Learning to be an agile leader

Leadership may not be our oldest discipline, but it has been around long enough to raise quite a herd of sacred cows. Around the world, companies have invested huge amounts of time – and other, harder currencies – in developing hierarchical organisational structures, writing procedural manuals, designing (and, where that doesn’t sound grand enough, engineering) internal processes. But there’s a problem.

If all this planfulness is going to succeed, the world must behave predictably. Because A and B will happen, we will do X and Y so that we are prepared. Unfortunately, the world moves more quickly and randomly than that: if you’re looking for predictability, look behind you.

This means, of course, that there is a problem with Leadership Development. If you have the wrong concept of leadership – firmly in control, rigidly top-down, not just process-driven but process-compliant – then your approach to developing leaders will be similarly out of alignment. You will be developing people to lead in a world that no longer exists, training them to believe that they will spend their days calling the shots when it is more likely that they will be dodging them. This world calls for a different kind of preparedness.