Few days back while I was playing with my granddaughter something she said striked me. She said, “you win or you learn.” This re-emphasized an old thought.
Often as adults we forget this simple thing. We get stuck in the idea of winning in the moment instead of moving on and learning new things. As leaders, one of the most important qualities we need to nurture is leadership agility.
The ability to make smart and effective decisions in a rapidly changing world is indeed a skill that needs to be fuelled. Agility is a skill that helps the leaders and organizations to handle the situation well. With an uncertain and complex market ahead, it is necessary to fuel agility in leadership and organizations.
Enhancing leadership agility in the workplace is not a difficult undertaking. Leaders can experiment and practise new initiatives which will help the employees in the longer run. With the changing customer needs agility has become more essential in organizations.
This made me pen down a few thoughts on agility today.
Elements to fuel agility in leadership
Agile leaders accept that they and their organizations need to adapt again and again to constantly changing conditions. They anticipate emerging threats and opportunities by continually scanning their organization’s environment for new developments. They view the challenges they face with fresh eyes and a willingness to rethink past assumptions.
Transform organizations into learning institutions
Our mindsets are too rigid. Therefore to make it flexible we should approach it with patience. Every challenge contains the possibility for learning if approached with intentionality. Taking even a moment to pause and consider what you might learn from a situation reinforces your intention and enhances you to new insights that might present themselves.
Nurture creative freedom
Leaders shouldn’t hesitate to give creative freedom. They should understand that creativity leads to innovation. When leaders give creative freedom a deep sense of purpose is instilled in the employees.
This gives them the opportunity to examine situations from multiple perspectives and to “connect the dots” between seemingly disparate issues which contributes in generating novel strategic insights. As a result, their visions for the future become innovative, purposeful, and compelling.
Invite and appreciate feedback
Awareness is the key to self improvement. Feedback is one of the most effective and best fodder to improve and learn. Development happens when there is awareness of what works and what doesn’t. Therefore appreciate and invite the culture of feedback-taking/giving for the improvement in overall performance of yours as well your team.
Empower employees
Of lately employees are sick of being robots in the hands of their employers. They want to be recognized for their human efforts. Give the employees their share of respect and appreciation.
Let them evolve by aligning their purpose with that of the organization. Of other things flexible hours of work and self management are two key factors in empowering employee engagement.
Agility in leadership pushes a leader to be a catalyst as well as a co-creator. With the growing uncertainty in the world, leaders need to cut down the weeds of misconceptions about failures and treat them as learnings to unleash creativity and agility.
