Category: Agile Leadership

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Agile Leadership

Build Back Better: How Leaders Can Build A Better, More Equal Future In An Agile Way

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

It’s an understatement to say that these are unprecedented and unpredictable times. Global uncertainty, measured by the World Uncertainty Index, is still around 50% above the historical average of 1996-2010. With the forces of Covid-19, ongoing instability and “uncertainty spillovers” from key systemic economies affecting the global economy, the World Bank’s economists are predicting that the world economy will not surpass pre-pandemic output before 2022.

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Agile Leadership

Why Agile Leaders Need To Be Master Strategists And Three Ways To Get Started

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

Albert Einstein is often credited with saying, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

For leaders today, that five minutes packs in even more activities — communicate and create buy-in from key players, then assemble a capable team that will implement the actions decisively and effectively. In a bid to save time, some leaders jump straight to action without fully understanding the context, but a weak, flimsy, poorly constructed solution based on lopsided facts and warped logic almost never goes down well.

From technology disruption to climate change issues to the unwelcome COVID-19 crisis, leaders are now faced with a monumental task of transforming even more complex systems. And the clock is ticking.

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Agile Leadership

Why Soft Skills Are About ‘Being’ First And ‘Doing’ Second

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “I am a human being, not a human doing.”

Leaders have already realized the importance of developing soft skills in their next-in-line leaders to increase the business’s bottom line. According to a McKinsey survey, large-scale reskilling is a concern and priority for 82% of C-suite executives worldwide. Organizations in advanced economies are expected to reskill tens of millions of mid-career, middle-age workers within the next 5-10 years with a shift to focus on more social and emotional skills along with advanced cognitive skills.

However, more than once, I have heard senior leaders lament that they have not seen a return on their investment in developing employees. So what’s wrong?

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Agile Leadership

Leadership 4.0: Developing Agility By Listening To Five Of Your Inner Voices

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

In a survey conducted by Deloitte on Industry 4.0 and readiness, executives reported that lack of vision on the part of leadership is one of the top three challenges to setting an Industry 4.0 strategy.

In my practice, I define agility as “the ability to be flexible and navigate through uncertainties and complexities while maintaining a sense of ease and authenticity.” This definition may be simple but is aligned to the quality we are all looking for in Leadership 4.0.

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Agile Leadership

Why Organizations Need Human-Centered Leaders, And Three Tips To Get Started

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

Half of the giants we now know may no longer exist by the next decade.

In 1964, a company on the S&P 500 had an average life expectancy of 33 years. This number was reduced to 24 years in 2016 and is forecast to shrink further to 12 years by 2027.

Organizations need to find the right business strategies, both long term and short term, to keep up with the fast-moving economy. Ensuring staff members are equipped with the necessary advanced cognitive skills and soft skills is one strategy, but upskilling is expected to take five to 10 years. The wide skills gap is a bottleneck that 79% of global CEOs are extremely concerned by, says a report by PwC. Some companies know they must fill the skills void immediately, and they have been aggressive in hiring top talent — often younger generations who are disruptors — to introduce innovation, divergent thinking and out-of-box solutions that are desperately required to extend the organization’s lifespan.

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Agile Leadership

Three Ways Agile Leaders Can Communicate An Evolving Vision Post-Pandemic

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This article originally appeared as a Council Post on Forbes here.

Leading is an uphill task. 

The difficulty is not only from the never-ending journey of self-mastery. As businesses and governments face unprecedented post-pandemic challenges in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, leaders also have to take care of the evolving needs of employees. To rise to the challenge and continue to thrive, leaders must be resilient and agile. To do so, according to an article by World Economic Forum, they can “start by anticipating what success looks like at the end of the recover phase — how their business will thrive for the long-term — then guide their teams to execute an outcome-based set of sprints to get there with agility.”

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