RULE #3

3

BE AN AGILE LEADER

In the future workplace, a new generation of managers will need to learn to lead differently in order to be effective. Leaders who are agile and adapt to the rapidly shifting business landscape will be able to recruit the best and most productive workers of tomorrow, and leverage their talent to achieve lasting business success.

We identified seven leadership traits that are required for the agile leader of the future (illustrated in Figure 3.1).¹

Figure 3.1 The agile leader of the future

When we think about the agile leader of the future, this capability is defined along two macro dimensions.²

One dimension focused on the ability to produce results, meaning:

•  Be transparent. Communicate and share on a regular basis.

•  Be accountable. Acknowledge both your losses and your wins and learn from them.

•  Be intrapreneurial. Seek out new opportunities and motivate others to think, imagine, and act in bold, enterprising ways.

•  Be future focused. Anticipate the growing complexity of your business environment.

And the other dimension focused on the ability to engage people, meaning:

•  Be team intelligent. Instill practices to make teams great in your organization.

•  Be inclusive. Build diversity and inclusion as a value within your organization.

•  Be a people developer. Enable on-demand individual and peer learning.

Collectively, these traits promote more effective management decisions, raise awareness and understanding of the power of teams, and generate sustainable business results. Managing these two dimensions of results-oriented and people-engaged leadership is what will drive the greatest change inside organizations and set agile leaders apart from the rest.

The Ability to Produce Results: Be Transparent

There is consistently one corporate principle that correlates with happy, loyal, and more engaged staff: transparency in the workplace. Modern employees want a culture of straight talk, along with clear expectations for how to excel. These elements build trust, which is the foundation of great teamwork and the key to attracting and retaining the best talent.

One of the most obvious ways to create an open and transparent workplace is through communicating and sharing on a regular basis. While this may have been achieved in the past through a highly scripted companywide memo or a stage-managed town hall meeting, the digital age requires a more radical and open approach.

Executives are expected to be fluent in internal and external media platforms so that they can “humanize” their organization and better publicize the firm’s innovations and accomplishments. They are also expected to more widely share management’s thinking and strategy, in order to better establish a connection with employees and clients.

This is more easily said than done. In our Future Workplace Forecast survey, when we asked managers how important transparency is to their organization’s future success, 85 percent said it was extremely or very important. But when we asked this same group of managers how transparent their organization is today, only 46 percent of managers said it was very or extremely transparent.

More interestingly, when we broke down the responses by company performance, we found that companies practicing transparency significantly outperformed their competitors. Only 21 percent of companies that were underperforming financially rated themselves as transparent, while 59 percent of outperformers did.

So what exactly does a transparent leader look like?

Many technology companies are in the vanguard of transparent approaches. Percolate, a marketing technology company with five offices in the United States and the United Kingdom, holds weekly meetings where every team member publicly judges his or her previous week’s performance and sets goals for the current one. Sharing insights and objectives with the whole team lets coworkers know how they can help each other and enables each member to learn from the others’ experiences.

Consider David Thodey, the former CEO of Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia. Before stepping down in 2015, he was a highly visible, digitally engaged, and transparent leader, regularly communicating with employees and customers. Crucially, he also backed up his outreach with action, following up on requests for suggested process changes with real reforms. Thodey also personally engaged with employees on the company’s internal social network and with customers on Twitter.

Transparency has become critical to communicating goals and creating a sense of team cohesion. John Donovan, who oversees 140,000 employees as chief strategy officer and president of Technology and Operations at AT&T, wanted to stress to his workforce just how important it was to adapt to a rapidly changing work environment. He needed employees to learn faster, which he understood was a difficult and risky request.

So he shared a personal story. At a global corporate gathering, with thousands of employees watching remotely, he showed a video in which he talked about growing up poor in a family of 11 children in Pittsburgh. He included his mother in the talk and they spoke movingly about how critical it is in life to imagine yourself in different circumstances and to work hard to get there.

“It was harder than you can possibly imagine,” Donovan told the New York Times, to open up about his personal history in front of staff. But he believes the point hit home and inspired many people. “I get a lot of people asking how my mother is doing,” he said.³

Transparency requires us to bring our “authentic self” to work, to model honesty and trust in our interactions, and to use emotional intelligence to understand the needs and concerns of our fellow employees and ourselves. The result will be: problems are solved faster, teams are more effective, and employees are more committed to the company’s mission.

Model Behaviors to Be Transparent

1. When in doubt, share. Employees who understand a company’s goals and processes are more apt to feel committed to that company’s mission. Whether it’s information on strategy, quarterly results, salaries, or your own personal motivations and aims, sharing information goes a long way toward fostering trust and engagement.

2. Walk the walk. Don’t simply make engagement a weekly exercise. Integrate it into your daily approach, and follow up on suggestions and concerns you encounter so that employees and clients understand that your presence isn’t just for show.

3. Admit mistakes. Transparent leaders are willing to admit mistakes and learn from them. If your goal is to have a team that genuinely wants to follow you, you must acknowledge the reality of each situation. To create an environment of trust and personal transparency, provide a model of clear expectations. Outline exactly how you would like to receive feedback, and then—importantly—be ready to accept it and act on it, whether it be positive or negative.

The Ability to Produce Results: Be Accountable

Many corporate cultures encourage people to run away from outcomes that are unexpected, without regard to the fact that surprising results often lead to breakthroughs and opportunity. Being accountable means recognizing both your losses and your wins. Such leaders not only own their mistakes; they learn from them and feel empowered to take responsibility for the good results they produce. Our Future Workplace Forecast survey found that 35 percent of the highest-performing organizations always or very often enable peer-to-peer recognition to acknowledge employee accomplishments compared with 25 percent for all respondents.

Accountability starts with clear expectations. For decades, those expectations were communicated largely during annual performance reviews—an inefficient once-a-year process that often left employees and managers alike unsatisfied.

When Donna Morris, now Adobe’s executive vice president of customer and employee experience, asked the people on her team several years ago to calculate the time eaten up by annual reviews, they found the review process required an incredible 80,000 hours of time from the 2,000 managers at Adobe each year—the equivalent of 40 full-time employees.⁴

Those results told Morris and her colleagues that it was time for disruptive change. Morris was one of the first Chief Human Resource Officers to scrap the annual performance review. In 2012. She replaced it with a series of regular check-ins that put accountability at the heart of conversations between managers and employees. These check-ins convey what is expected of employees, allow managers and employees alike to give and get feedback, and help employees with their growth and development plans. The reinvention of performance management was a key component in the ability of Adobe to transform its business. According to Morris, the move from an annual performance review process to the ongoing check-ins coincided with a major transformation of Adobe’s business model. During the subsequent four years, the Adobe employee base increased 40 percent, stock price tripled, and the percentage of recurring revenue went from zero to 81 percent. Morris believes the check-in process of frequent ongoing feedback was crucial to Adobe’s transformation to a more agile organization able to quickly take advantage of new business opportunities.

This transformation and reinvention of performance management and “safe” accountability is happening across a range of companies. Adobe, IBM, General Electric, Microsoft, Accenture, and Cisco, among others, are encouraging managers to be more explicit with their expectations to employees. Kee Meng Yeo, VP of Global Talent Development at Amway, reinforces the connection between accountability and mistakes: “Accountability is most often attached to failure, that’s where I always take a step back when people hit me with accountability. My reply has always been, do you really want accountability or do you really want a witch hunt?” Yeo advocates framing the organization’s accountability question as “Have you built an organization’s culture where it’s safe to be accountable?” and the individual employee accountability question as “Am I really open to taking accountability by learning from the mistakes I make?” Yeo also advocates “being honest about what you really value versus just promoting what’s written down for the sake of promoting what’s written down. Let’s have the courage to say what we actually want to encourage and reward and what we don’t. Let’s be direct about these expectations and not spin them at all.”

Our research highlighted how leaders exhibiting a strong sense of accountability, who give feedback often and communicate both positive and negative feedback, also reap the benefit of having higher employer net promoter scores. Quite simply, employees will be highly likely to refer friends and family to their employer if the organization practices transparent accountability from the top down.

Model Behaviors to Be Accountable

1. Set a good example. Denounce blame and shame tactics in favor of learning from mistakes. If you want members of your team to accept responsibility for setbacks as well as successes, you must do so as well.

2. Offer constant and immediate feedback. Provide frequent feedback, both positive and negative, and in both public and private forums. Emphasize what can be learned from negative outcomes, and empower teams to acknowledge their accomplishments.

3. Think beyond finding a technology solution. Solve for something larger than a new performance management tool, to rethink the entire employee experience and how this is impacted by “just-in-time accountability.” Fine-tuning the accountability process requires going deeper than just setting goals for what you want done; you also need to outline the behaviors related to how you want results accomplished.

The Ability to Produce Results: Be Intrapreneurial

There have always been go-getters inside companies that take risks, test new ideas, and push boundaries. But never have so many companies actively encouraged employees to act like entrepreneurs on the job—to be intrapreneurs inside their organizations. Rather than constraining workers who have ideas, effective leaders push workers to dream big. Intrapreneurial leaders motivate others to think, imagine, and act in bold, enterprising ways, to take ownership of ideas, and to innovate within the organization.

The track record for such efforts is startlingly impressive: Google’s Gmail, 3M’s Post-it notes, Facebook’s “like” button, and Sony’s PlayStation are all products of internal intrapreneurship projects. But intrapreneurship doesn’t just fuel bestselling products, innovation, and growth. It helps companies attract and retain the best employees, who increasingly want autonomy, meaningful work, and creative outlets on the job.

A significant shift in the mindset around intrapreneurship has taken place in companies across the world. In our Future Workplace study entitled “Gen Y Workplace Expectations,” 40 percent of millennials surveyed indicated interest in the opportunities that intrapreneurial workplaces provide. In that same study, 58 percent of seasoned managers reported being willing or extremely willing to support employees who want to capitalize on a new business opportunity within their company.⁵ As millennials are already the largest generational cohort in the United States—and along with generation Z, they will be well over 60 percent of the workforce by 2025—businesses are exploring how to build intrapreneurial thinking inside their organizations, by incentivizing talent to stay in-house, rather than striking out on their own to develop new products and services.

Brad Smith, Chairman and CEO of Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and QuickBase, has for years championed efforts to help employees innovate from within. The company’s noted Innovation Catalyst program trains employees to become innovation coaches and mentors, who then assist workers from across the company with thinking outside the box, experimenting with new products and processes, and uncovering important, overlooked opportunities.

“Regardless of whether you are leading a large enterprise or a small team, you need to remove barriers to innovation and get out of the way,” said Smith.⁶ Even though Intuit employs thousands of people, Smith continually stresses the importance of maintaining a start-up mindset, with the courage to take risks and stay nimble. The company’s Idea Jams and unstructured time also give employees opportunities to collaborate on new ideas. Its customer-focused “follow me home” program allows workers and managers to better understand customers’ needs by watching how Intuit’s products are used in the real world.

“At the end of the day, it’s about empowering individuals to contribute ideas and make an impact,” Smith says, “as well as setting goals that challenge employees to step outside their comfort zone.”

Model Behaviors to Be Intrapreneurial

1. Create a culture of innovation. Intrapreneurs benefit from a corporate culture in which new ideas can be shared and shaped. You need to connect the internal intrapreneurs and experimenters with each other. There are ample communities for entrepreneurs to connect with outside organizations. The need is just as high internally, yet lacking inside most organizations. Building this kind of community requires consistent encouragement from the top to allow employees to connect with each other and try out new ideas.

2. Believe in experimentation. Too often, the corporate language used to describe experimentation focuses on failure: setbacks, false starts, wrong turns, and mistakes. Agile leaders flip this mindset on its head, celebrating experimentation as a catalyst for success rather than an opportunity for failure. That requires encouraging prototyping, testing, and refining, as well as finding the value and lessons in even the smallest opportunities. Remove the fear of failure and release employees from the organization’s history of what has been tried or has not worked before. Only then will employees feel free to look at old problems differently and find the courage to take risks. When framed as intentional iteration and experimentation, a new mindset is created and ready for multiple learning moments.

3. Give credit where credit is due. People want to be recognized for the creative work they do in moving the organization’s mission forward. Agile leaders consistently acknowledge innovation if they hope to keep the company’s intrapreneurial culture strong. Incentives and recognition for experimenting and learning can compensate for the risks of failure. That might be realized through innovation awards, showcases, bonuses, and movement within the firm. Sometimes, a simple thank you will go a long way.

The Ability to Produce Results: Be Future Focused

As leaders, one of our primary jobs is to constantly revisit our company’s strategy and mission. We must take the time to focus on where our business and industry are heading—now, 5, or even 20 years in the future—and how best to position our business to achieve results. That requires staying abreast of trends so we can make informed speculations about how to stay ahead of the curve.

Organizations that “let go at the top”—avoiding hierarchy, incrementalism, and the safety of resting on past successes—will be the ones that are agile enough to leapfrog from opportunity to opportunity in the future. Those are the businesses that will enjoy long-term prosperity in our rapidly changing business environment.

But how do you develop a more future-focused mindset? How do you develop managers who can anticipate the growing complexity of their business environment? Who can think digitally and deliver solutions with the agility of a start-up?

For the past several years, the financial sector has watched the emergence of FinTech—technology-driven financial services companies—with growing wariness. FinTech offers mobile apps for an array of financial services, from managing investments to making group payments that were once the exclusive domain of banks.

In 2014, Singapore-based DBS Bank, one of the largest banks in Asia, felt an acute pressure to remain agile in a rapidly changing business environment. So the bank’s leadership decided to undertake an ambitious, innovative effort—a hackathon to help the bank come to grips with just how fast the digital world was changing and how survival depended on the ability to think and act creatively. Over 500 DBS employees and 50 start-up ventures across the Southeast Asia region were involved.

The participants were given 72 hours to create a working app to solve a specific business challenge. “You could see from the looks on their faces that they were nervous,” says Laurence Smith, former managing director and group head of Learning and Talent Development for DBS. “I mean, we had non-technical people who had no programming experience partnered with startups. But in the end, they did it.”⁷ The three days had the teams rapidly ideating, prototyping, hitting the streets to do experiments with real customers, returning to digest their learning, and deciding whether to “persevere or pivot” based on the learnings from their experiments.

In the very first hackathon—which was an experiment in itself—six prototypes were created, one of which is an app launched as part of the digital banking strategy in India. But the organizers say the most important shift was from a traditional banking mindset to a digital one. “Our moment of being truly future focused was when we started to think like the startups, focusing on how enabling technologies can make us smarter, faster, and how we can use big data to innovate and create useful products and services for our customers,” says Smith.

Several noticeable mindset and culture shifts became evident from before to after the hackathon:

Smith says, “What was amazing was when you see teams pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, exactly as real startups do to VCs—they were so proud of their creations, so excited about the revenue and market share opportunities, one team even said ‘72 hours ago we had no idea how to do this!’ and then they paused, looked again at the smart phone they were holding up, and you could see their face change to that ‘oh my gosh’ moment, when they realized that those kids in a garage really were a threat to big banks! But then you saw them pause, look at the phone again, stand a little straighter and say to themselves ‘We can do this too’ and in that moment they went from fearing the unknown to being confident in their ability to invent the future of banking.” DBS is the first organization in Singapore to build hackathons into its talent development program, with employees creating prototypes alongside start-ups.⁸

As Smith sees it, the key benefit of using the hackathon approach is to change the culture. DBS CEO Piyush Gupta agrees and has been lauded by local media as being one of the five most influential people shaping the future of banking. Gupta acknowledges the importance of the hackathons, saying, “How do you change [your people] so that they think like employees in Apple and Facebook? You can’t do that in a room, presenting on a whiteboard. You have to create a platform so people have a chance to engage, dirty their hands, and work with different kinds of people.”⁹

Hackathons have now been incorporated into the operating rhythm of DBS with a queue of business leaders wishing to sponsor hackathons as a part of a powerful problem-solving and ideation process. To date, hackathons have produced more than 50 prototypes of new DBS products, with 12 that have become real products for DBS.

But now the question is, how do you scale the success of the hackathons to the remaining 21,500 DBS employees? While asking this question, DBS discovered SmartUp (#BeMoreStartup), a mobile app for businesses providing users with insights, case studies, and lessons learned from some of the world’s top leaders, including those from Airbnb, Udacity, Squirrel, and many more tech gurus—people that an ordinary person could only ever dream of meeting.

SmartUp is primarily used as part of a reverse mentoring relationship between a banker who has gone through the hackathon and his or her team members to build digital literacy skills. Hearing about this, one DBS executive, Olivier Crespin, the head of Digital Bank, downloaded SmartUp over a weekend and then sent an e-mail to his entire team of over 300 people on Monday morning saying, “I encourage all of you to download the SmartUp app. It is very well done, it has case studies, quizzes, and book extracts on anything you need to know about digital and start up. I learned a lot; it’s the best training tool I have ever used. Should be mandatory to all, but do it at your own pace and leisure. In fact it’s pretty entertaining; there are simulations and challenges difficult to crack but really stimulating and refreshing.”

Smith ends with this: “How do I know our journey is working? One DBS executive came to me recently and shared that in three meetings he attended that week, key strategic decisions were changed as a result of insights or lessons learned just an hour before or the day before from SmartUp. Our journey in the digital world is starting to have impact inside DBS.”

Model Behaviors to Be Future Focused

1. Embrace disruption. In the digital era, breathless audacity has become the business model for many companies, transforming how they make financial transactions, book overnight stays, or power their cars. It’s an era that demands digital literacy from all leaders, especially those who work in HR. Be willing to welcome ideas that challenge current business models.

2. Step outside your comfort zone. Untether yourself from your desk to see the innovations that are powering change in your industry. Make a point to connect with people inside and outside your networks, attend conferences, and seek out change agents whenever possible.

3. Watch for change. Pay attention to understanding the causes of any results that were different from what was expected. Agile leaders have an obligation to make sure their ship is sailing smoothly, and focused on the horizon ahead and skillfully navigate unexpected situations on the journey.

The Ability to Engage People: Be Team Intelligent

While HR departments have traditionally focused on individual employees—recruiting them, developing them, and assessing their performance—we are beginning the see the advent of a new capability, one of developing team intelligence, the practice of making team performance great. According to Ashley Goodall, senior vice president of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, “One of the big misses in the HR function has been our nearly exclusive focus on individual development and performance. At Cisco we have noticed that great accomplishments are delivered through teams, not just through individuals working alone. This realization has guided our commitment to re-thinking performance management. We are solving for something bigger than just a new system for performance management. We are solving for how to find and make the best teams possible at Cisco.”

Goodall goes on to say, “At Cisco we believe there are three things that form the foundation of great teams. First is enabling all team members to assess their strengths and bring their best self to work each day; second is giving teams an opportunity to understand what the team stands for and how to openly support each other in the collective efforts. Third is having leaders engage frequently in future-focused conversations so team members know where they are going, why they are making the choices they make, and how they are doing against their goals. Our insight here is that an individual employee’s experience is really their team experience and this is different for everyone. So our goal as leaders is to understand team dynamics and to put the lens of the team on the entire HR process.” Goodall believes it is this maniacal focus on creating the right team environment that leads to improved productivity, innovation, and engagement.

There are many economic benefits of being team intelligent. Cisco is now piloting a new team platform it has branded Team Space to help people understand and reveal their strength in working together. Goodall continues, “Once we were clear on the big picture of understanding team dynamics and making more of the best teams, then we were able to select a technology solution, Team Space, to scale team excellence across Cisco.”

In the long term, Cisco wants to create an environment that provides customized tips for team leaders about what the best teams are doing. But more than that, Cisco wants to allow leaders to measure team engagement against the best teams and against their own engagement over time. But it’s important not to think about this as just a technology solution. For team intelligence to thrive, the whole team has to be on board, and this demands capturing team data and metrics. And when you start to examine the entire HR function through a team lens, you can see opportunities for hiring intact teams, developing intact teams, and coaching intact teams.

But this vision is easier said than done. There are significant barriers to making this vision a reality. Perhaps the biggest barrier is being uncomfortable with not having all the answers. This is a big change for some who may have grown up in the HR function. Goodall sees one solution: use design thinking in HR to examine the entire employee experience from the point of view of the employee. Becoming employee-centric provides leaders with the opportunity to create a truly compelling employee and team experience.

Model Behaviors to Be Team Intelligent

1. Find out who are the great team leaders in your organization. Identify the key attributes of these leaders. Determine what they do and how they do it so this capability can be developed for key executives.

2. Accelerate team performance. Understand individually and collectively what makes great teams for your organization and develop this across the enterprise. Move beyond thinking of this as a technology solution; it is really about developing a team-intelligent mindset.

3. Examine how to impact key HR processes through the team lens. Examine all aspects of the employee experience—including hiring, training, and compensation—through the lens of team performance. When you unlock the power of teams in your organization, you are better poised for breakthroughs.

The Ability to Engage People: Be Inclusive

Inclusivity is very different from diversity. Diversity is typically a question of whom you recruit, while inclusivity is about how you include them. It is about creating and—crucially—listening to individuals or teams that represent many different voices. It is a way to foster diversity of thought, encourage more creative problem solving, and integrate the input of all stakeholders. It is about building diversity and inclusiveness as cultural values within the organization.

Our Future Workplace Forecast asked HR and hiring managers to identify the business benefits of an inclusive workplace. The top result was to add diversity of thought, and the second was to attract top talent. The third reason varied by function. HR leaders saw a more inclusive workplace as improving employee engagement, while hiring managers believed more inclusiveness impacted business performance. The good news? Inclusion promotes both.

Inclusivity is about creating teams and project groups from the ground up that represent and include many divergent voices. That process begins with possessing cultural intelligence. This means understanding how people of different genders, races, and nationalities solve problems and propose solutions and leveraging this to your company’s competitive advantage.

At Cisco, Chief People Officer Fran Katsoudas has been leading an initiative to reimagine the way employees work. “The goal,” says Katsoudas, “is to create a nimbler, more responsive HR department where silos, time zones, and cultural barriers are broken down so we can create innovative new HR solutions.”

When one thinks of HR solutions, the list spans traditional functions, such as compliance training, career development, risk management, and performance management. This is exactly what Fran Katsoudas and her HR team wanted to change. In 2016, they used design thinking to “break” and then reimagine HR solutions for 71,000 global Cisco employees. Cisco actually closed all of HR for 24 hours and announced to employees that the company was using the time to engage the HR team and key stakeholders to create innovative HR solutions to deliver new and memorable employee experiences. To communicate the importance of inclusiveness, Fran traveled from Cisco headquarters in San Jose, California, to the Cisco office in Bangalore, India, to kick off this initiative.

Over that period of 24 hours, Cisco HR employees joined with colleagues in the services and engineering organizations in nine locations—including Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, Jerusalem, Krakow, London, Raleigh, and San Jose—to come together virtually using a mix of Cisco collaboration technologies. This initiative was called the Cisco HR Breakathon, and it gave birth to 105 new HR solutions. Two of the winning HR solutions proposed improving new-hire onboarding through a mobile app.

Cisco’s HR Breakathon was inclusive not only in reaching people globally but also in reaching out to key business units to involve them in the experience. “We created a global and cross-functional event dedicated to hacking all the ‘little and big things’ that hinder HR from providing an extraordinary employee experience,” says Katsoudas. She believes the power of the Cisco HR Breakathon was in its ability to empower the HR organization to let go of process thinking, engage globally, and put the Cisco employee experience at the center of it all.

Model Behaviors to Be Inclusive

1. Talk inclusiveness up. Have leaders and management continually promote the importance of diversity to the organization. Be clear on the business rationale surrounding the benefits of increased diversity. Create a flow of applications from candidates with diverse backgrounds and then make the extra effort to hear what they have to share.

2. Encourage diverse opinions to be shared. Monitor your own behavior to make sure you are hearing and including opinions and contributions from a wide set of advisors, clients, stakeholders, and team members. Actively ask for views on your inclusiveness style and on the inclusiveness of company initiatives, in settings both large and small. Use the latest technologies to promote and harness inclusive thinking.

3. Host events that put new perspectives on display. Create formal opportunities that encourage employees from various departments and diverse geographies to offer their unique approaches and opinions. Encourage employees to participate in community and civic diversity projects and cross-cultural organizational initiatives from community days to hackathons. Promote formal peer support groups or committees to develop programs to support diversity groups.

The Ability to Engage People: Be a People Developer

The business world pays a lot of lip service to the importance of people development. We know that it’s critical to an organization’s—and leader’s—success. But some research paints a different story. In McKinsey’s widely read article, “Why Leadership Development Programs Fail,” the evidence is daunting. While U.S. companies spend $14 billion on leadership development programs, nearly 30 percent of American managers admit they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities fully because they lack enough leaders with the right capabilities.¹⁰ The gap between the importance of leadership development and its ability to deliver results rests with the lack of context for leadership programs, an inability to tie to real business issues, the difficulty of changing the mindsets of leaders, and the failure to measure results. In the relentless push to adopt new leadership programs, often there is not enough time, resources, or know-how to apply the same business metrics to development that are applied to making other investments in the business.

In the future workplace, being a people developer requires enabling on-demand individual and peer learning. When forward-looking companies provide easy ways for employees to update skills and capabilities, they will be rewarded with a more engaged, longer-lasting workforce.

This is happening in select companies from established firms like Phillip Morris International (PMI) and Verizon Wireless to start-ups like Basecamp. At PMI, Filipe Dahlin heads Global Learning & Development. Dahlin’s first task was to develop a comprehensive strategy for Global L&D. Dahlin believes, “Developing talent to our fullest extent will enable the company’s future. While learning has always mattered, today it is essential and it is one of the strategic goals of our global human resource function.”

The heart of his plan revolves around building an advanced global learning platform accessible on both desktop and mobile devices, as well as a state-of-the-art executive development suite for leaders assuming new roles, and, importantly, a recognition that leadership development as a function cannot change without upskilling the entire HR function at PMI.

The focus on upskilling HR includes building HR analytics as a core competency for the function. And for content Dahlin and his team are turning not only to MOOCs at select university providers but also to syndication from consumer sites such as TED, Vice, and YouTube. What is impressive about the new focus at PMI Global Learning & Development is the recognition that learning is a survival competence for the organization, and as such, the traditional approach of tapping established training partners will no longer suffice. In this brave new world of people development, the learner will be able to access on-demand development on any device, at any time, and in any location. Learning comes to the employees rather than employees “going to learning.”

Innovation in people development is also happening at Basecamp, a company of under 100 employees, where CEO Jason Fried believes his employees should control both when and what they learn. Basecamp offers all employees a $1,000 allowance each year for continuing education. Some people take classes directly related to their careers, while others take photography lessons, learn an instrument, or try their hand with cooking lessons. The goal is to nurture lifelong learning, and the point is that as employees learn new skills—both related to their job and unrelated—this will enrich them as individuals and engage them as employees.

We expect to see more companies offering learning allowances where learning will not just be limited to the narrow confines of one’s job, but instead employees will have the freedom, autonomy, and resources to engage in continual learning. Shouldn’t this be the ultimate goal of people development: building lots of ways to learn and grow into one’s daily routine?

In addition to funding employees in what they want to learn, companies are also focusing on more peer-to-peer teaching as a way to build smarter, more knowledgeable employees. This style of learning is beneficial because as employees explain their ideas to one another, they strengthen skills that facilitate collaborative working. They may learn how a fellow employee likes to receive feedback, or they may better understand the processes of other teams in the company.

Lou Tedrick, VP of Learning and Development at Verizon Wireless, agrees. Tedrick incorporates “reps talking to reps” into the company’s mobile-enabled training. Frontline sales and service representatives make explanation videos of new products, promotions, and devices to share with colleagues as part of a structured learning program where learning is both fun and highly engaging.

Often in the rush of business, we think only of the formal ways to train employees and forget to create opportunities tapping unconventional modalities for sharing knowledge and growing on the job.

Think of people development is a survival skill in the next generation of work.

Model Behaviors to Be a People Developer

1. Be comfortable going beyond traditional learning providers to integrate consumer learning. Explore where your employees are learning today outside of your learning 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?