What is Agile Change Leadership?

There’s no doubt about it – how we need to lead has been turned on its head. In times of extreme uncertainty, we need new ways of leading!

As we emerge from a period of crisis, we enter a vulnerable time when we may revert to older practices. But we also have a unique opportunity to capture what we learned from the imposed change along with rapid decision making and adoption.

Agile Change Leadership defined

Agile Change Leadership is a leadership approach for organisations that are going through continuous change at pace. It applies to both leading business agility transformation and also leading organisations that use an Agile approach to technology and product delivery.

The foundations of the Agile Change Leadership approach are possessing an agile mindset and taking a human centred, agile approach to leading. They build psychological safety, and are comfortable with failure as part of the learning culture.

Leaders who succeed in Agile Change Leadership are flexible in application of style of leadership approach often drawing upon servant leadership, distributed leadership and adaptive leadership approaches.

When you witness their work you see they possess distinct personal qualities such as curiosity, empathy and a comfort with vulnerability. It’s not uncommon to see agile change leaders building change resilience and change readiness, in favour of focusing on change resistance.

Agile Change Leaders know the power of community and how it can galvanise sustainable change momentum. They use multiple nuanced change communication approaches to co-create and collaborate.

Leaders need to be agile in a workplace that is characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Change is relentless and the pressure to demonstrate an agile mindset is extreme.

To some extent the challenge for agile change leaders is both to be a custodian of nurturing an organisational culture that supports continuous disruption, AND also drive performance, outcomes and efficiency at speed.

While it seems daunting, the agile change leaders we know, wouldn’t have it any other way. They frequently tell us that learning to lead confidently through continuing disruption and change at speed is personally transformative and they feel liberated.