I found this Forbes article by John Bremen entitled 2021 In Review: Leadership Lessons from Delta, Omicron, The Great Resignation, and Climate Impact.
In it, he shared ideas around the new focus for leaders. He describes it as being future-focused and defined ten aspects of that emergent posture.
Adopt a new mindset with risk.
Commit to elastic innovation.
Drive purpose AND profit.
Use flexibility as an advantage.
Get real about remote and hybrid work.
Focus on employee wellbeing and organizational resilience.
Lead with empathy, compassion, and transparency.
Understand that treating people fairly doesn’t mean treating them the same.
Stay focused on talent during crisis.
Support ESG and sustainability (environment, social, governance factors).
While the notion of Agile Leadership wasn’t mentioned in the article, I felt as if each of John’s points aligned perfectly with agile ways of working and developing your agile leadership mindset.
Resonated with me
After reviewing the article and considering the ten aspects, there were a few that just kept resonating with me, including—
Focus on people, all people – of course, nearly every leader says this. But the future-centric agile leader needs to get the importance and value of their people deeply in their DNA.
The need for resilience – in ourselves as leaders, in our teams and organizations. And this includes the leader’s role in building, encouraging, and role modeling resilience at every opportunity.
The importance of building relationships – and finally, it struck me across many of the aspects that leadership is foundationally about building relationships with those we lead.
And I love the notion of elastic innovation!
Please share your reactions to the article and see if it has the same impact, on your thinking, that it did on mine.
And here’s a related video that you might find interesting by Karim Harbott and Pia-Maria Thoren - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-_FvhRPJyE
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.