Agility is a Necessity for Effective Leadership | Agile Leadership Journey

Katharine is a research team manager in a large organization supporting dozens of experimental specialties that included technology, robotics, materials, manufacturing, and more. Their clients and their clients’ needs were as diverse and specialized as the researchers partnering with them. The complexity of project and people management inundated Katherine as she increasingly felt the limitations of her focus and control. However, this hadn’t always been the case.

When Katharine started out as the manager of this team many years earlier, it was much smaller and more focused on fewer specialties. It was due to her team’s success in delivering results to their clients that created a positive feedback loop which grew the number and diversity of projects and budget to support them. While it was a “good” problem to have, it began to erode their team culture and test her leadership.

Likely you are seeing some parallels in Katharine’s story. Virtually every leader across all industries is feeling the pains of increasing complexity and the pace of change impacting their ability to deliver. It’s akin to driving on a country road, early in the morning, as a dense fog emerges along our path. While we, our vehicle, and our goal remain unchanged, the landscape around us changes dramatically and quickly. What was clear is now veiled. What were easy directional decisions now become obfuscated in uncertainty of when, if and where to turn. Thus, we slow down, hesitate, and try to take control over the situation. However, stopping is not an option.

For Katharine, the fog was multiple overlapping projects, schedules and researchers stretched across them to their breaking point. Her attempts to control the situation felt pointless. Fixing one project, schedule or researcher’s issue exposed new impacts and issues. Helping one area negatively affected another. It was like her navigation system continuously displayed a “rerouting” sign.

One might perceive Katharine as being “agile” in this situation. She is situationally adapting to the changing project, schedule and resource landscape. However, to Katharine, it felt more like herding cats and she perceived the situation to be deteriorating. If this is what “agile” means, she didn’t want anything to do with it.

Effective agility, however, involves more than situational adaptivity. It depends upon real-time awareness. While situational agility enables us to “pivot on a dime”, real-time awareness provides the insight on whether, when and how to pivot. Real-time awareness is akin to defogging our windows, allowing us a better view of our landscape and enabling us to evaluate our options.

Katharine needed more real-time awareness. She needed to defog her windows and see a bigger and better picture of her landscape in order for her situational adaptiveness to be more effectively applied. She accomplished this by letting go of her hero mindset that she had to solve this problem on her own. She opened her car door to let her team in to help. 

Effective agility is not a solo activity. The key to agility is that it is a team sport. The complexity and speed of our landscape can easily overwhelm any single person. However, teams with diverse experiences and perspectives have a better chance at navigating the foggy and changing terrain.

As Katharine let go of her hero mindset and opened up the organizational process challenges to her team, she not only provided a path to solve them, she provided her people agency to shape a culture they wanted to be a part of. She was working with them, not for or directing to them.

With her team, Katharine brainstormed and identified a few hypotheses to experiment on. As researchers, creating hypotheses and experimenting to gather data to make informed decisions came naturally. All they needed to do was redirect their focus to the organization and their process of managing projects, schedules, budgets and people.

This leads us to our last, and most important, definition of agile: Agile is an empirical approach. As opposed to a defined approach where one can predict outcomes based on a set of inputs, an empirical approach leverages experiments to learn what works (and what doesn’t). So while a defined approach may be effective for simple or somewhat complicated problems, an empirical approach is required for complex problems, like Katharine’s.

At this point in this post, you might like to learn the solutions that Katharine and her team came up with. It is natural for us to want solutions. However, that eludes the point of this article — complex problems are not solved by copying and pasting solutions that others have found. Rather, it is the process of identifying, hypothesizing, experimenting and solving your own problems using the recipe of agility. The solutions that Katharine and her team found are less important than how they approached and discovered them. And even though not all of their solutions were winners, the learning they received through the process was a winning strategy for their success as an organization.

Let’s summarize what we learned about agility as a necessity for leadership. 

• Agility is situational adaptiveness. Develop a capacity to adapt situationally to your changing landscape. Expecting what has worked previously to work today is a fool’s gamble.
• Agility is real-time awareness. Real-time awareness helps us know whether, when and how to adapt. Take a step back from your situation and invite others to look at the situation to gain differing perspectives and to expose more options.
• Agility is a team sport. Let go of your hero mindset to let others in to help solve the problem together. Bringing others in is not a sign of leadership weakness, but rather a sign of strength that builds trust, empowers others, and creates better outcomes.
• Agility is an empirical approach. Let go of your illusion of control and reliance that plans hold through time. While a planning process remains a valuable team exercise, the plans are mere starting points that will change over time.