Leadership is setting the vision and direction, while motivating and fully utilizing all resources at your disposal to make that vision a reality. The most important leadership skill to have is the ability to flex in whatever way is required by the situation you find yourself in.
This has been termed “Leadership Agility”. It’s more than just flexibility. It’s proactive, goal-oriented flexibility with a purpose. And it’s more important than ever due to two key factors:
- Rapidly increasing pace of change – not only is everything changing rapidly, the PACE at which it’s changing is increasing. Why? The huge advances in technology and globalization, which will only continue to increase.
- Rapidly increasing amounts of ambiguity and uncertainty – our brains love novelty, but hate uncertainty. Novelty intrigues us, but uncertainty by definition creates stress. Why? Stress is caused by anything to which an organism needs to adapt. Even when we know what’s changing, we experience stress. Not to know what’s coming turns the heat up exponentially!
A company, Changewise, has developed an assessment which helps leaders become clear on their level of agility and the levers they can work on to become more agile. It’s designed for leaders facing a rapidly changing environment with a great deal of uncertainty…..which pretty much applies to what EVERY leader is facing today. In their model, a great leader is proficient in 4 key areas: stakeholder agility, self – management agility, creative agility and context setting agility. Our next series of articles will explore each one in turn.
Enerpace is certified in Leadership Agility and the LA360 instrument. You can find out more about this tool, and all others we offer here: http://enerpace.com/assessments/ Contact us at 630-832-4399 to receive more information or a sample report.
