Leading an organization through turbulent times is incredibly difficult. And if the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have taught us anything, it’s that a business leader’s agility – that is, their ability to lead through sudden and unexpected change – can determine an organization’s future success or failure.

The agile leaders of today now know that agility is the key to leading their businesses into an uncertain future. They’re flexible, collaborative, focused, open-minded and open to new ways of doing things, which allows an organization within a changing business landscape to re-evaluate its long-term goals and meet its short-term needs quickly and effectively.

But agility isn’t a leadership characteristic to be applied only amid pandemic-size chaos. Sure, we’ve learned some lessons recently on the importance of agility in business – for business leaders to think strategically, inspire confidence and resilience in teams, and be able and willing to pivot quickly to adapt to change. The success of true leadership will be tested by how business leaders apply these lessons moving forward.

Change Drivers

The importance of agility in leadership was on the rise long before the pandemic came along. For the past 20 years or more, agility was already a business buzzword as technological innovation worked to disrupt the world by instigating a change in the demands and expectations of customers, improving processes, products and services, and triggering fierce market competition.

The decades-old acronym VUCA, meaning volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, was used to describe these changing times, and depicts events and situations that are difficult to understand, thus making it hard to predict the outcomes of any actions taken.

The indisputable connection between VUCA and the rise in agility as an essential leadership quality was also recognized by Bill Joiner, President of ChangeWise and author of Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change. “Two deep, long-term trends – accelerating change and growing interdependence – have made agility a global imperative,” he states in an essay published in 2013 by Duke Corporate Education’s global educator network.

“In an increasingly unpredictable world, one thing we can confidently predict is that the pace of change will be faster next year and even faster the year after … Agile leadership, then, is not just another tool for a manager’s toolkit. It is a core capacity, a ‘metacompetency’, if you will, that affects how leaders deploy all their other competencies.”

Agility for Leaders

According to Chuck Mollar, author of The Rise of the Agile Leader: Can You Make the Shift?, organizations around the world that are grappling with change and attempting to develop more business agility may not achieve the desired outcome if they don’t focus specifically on their leadership.

“Many companies are attempting agile transformation, but without a shift in traditional leadership mindsets, abilities and development, they will not succeed,” he explains in his book. “To navigate change and achieve success, you need to become an agile leader. Today’s leaders need to be agile in order to develop and drive agile teams, organizations, culture and results.”

The American Management Association (AMA) also determines that “no team can achieve true agility without a strong and agile leader to guide them” and that in the current global climate, “every leader must recognize, understand and develop the characteristics of agile leaders”. The AMA defines these key characteristics to be: focused; a strategic thinker; bold; inspirational; consistent; resilient; dynamic; flexible; and communicative.

Steering Through Disruption

Developing an agile business, capable of weathering the inevitable storms ahead, starts at the very top. It’s the leaders who set the ‘agility agenda’ – hire the right people, nurture a proactive culture and constitute practices and behaviors to ensure agility permeates and is cohesive throughout their organizations.

Accenture’s ‘2020 Business Agility Report’ recognized that a “business agility revolution” was well underway and outlined in its findings that leadership style was the biggest challenge to business agility adoption faced by most organizations. The analysis revealed challenges included a lack of vision and insufficient sponsorship for business agility by management.