Today’s leaders are facing new kinds of challenges every day. Not only do they have to confront continuing economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability, but also they must navigate an increasingly complex global marketplace with a growing multi-generational workforce.
When the business landscapes changes, strategy that worked in the past will not work today, and only organisations that can adapt to changing business conditions will survive. Thus, the trend demands a leader with agility to lead the change.
So what exactly is agility? Why does it matter in building tomorrow’s leaders?
In terms of business, agility refers to the capability to anticipate and respond to any uncertainty in the market to one’s advantage. For example, if you can manage risk and respond to it more effectively than your competitor, then you could certainly reap the given benefits. It is essentially the ability to adapt to surprises, survive them, and flourish in the ever-changing present at all levels of a company.
Although agility isn’t a high-profile feature for many organisations, it is rapidly becoming clear that it is going to be a required attribute for future success.
At high levels, strategic planning for plausible future risks and obstacles will help a company build plans that will help it survive and bounce back from adversity. At the individual level, one needs the ability to use one’s experience and skills to avoid or survive setbacks, and to focus on a better future even if the present looks difficult. This is exactly why tomorrow’s leaders require agility to lead through the ever-changing present.
Principally, it is no surprise that “learning agility” is becoming critical in building effective leaders, especially when the world is changing at an ever-faster pace, with uncertainty and unfamiliarity increasingly common. For these reasons, we cannot hope to have previously experienced every situation we may face, so we must be able to extrapolate from different situations we have previously experienced, and draw new conclusions that can be readily applied.
Simply put, learning agility is about how one takes lessons from previous situations and applies them in relevant ways to new situations. The challenge, however, is that we tend to be sceptical about the unfamiliar and hesitant to seek out the unknown. So if applying learning across unrelated situations is a critical leadership skill, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and unfamiliar situations — at least to some extent.
Here, it should be noted that learning agility is the skill that helps a leader stay flexible, learn from mistakes, and be willing to face any unforeseen challenges. Surely it is a skill that cannot be developed alone; instead, it must be simultaneously groomed with emotional intelligence for a person to truly acquire the ability to recover from and capitalise on failure.
Having leaders with agility to lead change in your organisation is highly desirable, but it still might move at a slower pace compared with others as long as your people aren’t being encouraged to equip themselves with agility as well.
That’s why I must say that apart from embracing agility on your own, you as a leader need to work with your HR specialists to ensure that the human capital in the organisation has the skills and abilities to respond quickly to new developments. As well, your organisation must have the infrastructure and processes to mobilise this human capital into action as efficiently as possible. This way, you are guaranteed to stay relevant or even ahead of the market.
Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has been quoted as saying, “In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish.”
In other words, we all should realise that it is no longer about what size fish you are, but the motion of the ocean that will determine your position in the market. Firms that are quick to develop and execute an effective strategy, regardless of their size, have the opportunity to stand out from competitors that are slower to adapt.
The bottom line is, do you think your organisation has a sufficient number of leaders with agility to lead it through change and any uncertainties there might be in this near future? If your answer is no, then start building tomorrow’s leaders today!
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand's leading Organisation and People Development Consultancy. She can be reached by e-mail at arinya_t@apm.co.th or https://www.linkedin.com/pub/arinya-talerngsri/a/81a/53b
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