Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2024 - 17

UPSKILLING
LEADING WITH AGILITY
BY STEVE DION
Have you ever caught one of those
annual dog shows hosted by your local
kennel club? If not, you are missing
out on a super fun, family-friendly
outing. The highlight for me is watching
the agility demonstrations. With an
abundance of eagerness and joy and
a sprinkling of occasional confusion,
purebreds and mutts alike weave
their way through poles, dash through
tunnels, leap through hoops and over
hurdles and balance on seesaws to
reach the finish line as quickly as
possible. The giggling, enthusiastic
crowd cheers them all on, dogs big and
small, as they deftly (or maybe not so
deftly) navigate through each obstacle,
their handlers cueing each move with
gestures and commands and offering
a hearty belly rub and yummy treat
at the end.
For leaders, the workplace often
presents a similar proverbial obstacle
course, requiring all manner of weaving
and dashing and navigating for leaders
to stay on top of their responsibilities
and achieve the results expected of
them. However, the dogs have several
advantages - knowing and practicing
each obstacle before the contest, a
loving handler to keep them on track
and an audience to cheer them on.
Leaders? Not so much.
Jim Highsmith, one of the creators
of the Agile software development
methodology,
has characterized
agility as " principally about mindset,
not practices. " Mindset describes
the personal attitudes, beliefs and
expectations that fundamentally shape
who we are and what we do. The
cognitive model of human behavior
demonstrates how our thoughts become
feelings, which become our actions, and
those actions yield some sort of outcome.
For leaders, mindset is at the foundation
of how they see, interpret and respond
to situations in the workplace. As noted
a McKinsey white paper, " Making
the leader's mind-set the subject of
conscious scrutiny is indispensable to all
leadership effectiveness. "
Mindset is key to agility.
HOW DOES MINDSET
IMPACT AGILITY?
Agility in the workplace is about
finding a path through challenges and
obstacles that can be new, ambiguous,
unanticipated or changeable in order
to achieve desired results. Leaders
demonstrate agility all the time, in big
and small ways. In practice, it takes the
shape of a host of standard leadership
skills, such as managing conflict and
change,
communication
and critical
thinking, among others. For that reason,
some researchers have dubbed agility
a " meta-competency " because it
requires the application of varied skills
simultaneously and with intention. This
is where mindset comes in.
Indeed, the relationship between
mindset and agility was a recurring theme
in our review of thought leadership on
the topic. For an agile leader, managing
mindset is about cultivating an approach
to workplace challenges that enables a
response that is thoughtful and rational,
and conducive to a positive outcome.
Unlike the energetic, high-spirited pups
dashing madly toward their reward at
the end of the course, agile leaders are
TRAINING INDUSTRY MAGAZINE - SUMMER 2024 I WWW.TRAININGINDUSTRY.COM/MAGAZINE
best served by a mindset that supports a
measured, deliberate way forward.
MINDSET AND AGILITY AS
A PROCESS
Today's business environment is marked
by uncertainty, tumult and constant
change. The best-laid plans don't always
go as we expect or want them to go.
The habits and practices that once got
results may no longer apply; the need
to create, innovate and reinvent is as
constant as it is stressful.
As researchers Bill Joiner and Stephen
Josephs note in their book, " Leadership
Agility, " " Our economy demands new
personal capacities as well as new
leadership competencies. " As they
navigate this reality, the clients we work
with consistently name agility - which
Joiner and Josephs call a " master
competency " - as a skill they seek to
fortify among their leadership ranks.
As part of our efforts to help leaders
develop this critical competency, we
developed a model to represent how
leadership agility works (see Figure 1).
The model outlines agility as a circular
process, with mindset at its center.
The emphasis is not on the details of
a leader's response to a challenge or
situation; instead, it's everything that
leads up to the response (informed
by mindset) that is most critical to the
process. This practical, action-oriented
approach, based on our analysis of the
work of leadership agility researchers
and practitioners, points to four
key steps.
17

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/leading-agile-transformation-the-new-capabilities-leaders-need-to-build-21st-century-organizations https://trainingindustry.com/wiki/content-development/agile-learning-design/ https://trainingindustry.com/wiki/content-development/agile-learning-design/ https://www.trainingindustry.com/magazine

Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2024

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