Agile leaders build agile organizations together

The need to transform businesses to be able to keep pace with market and technology trends, and opportunities, has never been more urgent. However, with this, comes the need to ensure that leaders at all levels are ready to lead complex change, and business transformation. My experience suggests that without an approach to leadership which enables agility, strategy execution and transformation efforts can suffer, if not fail completely.

I have designed a very user-friendly framework for individuals, teams, and large groups of leaders in complex organizations to learn how to lead difficult change. This framework focuses on leadership mindset and behaviour. It is anchored in decades of research on leadership, business change, and organizational effectiveness.

I do not tell leaders in organizations how to do their jobs or give them endless, interesting but academic 'case studies' about other sectors. These sorts of case studies are often disconnected from the realities that the people I'm working with face on the ground. Even if awareness of what other organizations are doing can be very enlightening, and important for general business knowledge of good or emerging practice, for coaching purposes it is more effective to treat leaders and their own organizations as their own 'case studies'.

An agile approach to leadership makes use of every human capability: the ability to deal with complex situations in a cognitive sense; the ability to connect with others emotionally; the ability to stay the course during tough periods of change; and, the ability to focus at all times on making a sustainable and desirable impact.

Groups of executives can learn about themselves in a way which is engaging and pragmatic, using facilitated dialogue rather than too much 'chalk and talk'. 'Here-and-now' experiential methods, which are embodied, and direct, business-relevant language also helps.

I also try not to label people or put them in a box, in psychological terms.

As a psychologist working with organizations for twenty five years, I have very frequently used a range of psychometric tools to support leadership development. The right psychometric tools obviously have significant utility at at certain times. What I have also learned is that guided reflection with groups about their personal and collective challenges, couched in business reality, is sometimes more powerful than what might be perceived as esoteric and instantly forgettable psychobabble in psychometric test reports. Having said this, there is obviously very often a place for good, statistically robust psychometric tools. I have been engaged in designing them myself.

There is not much use (in my estimation) for the worryingly common pseudoscientific products that lump individuals into fixed categories, caricaturing their behaviour, and restricting their own thinking about personality, and behaviour at work. Most of these sorts of tools can be infantilizing of grown adults. The more simplistic assessment tools also sometimes claim to be neuroscience or 'brain' based, a form of psychobabble which eminent coaching psychologist Anthony Grant once referred to as 'neuro-nonsense'.

I have come across those who claim to use 'neuroscience' but have not dissected or seen a brain. Some of the purveyors of neuroscience to businesses do not always appreciate the true complexity of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, the biology of learning and memory, individual differences, human information processing, or the challenges of neuropsychological research.

It's very fair to say that you don't need to be a qualified psychologist to coach executives in a psychologically informed way, as long as you are very open and honest about the limitations of what you offer. Psychology and neuroscience are fields with many serious scientific challenges and constraints, afterall. They are not magic.

It's also possible that the utility and 'face validity' of some assessment tools, that is to say, whether they feel useful and intuitive, matters just as much, maybe even more, than whether they are scientifically robust. This may be true if they are only being used for coaching teams and groups. It is the quality and value of the conversations people have which counts.

What troubles me is that the psychological labels we attach to people in executive coaching or team development can be very sticky. They can damage peoples' careers, when they are taken out of context, or used without the right disclaimers, caveats, and appropriate nuance.

Leading in an agile way can be developed with and without psychometrics, and certainly does not benefit from labelling of people. It is relevant for anyone who is tasked with making transformation successful, or working in a way which requires responsiveness to changing business conditions.

People benefit from being aligned to shared outcomes, to a coherent strategy, and being able to articulate its human and practical implications to teams. Without managers and senior leaders who can do this collectively and consistently well, business strategies and transformation plans may never get beyond the huge and often impenetrable PowerPoint decks and spreadsheets in which they are created.

It makes sense first to ensure that all the managers and leaders who are leading transformational change programmes or tasked with delivering strategic priorities, understand how to embody and enact their own role as change agents.

It makes sense to help all managers and senior executives develop a sound understanding of how to be agile in a human sense. In the long run, honest conversations about the challenges of change, and ways to keep moving forward despite setbacks, are likely to help them get results.

Yes, raising awareness about individual differences is very helpful, if it's done in the right ways at the right times with evidence-based tools. However, in business, it's results that count, rather than very long conversations about what type of biscuit you are.

CUSTOMISABLE WORKSHOPS, TEAM COACHING and CONSULTANCY

BUILDING THE AGILE ORGANIZATION: HARNESSING CHANGE AND MANAGING COMPLEXITY

For leadership teams, HR practitioners, and organizational change agents

Targeted business outcomes: improved innovation, ownership behaviour, engagement of people during transformation and mobilization of teams towards shared purpose, and business goals.

-     Learn a psychological approach to agile leadership which can enhance performance in

times of uncertainty.

-     Includes a framework for managing complexity and trade-offs in organizations.