Agility Is Now the Most Important Leadership Trait
Leadership is at a pivot point:
Agility is arguably now the most important leadership trait.
Leadership agility now transcends all other traits, because all others must be agile in how they are performed. Here’s why:
Just look at the changes that came at us over the past five years: a pandemic, work from home, supply chain disruptions, the crypto craze, instability in Europe, and the emergence of powerful LLM AI. And there is no sign of that pace abating: rapid disruptive change is the new normal.
By “agility”, what do you mean?
When we say “agility”, we mean true agility, as the dictionary defines it: “Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character” (Webster). We are not talking about “Agile” methods in the context of software teams.
We mean that business leaders need to be able to pivot quickly, but effectively, in every way.
Also, as we will see, agility is needed first and foremost at the top, but is also needed throughout every level of the organization.
The entire corporate finance concept of planning and executing a change is obsolete
The challenge is that to pivot quickly in today’s complex product world, a leader cannot give orders for everyone to pivot. That won’t work. Today’s issues are too interwoven; they are too multi-faceted; they are too uncertain; and the complexity of today’s products means that many product development issues can only be discovered in the course of development.
The entire corporate finance concept of planning a change, executing it, and then assuming a new status quo is obsolete.
That’s what is different today. We can no longer make a plan and sit back as it executes, because today, it is likely that things will change before execution has completed.
Some Evidence
We examined five highly agile companies: SpaceX, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, and Google. These are very different companies, and each has demonstrated extreme agility at scale. What we found was:
There were no common standard practices or methods.
None of these companies emphasize “Agile” as a paradigm for how to do things.
There were common behavioral traits of their leaders, and those traits permeated the company as cultural norms.
Among the five companies, the one that is most known for its agility is SpaceX. Yet at SpaceX, according to a senior software manager, “Spacex also has no Agile people or PMs…Also we don’t use the word Agile.”
It is ironic that one of the most agile companies in the world does not even acknowledge “Agile methods”.
Instead, what we found to be common among the five highly agile companies that we studied was a common set of leader behaviors: twelve in fact. Four of these were:
Cultural expectation that people will solve problems – not “complete tasks”.
Cultural expectation that people will not wait.
Cultural expectation that people will go out of their lane.
Cultural expectation that people will prudently try things before being completely sure it will work.
Instead of relying on processes to make them agile and effective, these companies rely on behavioral norms. Those norms are set by leaders, through their stated expectations and also by demonstrating it themselves.
This is not to say that these companies don’t have processes: they do. But it is not their processes that make them agile and effective. Rather, their processes are an outcome: these companies don’t copy the processes of others; instead, their people, who work under the above stated expectations, define the processes that they need, in the course of doing the work.
Agility and effectiveness result from behavior, which results from leader behavior and expectations. Effective processes and a sense of accountability result from those.
What to Do
Today’s leaders need to be more hands-on than their predecessors. This seems counterintuitive because if things are becoming more complex, shouldn’t leaders stand back and let people close to the work handle it?
Yes and no. Because things are changing so quickly,
the only way to know what is going on is to be close to the work. Also, when people are stuck, a rapid decision is needed – there is no time to wait for the next planning event.
Here are some things to focus on.
Prepare and Empower – Develop people. Then empower them. Don’t be a bottleneck. Don’t require people to ask permission: instead, inspect things and provide quick feedback.
Participate – Generate discussions. Teach people how you want them to think of things. Watch for gaps. Glide between strategic and tactical – to show others how to align them, and to discover when the strategy is wrong. Be decisive to move things forward, but not to boss people. Give people problems to solve – not tasks to do.
Continuous Learning – Utilize intrinsic motivators: motivators that tap into people’s own interests and personal agency. Treat learning and experimentation as a critical part of the work. Purposely move people around to cross-train. Watch for and prevent key-person dependencies.
Collective Incentives – Win-win incentives. Shun team spirit – encourage company spirit. Teams help people to organize their work – they should not have their own micro culture. Do not reward internal competition. Move people around.
Be Event-Based – Plan for both short- and long-term: Always make two plans: how to stop the bleeding, and how to fix the root cause in alignment with strategies and values. Never wait: Reconsider all plans – even strategic ones – each time new information challenges the assumptions of existing plans. Strategic plans made ten months ago are so out of date that they put the entire organization at risk.
Conclusions
The plan-execute model is obsolete. Planning and execution are now part of a single continuous process. For that reason, purely calendar-based planning does not work well anymore. Leaders need to be in the action, in order to know what is happening and in order to guide the action. The company’s power and ability to respond well depends on the decision-making of people at all levels of the organization, and senior leaders need to be ready to change strategies and make unblocking decisions as new information arrives. Since this also applies to leaders at all levels, a major task for senior leaders to focus on is developing the leadership abilities of their people.
