Moving Towards Agile Leadership to Help Organizations Succeed.

In the rapidly changing organizational climate of today, agility is emerging as a core need for leaders, and ‘agile leadership’ has become a buzzword. This paper attempts to demystify the term by combing through definitions and approaches proposed by experts and distilling leadership agility into its core constituent characteristics. The paper identifies five basic attitudinal preferences that set agile leaders apart, namely, guidance over control, collaboration over hierarchy, cross-functionality over silos, adaptiveness over plan-centricity, and value creation over output. With an understanding of these attitudinal preferences, the paper turns its focus on how agile leadership can be developed, including by supporting individuals in imbibing these qualities. Creating an agile culture emerges as the key to scaling agility in organizations. The paper finds that, in essence, agile leaders foster more agile leadership. In the rapidly changing organizational climate of today, agility is emerging as a core need for leaders, and ‘agile leadership’ has become a buzzword. This paper attempts to demystify the term by combing through definitions and approaches proposed by experts and distilling leadership agility into its core constituent characteristics. The paper identifies five basic attitudinal preferences that set agile leaders apart, namely, guidance over control, collaboration over hierarchy, cross-functionality over silos, adaptiveness over plan-centricity, and value creation over output. With an understanding of these attitudinal preferences, the paper turns its focus on how agile leadership can be developed, including by supporting individuals in imbibing these qualities. Creating an agile culture emerges as the key to scaling agility in organizations. The paper finds that, in essence, agile leaders foster more agile leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]