The focus of our recent Business Growth Network (BGN) event was agile leadership and what exactly this means for individuals and businesses as a whole.
According to the simplest definition, the word “agile” means having the ability to move quickly and easily and being able to think and understand quickly.
Given the huge number of publications on the concept, it may seem like it is just another buzzword in today’s world of business. However, this is not the case when it comes to agile leadership. In its recent report, the World Economic Forum published a list of top skills required to be successful as leaders in 2020, many of them related to being more agile.
The Agile Business Consortium (the UK based not-for-profit body) released their first white paper on the topic in late 2017. To this day, this document remains to be an extremely relevant guide on how to be agile as a business leader. According to it, the keys to agile leadership lie in the concepts of Communication, Commitment and Collaboration. Much of our discussion during the BGN centred around these three words and in particular, the following nine principles:
Communication
- Actions speak louder than words
- Improved quality of thinking leads to improved outcomes
- Organisations improve through effective feedback
Commitment
- People require meaning and purpose to make work fulfilling
- Emotion is a foundation to enhanced creativity and innovation
- Leadership lives everywhere in the organisation
Collaboration
- Leaders devolve appropriate power and authority
- Collaborative communities achieve more than individuals
- Great ideas can come from anywhere in the organisation
Please contact your Brentnalls WA team member, if you need help in developing agile leadership capability in your business.
