How to improve leadership agility?

Key Takeaways:

• Strategic agility allows leaders to toggle between dynamic, changing markets and long-term strategies. Indeed, in the Nordics, for instance, a full 68% of the companies optimize for cost efficiency, which is attestation enough to needing agile leadership. (Deloitte Business Agility Survey 2024)
• Leadership agility can be improved through adaptability, emotional intelligence, continuous learning, coaching, managing change, and fostering environments that encourage innovation and collaboration.
• Strategic thinking, setting measurable goals, and building resilience help leaders navigate rapid changes and lead effectively in dynamic environments.
• Leadership agility is highly critical in the process of organizational transformation, integration across functions, and governance restructuring.
• Roche Serbia will act as an example of leadership agility by top-down and bottom-up approaches, psychological safety, continuous learning, and data-driven feedback. (Agile Business Conference 2024)

1- What is strategic agility in leadership?

Strategic agility in leadership is the ability of a leader towards swift change in long-term strategies as the market dynamics, customer demands, and other disruptions fluctuate.

Let's take a closer look at the latest Deloitte Business Agility Survey 2024; a pulse check of Business Agility in the Nordics, conducted in May 2024. We will use this survey to delve into precisely what the term 'strategic agility' in leadership means and why it is so crucial for organizations today.

This is further underlined in the Deloitte survey, where in the Nordics, 68% of companies optimize for cost efficiency. For perspective, leaders must be adaptive and responsive to these emerging challenges. By strategic agility, this means a leader can make adjustments in not only the short term toward operational imperatives but can also align decisions within the longer-term view of the organization on matters concerning its resilience and sustainability.

Why Do We Need Strategic Agility?

In today's unpredictable, fast-moving market, strategic agility is very important. The survey shows that the majority of businesses in the Nordics face continuous disruption: economic uncertainty and inflation make resilience through agility an imperative.

Where an organization can embrace agility, it copes with operational management and responds to these challenges intelligently. As observed in this report, 57% of organizations have not clearly articulated the "why" for their shift in an agile way of working, undermining their ability to reap benefits from strategic agility. Conversely, clear goals can be crystallized by leaders in strategic agility to ensure the organization stays on course in achieving objectives during uncertain times.

Where Do We Need Strategic Agility?

1. Organizational Transformation: 
   Strategic agility is the ability one requires in particular when transformation is gripping one's organization. Most of the companies either simply implement agile processes or are stuck at how to focus on real outcomes instead of mere processes. It is here that leaders need to step in and guide this shift, ensuring that this transformation leads to positive, tangible changes with improved alignment towards the company's long-term vision.
2. Cross-functional Integration: 
   With agile practices proliferating from IT to other departments, leadership should provide alignment across the entire organization. It is strategic agility that knits these teams together, ensuring everyone is working for the same vision and that agile practices are consistent throughout all areas of the business.
3. Governance and Control: 
   Outdated models of governance can prevent agile practices from being fully successful. Leaders must rework the governance structures to accommodate agile ways of working by installing frameworks that allow teams the flexibility and responsiveness connected with control of strategic direction, combined with rapid time-to-market.

We talked about the importance, we talked about the need; but how do we enhance leadership agility?

2- How do you grow an agile mindset?

Building an agile mindset requires a mix of attitudes, practices, and continuous learning. Here's how you can nurture an agile mindset, constructed from information collated in the articles.

• Embrace Adaptability: Agile altogether marries flexibility and openness to change. It requires leadership and teams to be ready, willing, and able to change strategies and operations to meet the dynamics in which they find themselves. Let them observe change as an opportunity, not as a problem; hence, предусмотреть a culture that allows experimenting and receiving feedback as part of the going routine.
• Foster Continuous Learning: Agile is alive only when it learns and improves. Leaders and teams must create a focus on skill acquisition, experimentation coupled with learning, and process adjustments. Regular retrospectives and feedback are necessary for finding places to improve.

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• Foster collaboration and transparency: Let the departments communicate with one another. With open lines in the team, it means the departments build confidence in one another. This brings leadership closer in trust to teams in solving problems creatively and expeditiously.
• Letting Innovation and Risk-Taking Flourish: Let innovation and calculated risk-taking be practiced among the employees in full safety. Give them space for creative problem-solving without the fear of failure; hence, this will drive in agile thinking and organizational growth.
• Empower self-organizing teams: The agile mindset develops more when teams are empowered to take their own decisions. Granting more autonomy and less bureaucratic decision-making motivates the teams to act faster and search for solutions themselves.

Die Anpassungsfähigkeit an diese wenigen, klar erkennbaren Elemente bestätigt die agile Denkweise: Anpassungsfähigkeit, Lernen, Zusammenarbeit, Innovation und die Stärkung der Menschen. Diese Prinzipien sind entscheidend für eine agile Denkweise, unabhängig von der Organisation.

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3- How do you develop leadership agility?

The successful leaders in the year 2024 will be the ones who can demonstrate traits of adaptability, emotional intelligence, coaching, change management, and strategic thinking. These competencies, rooted in agile leadership principles, can be developed through a blend of formal training, real-time feedback, and practice. Leaders who embody these traits effectively step into agile leadership roles, guiding their teams through continuous learning and adaptation to evolving challenges.

According to the LEADx Leadership Development Benchmark Report, measuring leadership impact is of fast-growing interest. It means that the leaders should give equal attention to proving the value of development through metrics transparently and results-oriented strategies.

Below is a detailed response on the central competencies that will be needed in leadership for 2024, and how to develop them.

Adaptability and Agility

• Why it's important: The leaders of 2024 will need to be agile, adapting quickly to rapid changes wrought by technology, marketplace demands, or changes in the workplace. Agility-considering hybrid models for work and technological changes like AI-is no longer optional. 
• How to develop it: As pointed out in the LEADx report, leaders must "work smarter, not harder." That means building an environment of continuous learning and agility in decision-making. Keep failure in perspective as a part of learning, with the ability to pivot when the approach is wrong. Management development programs should focus on adaptive strategies, along with resiliency-building.

Emotional Intelligence - EQ

• Why it's important: Emotional Intelligence remains critical-particularly-with most companies still dealing with complex multi-generational and diverse teams. The ability to manage one's emotions, to communicate effectively, and to show empathy towards employees creates more engagement and better productivity. The report by LEADx underlines that 68% of the leadership development programs had emotional intelligence as the main focus of the training.
• How to develop it: It can be developed in leaders through exercises for self-awareness, feedback mechanisms, and training programs teaching empathy, active listening, and managing relationships. Investment in the EQ of leaders ensures that they can lead cumbersome conversations and situations smoothly.

Coaching and Mentorship

• Why it's important: Coaching skills will be the number one in-demand leadership talent in 2024, according to the LEADx report. Managers are player-coaches, having to balance their own deliverables with guiding their teams; hence, coaching skills are an important ingredient in team engagement and team performance.
• How to develop it: The companies should provide formalized coaching programs in which the leaders may learn how to ask probing questions, give effective feedback, and offer career development support for their followers. Companies are more and more implementing AI-powered nudges that support leadership coaching, according to the LEADx report.

Manage Changes

• Why it's important: One of the most significant challenges leaders face in 2024 is leading through change. Whether it's economic uncertainty or technological disruption, knowing how to manage change effectively is what will continue to help a leader maintain productivity and morale.
• How to develop it: The training of leaders in the field of strategic communication, stakeholder engagement, and cross-functional collaboration is mandatory. Equally critical will be the leadership development programs that help leaders build resilience themselves while guiding their teams through transitions with a minimum of stress and disruption.

Focus of Measurement and Impact

• Why it matters: Make sure the LEADx report emphasizes why it's so key to demonstrate the ROI on leadership development. As budgets shrink, leadership development needs to prove its value with quantifiable results in employee engagement, retention, and performance.
• How to build: The habit of setting crystal clear, quantifiable objectives, and tracking the results frequently is what leaders should embrace. The KPIs every organization needs to start adopting simply include behavior change and business outcome. Leadership training includes how a framework for setting KPIs, measuring success, and changing strategies based upon the results.

Strategic Thinking

• Why it's important: This is one of the key skills of a strategic thinker in 2024. The leaders need to have the ability to deal with a complex business world, see into the future, and make long-term decisions to drive an organization forward.
• How to develop it: Mentorship and leadership classes focused on big-picture thinking can nurture strategic thinking through scenario-planning exercises. Let leaders step out of the details of operations and work towards big-picture thinking.

4- What is an example of leadership agility?

One of the Best Agile Leadership Examples: Roche

Probably one of the best agile leadership examples in transformation presented at Agile Business Conference 2024 is Roche Serbia. Through psychological safety and engagement, the leadership of Roche Serbia demonstrates professional agile leadership, where they not only believe in and practice agile values and principles but also effectively translate them into organizational growth.

Till then, Roche Serbia had been a very stable organization, doing extremely well. But the leadership still felt there was something more to do to get away from traditional management in the drastic and complicated environment of healthcare.

Currently, serving as the Agile Coach at Roche Serbia, I lead our Enabling Team in embracing an agile mindset, embodying our operating principles through exemplary leadership, and championing the importance of strong, foundational knowledge in our domains.

- Jelena Savic / Roche Serbia

They were doing well but made this bold decision-to adopt the Agile principles-to stay relevant and also to be ahead of market shifts. It wasn't for poor performance, but to be more responsive toward customer needs in trying to improve patient outcomes. The leadership agility of Roche Serbia was not only to make bold decisions, but also how they implemented and sustained such a change. Here's how they did it:

1. Top-down and Bottom-up Approach: The leadership team themselves embraced agile before doing it more broadly in the organization. This top-down initiative was complemented by grass-roots enthusiasm on the part of employees, particularly those who joined what was called the Transformation Team-a diverse group of energetic change agents charged with sensing and aligning the expectations of employees and leadership alike. In involving people at every level, Roche ensured that the transformation would not be an edict handed down from above but a collaborative undertaking.
2. Creating Psychological Safety: Leaders who are invested in building psychological safety are aware that changes in roles and structure could feel very personal to employees. They continuously coach and mentor staff through transitioning into new roles, such as "enablers" rather than traditional managers. The focus on trust allowed employees to feel safe sharing their ideas and concerns, which improved collaboration and innovation across teams.
3. Investment in Continuous Learning: Roche Serbia established several platforms for education, feedback, and open conversations—both online and offline. They collaborated with external experts and consultants, which brought new views and helped to conduct agile practices even more efficiently. This continuous learning atmosphere unveiled new talent and allowed employees to plot their career paths, as depicted by team members taking on roles such as Scrum Masters, often from non-agile backgrounds of pharmacy.
4. The Agile Work Cycles and Collaboration: By applying agile practices, they worked in shorter iterative cycles of testing and adjusting their strategies as they went along. This afforded them the power to answer emerging customer needs and health demands very quickly. Moreover, Roche forged strong external collaborations with health professionals, government bodies, and other stakeholders to extend influence beyond the company.
5. Metrics and Feedback: The movement was measured on a standardized feedback measurement tool; trends were continuously mapped on psychological safety, employee engagement, and cross-team collaboration. Roche Serbia made data-driven adaptations in the journey. That fact facilitated sustained improvement both within internal metrics and in external patient outcomes.

This combination of leadership commitment, a secure and open environment, continuous learning, and adaptation based on data was key to an effective agile transformation that, at Roche Serbia, enabled growth in employee engagement and-most importantly-in patients affected. You can check their journey in detail in the Agile Business Conference 2024.