Agility is a critical skill for leaders to succeed in today’s world. Now more than ever, we need to respond to rapid change with speed and accuracy. We continually need to adapt our ways of working. We need to become more agile.
Agile leaders are connected. They know how to connect with their team, customers, colleagues, and stakeholders. They know how to connect with societal trends that are shaping a new reality around us.
By developing an agile mindset and leadership capability in your organisation, you will create a climate where agile ways of working can flourish
The Cirrus Agile Leadership Framework
Our framework outlines eight characteristics that agile leaders demonstrate. We help leaders develop these to create a climate where agile working is the norm.
The eight characteristics of an agile leader
Here is what agile leaders look like in detail.
1. Feeling Safe
Leaders have empathy and create an agile culture based on psychological safety, increasing confidence to take risks.
2. Learning agility
Leaders are curious and create learning opportunities for themselves and their teams, instilling a growth mindset to drive improvement and insight.
3. Disruptive thinking
Leaders embrace digital opportunities and look outwards to understand their customers, opportunities and threats. They enable innovation to achieve breakthroughs.
4. Customer vision
Leaders articulate customer wants and needs through storytelling, helping others to understand and re-prioritise outputs to meet these.
5. Ruthless prioritisation
Leaders collaborate with teams to regularly review and select outstanding activities to focus on to achieve the customer vision. Priority is given to the most important,
to deliver with quality and pace.
6. Performance improvement
Leaders coach teams to work well together, set stretching goals, and regularly review how to improve and increase productivity.
7. Devolved decision making
Leaders empower their teams to decide how to achieve their goals, to take responsibility and to make decisions.
8. Collaborative achievement
Leaders create cross functional teams to accelerate processes and performance through short sprint working. They embed a shared purpose and accountability, with regular communication.
The eight characteristics of an agile leader
Here is what agile leaders look like in detail.
1. Feeling safe
Leaders have empathy and create an agile culture based on psychological safety, increasing confidence to take risks.
2. Learning agility
Leaders are curious and create learning opportunities for themselves and their teams, instilling a growth mindset to drive improvement and insight.
3. Disruptive thinking
Leaders embrace digital opportunities and look outwards to understand their customers, opportunities and threats. They enable innovation to achieve breakthroughs.
4. Customer vision
Leaders articulate customer wants and needs through storytelling, helping others to understand and re-prioritise outputs to meet these.
5. Ruthless prioritisation
Leaders collaborate with teams to regularly review and select outstanding activities to focus on to achieve the customer vision. Priority is given to the most important, to deliver with quality and pace.
6. Performance improvement
Leaders coach teams to work well together, set stretching goals, and regularly review how to improve and increase productivity.
7. Devolved decision making
Leaders empower their teams to decide how to achieve their goals, to take responsibility and to make decisions.
8. Collaborative achievement
Leaders create cross-functional teams to accelerate processes and performance through short sprint working. They embed a shared purpose and accountability, with regular communication.
Masterclass
Post-Pandemic Leadership: Facing the future with agility
Discover how to prepare your organisation and leaders to adapt to a new reality of ongoing change
How we can help
We help you become more agile by assessing and developing agile leaders and teams and engaging your organisation. Working with you, we assess the potential for becoming more agile, at organisation, team and leader level. Then through experiential workshops we co-design a roadmap that outlines your vision and priorities, and a plan for success.
Develop self awareness by assessing leaders against the eight characteristics
Change behaviour by helping learners develop positive habits via our app
Measure team and organisational agility using the Cirrus diagnostic
Sustain your transformation by driving agile ways of working
Build a bespoke learning journey by choosing from eight development themes
Define and embed agile competencies throughout your people processes
Choose from a range of delivery options, digital tools and resources
Measure business impact and demonstrate effectiveness.
Cirrus insights into agile leadership
Check out our latest masterclasses, research and The Agile Leader book by Cirrus CEO Dr Simon Hayward
How to adapt with agility
to the virtual world
Watch the masterclass
8 ways to scale agile leadership across your organisation
Watch the masterclass
Research:
Overcoming the barriers to agility
Read the research paper
The Agile Leader book by
Dr Simon Hayward
How to create an agile business in the digital age
Agile Leadership by Cirrus will help you:
Develop leaders’ ability to deliver strategy confidently and at pace
Create a collaborative and agile culture with agile ways of working
Boost business performance through improved customer focus and innovation
Enhance employee engagement with leaders inspiring others
Discover more about how we help organisations become more agile
Cirrus in the media
We regularly publish insights into agile leadership. Take a look at some of our recent coverage.
How to be a successful agile leader
The role of L&D in building an agile business
Can remote working help us to become more agile?
D&I is key to post-pandemic agility
Are hierarchies still necessary?
Being agile vs
doing agile
Looking to develop agile leadership across your organisation?
Get in touch! We’d love to speak with you
