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“One cannot hire a hand—the whole man always comes with it.”

Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

 

Leading at the speed of change is one of the most significant leadership challenges today, particularly in a “VUCA” (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment exacerbated by the pandemic. This requires identifying the constant changes in members, processes, technology and digital transformation to promote  agile leadership. So, what are the steps to increase agility inside teams and shape people’s mindset?

In agility itself, leaders will find the answers for the majority of challenges. First, however, to overcome future difficulties, leaders must be closer to their teams, even at a distance, maintain clear communication, and promote mutual understanding and comprehension. The duty to accomplish a task should be on  par with good communication and personal relationships to ensure that good performance is not just an end in itself. Mainly, looking at the Harvard Business Review “A Winning Approach to Employee Success” survey, with responses from 984 business executives, 81% of respondents strongly agree that highly engaged employees deliver a better performance.

An agile leader should be able to communicate with stakeholders as well as the employees. For that matter, a talent managing tool will help leaders to embrace organisational agility at the individual, team, and organisational levels. Furthermore, creating a safe and collaborative environment so that each team member feels creative, develops the best solutions for the challenges that arise, and is involved in the organisation’s culture is essential in agile leadership and will allow innovation. Moreover, agility means the ability to ensure that disruption can lead to a positive end and, most of all, is the right path to promote change and innovation.

 

“Neuro-leadership” and executive education: the brain at the leader’s service 

So-called “neuro-leadership” combines the most recent discoveries inneuroscience on the brain’s functioning with the development of leadership skills. If we think about how little we know of the human brain abilities, we rapidly realise the dimension of its potential. Therefore, it is possible to extrapolate the development potential that leadership, as we know it today, may have in the future. “Neuroplasticity” is the scientific term referring to the brain’s ability to adapt throughout life. In this sense, giving individuals the certainty that it is possible to transform, evolve, and change how they respond and react to challenges, will directly influenceeach individual’s way of leading. Therefore, the brain may reveal more than we think about leadership evolution.

 

As leadership expert Peter Drucker stated in his famous book The Effective Executive, “effectiveness must be learned”. Executive education can be the turning point for current and future leaders, and the top international MBA programs can provide students with a unique learning experience in an entrepreneurial and international environment. Through a transformational learning journey based on creative and stimulating international experiences, leaders can experience a safe environment to solidify their tools and methods and promote themselves and their teams with an innovative-driven mindset.

 

The brain directly impacts how a leader can regulate his emotions to better react in moments of more significant stress or pressure. A calm leader will respond quickly and in a structured way to challenges and transmit well-being and security to his or her teams, minimising emotional stress and making room for more innovation and creativity. Understanding how the brain can be adaptable can effectively change the leadership course to a more agilitybased one. It is just a matter of finding the right strategies to help the brain be more agile and productive.

 

For example, the course on Neuroscience for Leadership offered by MIT Management Education intends to analyse how neuroscience techniques apply to leadership development, the scope of agility and diversity of thinking in adult brains, or basic human emotions and mindfulness. Students have access to guided meditation, yoga classes, and even a report on their brain profile in this course. This kind of programs helps leaders reinforce their hard and soft skills, find the natural connection between innovation and agility, promote agile-thinking inside their teams, and, consequently, make their businesses more competitive in a fast-changing market.

 

“Neuroplasticity”: the key to evolving as a leader

Abandoning old practices, monitoring, rewarding and recognising the effort and learning of employees, and making room for error are little tricks to help the brain create new brain synapses and build a path to innovation and a more flexible and agile future.

 

According to the Neuroscience and Leadership series by Ardigent consultant, neuroplasticity has three mechanisms: neurogenesis, the process by which neurons are produced by neural stem cells, which is most evident in embryonic development, but science has proven that it also develops in adulthood; the myelination, which means, the process of producing myelin sheaths. This fatty substance insulates the neuron’s cell membrane, making the signals sent from one neuron to another stronger and preventing interference; and third, the synapses through which our brains constantly renew themselves, creating new synaptic connections between existing neurons. It is in this process that we learn new skills and form new habits and competencies. However, it is essential to know that the reverse can also happen: if we stop putting specific skills into practice, those synaptic connections can be lost. As a result, those neural pathways can become weaker.

 

This uncomplicated description shows that “neuro-agility” is vital for leaders to develop new skills, personal interactions, effectiveness and efficiency in decision-making and problem-solving, and their reaction under pressure. Also, it will determine the openness to promote an agile and collaborative spirit for faster and positive transformation in their teams and increase the probability of turning these actions into a new habit.