management system. These sites likely will include TED, YouTube, Vice, and Buzzfeed. Now reach out and craft syndication deals to bring this content in-house. Be innovative in curating popular MOOCs and integrating them into your learning offerings. Consider developing your own in-house MOOC or curating MOOCs aligned to your key capabilities.
2. Seek opportunities to enable peer-to-peer teaching. Peer-to-peer teaching enables
employees to develop social capital resulting in enhanced reputation, the creation of trust, the development of currency, and the ability to leverage networks within. As a result, employees will contribute to each other’s development and be more engaged with each other.
3. Share your own learning journey. Make sure your employees see you adding to your own skills repertoire. Offer details of your progress (and challenges) openly and often. Be someone others want to learn from.
Role-Modeling the Culture: An Enabler to Being an Agile Leader
If agile leadership is about the ability to produce results and engage people to get those results, then how does a company’s culture play into this? It can either enable or present a barrier to putting agile leadership into practice.
Culture often gets described as the tribal behaviors of a group, the shared values, the “way that we do things around here.” We all talk about it; we think, “Oh, culture, of course!” Organizations tend to have a well-documented and visible sets of values. When we hear leaders talk about the culture of an organization, the primary focus is on the aspirational. These values tend to be reflected by the written and spoken words of senior management. The values found on a company website or annual report and should be the behaviors consistent with the cultural aspirations of the firm: “These are our values, this is our culture, and this is what we expect of you.”
Then there’s the culture gap, a barrier to agile leadership. This is the gap between the behaviors we promote and those we tolerate. Figure 3.2 shows this culture gap.
Figure 3.2 The culture gap
Our Future Workplace Forecast survey asked three important questions regarding culture. First we asked, “How important is it to you that your leaders model the company culture?”11 In total, 92
percent answered very or extremely important across industries, cultures, and ages. It matters to everybody, everywhere, every function, every industry, and every age group. That’s the good news.
The second question we asked was “Are your leaders role-modeling the culture?” At 66 percent, a majority of our respondents rated their senior leaders highly for their management style, actions, and behaviors as role models for organizational culture. Essentially, they were living the values and walking the walk.
Our third question was on tolerance of behaviors. We asked “How often do you see examples of your organization tolerating behaviors that do not reflect the stated company culture?” Only 37 percent of winning organizations see these poor behaviors tolerated,12 while 47 percent of all
respondents do. Winning organizations are consistently less tolerant of behaviors that do not reflect the stated company culture. It doesn’t matter what’s written on our wall; it’s what we tolerate that matters, meaning “The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”13 If we aspire to agile leadership, where leaders are people developers, transparent, and team intelligent, and our leaders do not behave this way, that’s our true culture.
Companies that practice agile leadership do so starting with the hiring process. Both Airbnb and Glassdoor shared a similar response to how important culture is in the hiring process. We asked,
“How do you protect your culture when you will have more employees two years from now than you’ve hired cumulatively over the last six years?” Bottom line: they screen for cultural fit in the hiring process. Once hiring managers establish that a candidate is qualified, then this person is interviewed by someone else to assess the cultural fit. No matter how well qualified someone might be, the candidate must fit the culture to be offered the job. Culture is the glue that binds the seven traits of agile leadership together in winning organizations.
Implementing the Seven Traits of Agile Leadership
It might seem daunting to juggle the seven traits of the agile leader. But it’s critical to note how interwoven many of the core characteristics are to produce results and engage people. None is necessarily more important than another; the traits work together as part of an organic whole,
complementing and reinforcing the importance of the other. Leaders who role-model the traits of agile leadership enable this for the entire organization. An intrapreneurial employee is only able to function at full capacity within a future-focused organization. A more transparent leader strengthens trust
between employees, their wider teams, and the organization at large. With greater transparency, more inclusive teams can create an environment ripe for more intrapreneurial collaboration. Greater
inclusiveness often fosters a space of mutual teaching and learning where team members are more likely to hold each other accountable for group learning initiatives. With increased trust come happier, longer-tenured employees who are more likely to share expertise, strengths, weaknesses, duties, and unique experiences, leading to a stronger foundation for team intelligence. Agile
leadership is about the ability to produce results. It is also about the ability to engage people. Finally, it is about role-modeling the values of the organization and demonstrating an intolerance of culturally inappropriate behaviors not tolerating bad behaviors to get results.
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• Of the four traits that shape my ability to produce results (be transparent, be accountable, be intrapreneurial, be future focused):
• Which is my strength?
• What one model behavior do I most want to work on improving?
• Of the three traits that shape my ability to engage people (be team intelligent, be inclusive, be a people developer):
• Which is my strength?
• What one model behavior do I most want to work on improving?
• How do I believe I show up to others on each of the traits of agile leadership?
• What one trait does a trusted colleague think I should work on improving?
• How am I going to role-model the cultural values of the organization?
My Team
• What traits of agile leadership are most important to our team?
• Are there traits that we could pay more attention to as a team?
• What model behaviors are most important for our team?
• What model behaviors do we want to hold each other more accountable for practicing?
• How are we going to hold each other accountable for the cultural values of the organization?
My Organization
• How do our company values connect to the model behaviors of what we expect of our leaders and managers?
• Is there enough emphasis within our current training of linking development to model behaviors?
• Do our leadership training programs incorporate the seven traits of being an agile leader?
• What else could our organization do to further develop the seven traits of an agile leader among our emerging leaders?
PART II