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The Agile Leader: Tips to Build Agility
- 1. Hi! I’m Coni Judge, Ph.D. coni.eden@gmail.com conijudge.com • Executive Coach & Thinking Partner – Work with senior leaders – mostly introverted women – to communicate more effectively and project themselves confidently to achieve their personal and professional goals. • Internal Communications & Change Consultant – Work with big companies going through change to engage and motivate employees, drive desired behavior and achieve performance objectives. • Speaker and Author of self-help/business books on Self- Esteem, Executive Presence for Women, and building positive company cultures
- 2. Building Leader Agility CONI JUDGE, PH.D.
- 3. Objectives: 1. Understand the importance of leadership agility. 2. Understand latest research on the components of leadership agility. 3. Identify actions to take in order to increase our agility when leading change.
- 4. Leadership Agility “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.” - Bill Gates Leader Agility The ability to think and move quickly and easily in complex and rapidly changing conditions The other Agile
- 5. What Are Your Experiences with Leadership Agility? Think of your experiences leading change. What is an example of a time you needed to demonstrate agility? • What was easy? • What was difficult? • What would you do differently next time?
- 6. Enabling Change & Learning in Senior Leaders DisruptiveExperiences • Success/Failure • New Role • New Context • Challenges from others • Life events BarrierstoLearning • Excessive Conviction • Fear of Vulnerability • Defensiveness EnablersforChange • Engaging in Dialogue • Developing a Narrative • Leader Coaching How can you overcome barriers to growth and learn from disruptive experiences?
- 7. Components of Organizational Agility Being truly agile requires speed, adaptiveness and areas of stability Agile Cultures are: • Customer Centric • Empowered • Open to new practices • Asset focused • Growth orientated • Positive reinforcement Or ++ ++ Innovative, adaptive and energetic BUT Chaotic Well run AND Innovative, adaptive and energetic At Risk Well run BUT Bureaucratic, unable to change quickly Stabilizing backbone Stabilizing structures, processes & people Velocity & Adaptiveness 0
- 8. Agile Organization vs. Agile Leadership Capabilities Leader Speed Leader Adaptiveness Leader Capabilities Leaders Trust An organization can only be as fast, adaptive, and stable as its leaders. Truly agile organizations are driven by leader behavior and role modelling.
- 9. Focusing to Increase Your Leadership Agility Leadership Speed Leadership Adaptiveness Leadership Strong Core Capabilities Leadership Trust How quickly and accurately are you able to make decisions? How quickly are you mastering new technologies? What are you doing to increase your own personal ability to change more quickly? How comfortable & skilled are you at rapidly developing & testing new leadership skills? How skilled and comfortable are you with rapidly developing & testing new business practices? How easily do you integrate new practices into your work? What core leadership skills might you need to strengthen? • Creating a clear vision • Learning new practices & technology in your business area • Expanding your internal or external network • Emotional control during high intensity activities How well do you establish, expand, and restore trust with customers, partners, and co- workers? Are you someone that others trust? Do you trust yourself?
- 10. Strategies for Increasing Leadership Agility? • Spend time with people who bring a different perspective and way of thinking • Adopt a new approach in your owrk • Practice increasing speed by setting yourself speed-goal ‘sprints’ and tracking progress • Recruit a mentor who is younger to teach you a new technology or methodology • Attend an online workshop • Assemble a ‘Board of Advisors’ to help you What’s your plan to increase agility? 1. Set a goal and a timeline. 2. Gather ideas to help you improve. 3. Identify people to help. 4. Identify realistic sub goals. 5. Get feedback.
- 11. Who Has Supported You? How Can You Support Others?
- 12. Color belongs to our being. Maybe each one of us has his own. – Le Corbusier
Editor's Notes
- Explain: The session on Agility will have three areas of focus – and at the end of the session, you should be able to: Understand the importance of leadership agility Gain knowledge about latest research on the components of leadership agility And be able to take actions to increase our ability to use agility when leading change at Shell. We’ll start off by learning about what leadership agility means.
- Explain: Word Agility is around since the nineties…. Key for successful leaders is learning agility - constant adaption, short response time, One of the skills of great change leaders is agility. The ability to think and move quickly and easily in complex and rapidly changing conditions How you as a leader can move quickly? Can you easily navigate some complex waters and a lot of that has to do with having a growth mindset, seeking more information, looking to connect with other leaders and expand your network, because environments and changes are often quite complex, so the more we are connecting with others and growing the easier it will be for us. One example will be that every 2 days we generate today as much information as we have in recorded history up to the year 2003. our world is now increasingly complex with lot of information in it and it is increasingly changing, because we have new technology and new information every day, so our ability to be agile as leaders and agile as an organization is very crucial. (Co-host and speaker to share personal reflections and /or business related information) Agility has been around for a long time now. Sine the 90s we are talking about leaders and their ability to be a great leader and the need to be flexible and adapt quickly to new situations, but also the ability to learn and grow. We are talking about that more and more today also from a perspective of the need of an agile organization. But to get to a point where our organization is agile we do need to work on leadership agility as well. We will deep dive into that in a moment. The other “Agile” with capital A Officially Agile was born in 2001 from Agile Manifesto to improve productivity in software development, but it’s now expanding into other areas (f.ex. Marketing). Any project team that follows the values of 12 Agile principles can be considered ‘agile’. In a nutshell Agile is a time-focused, iterative philosophy that allows to build a product step-by-step (incrementally), delivering it by smaller pieces. One of its main benefits is the ability to adapt and change at any step (depending on feedback, market conditions, corporate obstacles, etc.) and to supply only relevant products to the market.
- Explain: What's your experience with agility? How do you understand agility? What does it mean to you? How do you perceive it? (speaker to hear answer of a couple of participants – do not correct or change definitions) What is an example of a time when you had to demonstrate agility, here at Shell or otherwise? When did you have to be more flexible than normal? How easy was it for you? Co-host to volunteer to answer this question, if no one else is willing to speak up or as a starter. Then give a couple minutes to discuss responses.
- Example from Co-host Explain: Like mentioned before agility can be of course seen in personal matters – in terms of agile leadership but also in terms of an agile organization. For An organization to be truly agile has a number of components, many driven by how leaders act. Let’s take a look at some of the components… If an organisation is agile, leaders need to be agile. Becoming a more agile organization, to be able to more quickly respond to change, is critical for organizations today. A research group, recently conducted a new study to define agility in the new business environment and to find out what differentiates the truly agile from those at risk. Here are some findings: Speed, or velocity, is an important factor (how fast can you move in an complex environment and changing environment? And as an organization have you set up your systems and processes so that you can move quickly? How quickly can you access information that will help you make active decisions quickly?) So is adaptiveness – the ability to be flexible (How adaptive or flexible are you? If you have a decision to make and you have to make it quickly, you need to have reliable data but you also might need to do some ransom scenarios and do some risk mitigation, identify potential risks and mitigate the risk for decisions that you want to make? So adaptiveness would be the ability to look at things from multiple perspectives and maybe to some scenario planning and do that rather quickly) Perhaps the most surprising factor in Agility that is also requires that some aspects of the business stay stable – in other words, there must be stabilizing structure, processes, and people (If you are going to move with speed and flexibility you also have to have some aspects that remain stable in your core while you are changing other things in the organization. Not everything can change at once. Over time you need to update processes and tools and your skills and your workforce, but you can not change everything at once. If you would try to change everything at once you would not be able to move quickly. Too many things will be in flight. That doesn’t mean that you don’t ever change people, processes, or structures. It means that you can’t change all of that at once – and keep a stable core. Like with a motorcycle, this one you see can reach up to 350 mph, but please note the stable wheeling. The core is stable. (co-host & speaker can change picture/ example) Polarity management: be both stable and act with velocity Ask co-host to make the bridge to the business - make it positive Our brains like certainty and stability: so the 'so what' for leaders is: articulate what remains the same, where the stability is coming from, organisation structures staying the same Example: fail fast is a key concept in the Technology strategy & new organization. How do you manage the shape of the technology funnel (from D0 ideation/discovery to D4 deployment/replication. Work on 5 prototypes and know that only 1 will make it, or none at all, but all 5 together lead to new insights
- Explain: In order for an organization to be adaptable or flexible, you have to have that in your leaders too. For an organization to be like that, your leaders need to be like that. Remember: An organization can only be as fast, adaptive, and stable as it’s leaders. When you think of those components of agility: The speed with which you personally as a leader act and move forward, your personal speed. How adaptive or flexible are you, especially during times of change? What are leadership capabilities that you have that are stable and core capabilities? You can still learning and growing also in those areas but the thing that you are keeping stable right now are the things that are your strengths. When you are really strength focus you are keeping your strengths stable. And also what is the component of trust? Does your team trust you? Are you good at building trust? If trust have been broken in some parts of the organization are you as leaders are able to repair that trust? Can you establish trust? Can you maintain trust? These are really the 4 core components when we think about us as leaders. The organization is one element, but we and our behaviors and attitudes are building that organization. These are the components we will deep dive into on the next couple of slides.
- Explain: Let’s look at each of the four capabilities that leaders must develop to be agile, and to lead truly agile organizations. (give people a couple of minutes to read trough the questions) Speed – (review the questions – ask people to add more questions to each category) Adaptiveness – this includes your personal ability to adapt and to adopt new practices, also includes design thinking concepts of test fast, fail, learn, test again Let’s look at some of the core fundamentals of leadership: how strong is your core? In what areas do you need to build your core, fundamental leadership skills? Here are some ideas – we always need to continue to work on our fundamental skills. Just like great athletes continue to focus on their fundamental skills – they drill and practice on fundamentals every day – so must we. There are new techniques, new ways that we may need to incorporate into our routines to keep the fundamentals strong. Stable core capabilities: your own values & beliefs on care for people Lastly, we need to look at the element of trust. There are several aspects of trust that are important The ability to build trust To expand trust To recover trust And we need to think about building, expanding, recovering trust with multiple stakeholder How do you know if you are someone that others trust? Do you trust yourself? If not, what do you need to do….so that you can trust yourself?
- Explain: What can we actually do to increase our change agility? These involve doing things faster or in a different way, or trying something new entirely. (speaker to focus on the elements on the slide) Ask somebody from the group to come up with other ideas to improve agility and discuss them – Co-host can start. Another way of thinking about this is: how do we learn to increase our perspective and spend time with people who make us feel uncomfortable so we can see things from multiple perspectives? Now it sounds simple – becoming more agile- but what does becoming more agile really mean? It means getting comfortable with uncertainty. It means jumping ahead even though you might not have all of the data yet. Just trying out and course correcting as you go. It means not being afraid of failing and committing to giving it a shot.