applied Learning Cycle provides a roadmap for how leaders can continually adapt, grow, and evolve.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President and Founder of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring their best leadership selves to their most challenging situations. He is the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life . You can also follow Tony on?Forbes ?to see his latest articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others.