An Agile Leadership Journey

Agile leadership is not a new concept and did not merely emerge from the technology-centric Agile movement of the last 20 years. In fact, adaptive leadership can be traced back to the beginnings of human development with surges of progress and roadblock setbacks along the journey. As technology has created workflow efficiencies, agile leadership developed from a need to be more adaptable in more complex scenarios. While the Agile movement formed at the turn of the century, the roots of agile leadership go much deeper.

Organizational leadership models today can be traced back to about 13,000 years ago. Around this time, agriculture enabled larger, formerly nomadic populations to form stable cities. As city populations grew, hierarchical leadership structures emerged to manage them. Leadership divisions formed around functions, and the connection between leaders and members—along with their power and status—slowly pulled apart. Land boundaries connected cities to form states and royal families ruling class-based societies emerged through this period of time.

The foundations of modern management, often attributed to Frederick Taylor and his consequential paper on The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), can be traced back to these earlier leadership principles. Taylor was incredible for his time in improving system workflow, irrespective of human impact. While he routinely improved manufacturing workflow by many multiples and improved quality and repeatability at the same time, he looked upon the workforce as incompetent, unskilled and not of value to train beyond simple repetitive tasks. Leaders think, workers do; Not far from the viewpoint of monarchical leaders ruling over their subjects.

Following World War II, Japanese manufacturing was struggling with quality control of its products. In a chance meeting and speech given by Edward Deming on Statistical Product Quality, Toyota and Deming began a relationship that likely inspired one of the most significant leadership shifts in our lifetimes and held Toyota’s position on top of the auto industry for the rest of the century. At the time labeled The Toyota Way, and now known as Lean Manufacturing, Deming and Toyota not only shook up the manufacturing process but fundamentally challenged the foundational leadership principles that ruled royal families and Taylorism. Deming put the line worker in charge of both their process and quality control, thus shifting the power of control from the manager to the worker. They installed an andon cord that ran the length of the line that any worker could pull to stop the entire process. Any worker stopping the plant triggered a deep dive (five whys) into the root cause of the problem before restarting.

Other companies attempted to copy Toyota’s new leadership model with little success. This wasn’t because Toyota hid their approach as a competitive advantage. Indeed, they gave tours and provided many other manufacturers with their playbook. It was the limitations of the other manufacturers who failed to recognize that installing the Toyota “hardware” structure and processes was not enough. It further required a “software” upgrade to change the mindset of leadership. Other companies were either unable, unwilling, or simply didn’t understand the new leadership principles that made the new processes work.

However, concepts of adaptive leadership can be traced back to primitive times in human evolution. 2.5 million years ago, leaders and followers likely emerged through a reciprocity relationship that has been labeled service-for-prestige. Voluntary leader-follower relationships developed through the reciprocal exchange of demonstrated respect for valued services delivered (e.g. providing more food in exchange for hunting). Unlike the more hierarchical models, this reciprocal relationship had leaders more closely related to the work as direct service rather than overseeing others doing the work. Furthermore, the leaders more often emerged based on their experience rather than being instilled through lineage. Finally, these early leaders were more frequently challenged by their followers if they failed to provide services as opposed to later leaders who held the position regardless of results. In essence, followers had more status, relationship and autonomy with respect to their leader. Does this sound familiar? Essentially, Deming and the leadership models that followed are taking us back to our human roots rather than dramatically shifting away from them.

The reason this leader-follower relationship development is so critical is that for two millennia the human brain evolved to value this more dynamic, adaptive and reciprocal relationship. From our viewpoint in 2022, the past 13,000 years might feel like a very long time. However, from an evolutionary perspective, 13,000 years represents only 0.5% of the approximately 2.5 million years of human development! Our human desire for status, relationship and autonomy, along with the threat we feel when they are challenged or taken away, are deeply ingrained in all human DNA. The human brain codependency with status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness (SCARF) have been well documented through research by David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work and founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute.

Thus, we can see that through the lens of time, our last 13,000 years of leadership have been misguided. Businesses of today need to more closely resemble the nomadic nimbleness of our early human communities as compared to the stability and size of the later citystates. Larger organizations are finding that they are more adaptive and effective when operating as multiple smaller business units, each with the autonomy and relatedness to connect closely with their employees and customers. The leadership to drive these business units needs to be more connected, engaging, empowering, balanced, dynamic, and adaptive. 

Agile leadership is not new. More adaptive leadership models have been reentering the workforce since the 1940’s when Deming and Toyota radically altered the power dynamics between leaders and workers. And yet, we are a long way from 1940. Today, the needs of business, and the leaders who lead them, need to change yet again. In the 1940s, leaders were seeking to optimize how to build a quality car in the most efficient manner. In the 2020s, leaders are seeking to innovate new ideas and technologies faster than competitors amidst rapid change and complexity that was inconceivable less than a hundred years earlier. While lean manufacturing processes and automation are dominant across the globe, lean leadership is more rare.

Today, the ability to effectively lead in a VUCA world is necessary at all levels of an organization. This is true regardless of whether you are leading an organization, a team, a project, or influencing in other ways. Leaders have the capacity to grow through multiple developmental stages to improve their effectiveness—what Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs define as “leadership agility” in their book by the same name. As a leader develops agility, they increase their creativity to identify better outcomes, stakeholder engagement to co-create them, and the situational adaptiveness to achieve them. More agile leaders see more options, engage in more diverse dialogue, and make more informed decisions, resulting in the ability to take more effective actions and improve business agility. Leaders must combine real-time awareness with the openness and courage to situationally experiment on new approaches to everyday situations, thus developing new competencies. It not only depends on harnessing the leader’s strengths, but also in managing their emotional triggers and balancing dualities with no “right” answers. 

Furthermore, how leaders think and approach their work and their employees shapes their organizational culture. That’s because how leaders think impacts their work—from what they focus on to how they measure success, from who they hire to how they compensate employees, from the policies and structures they develop to how they engage with others. How leaders think shapes what they do, and what they do shapes the organizational culture, which supports or impedes business agility.

The Agile Leadership Journey™ approach to leadership development and shaping culture is based on the belief (and the research that supports it) that leaders have the capacity to grow through stages to improve their effectiveness, that leadership can be developed, and that everyone, regardless of role or title, can demonstrate more effective leadership. We take the approach that leadership and culture have a symbiotic relationship—in other words, leadership shapes culture and culture shapes leadership. Leaders can develop the capacity to deliberately shape organizational culture to improve business agility, health, and performance. Effective leadership is a journey, not a destination.