In partnership with
Are you an agile leader?
I just finished reading through three articles that all mention the critical importance of leadership agility in 2026, but none clearly addressed how to become agile without becoming inconsistent or reactive.
How can leaders remain agile and adaptable while being authentic, empathetic, and consistent in their leadership approach? Consistency and agility can and should be used together, but it requires a leader to be in tune with themselves, their principles, and how their actions impact their team.
Making quick decisions, knowing when to seize an opportunity, and knowing when to avoid a trap are hallmarks of agile leaders. These leaders treat their landscape as an ever-dancing topography they must navigate safely. Doing it with grace requires clarity and consistency in leadership actions and behaviors. So, how do great leaders remain consistent, fluid, decisive, and confident in an ever-changing environment?
They rely on decision-making frameworks, principles, values, and guiding beliefs to ensure consistent behavior in an ever-changing environment. Here are some examples you can begin with:
What’s your philosophy?
How do your beliefs impact how you lead and show up for your team each day?
What’s the core identity of your leadership? Trust. Build strong teams. Coach and develop new leaders.
You must understand the core identity of your leadership style before you can be agile.
Agility comes from knowing how to leverage your strengths in creative or unique ways. You can’t do that unless you really understand yourself and what your leadership style is.
What are your values?
What’s important to you?
How do your values impact your leadership?
If you value problem-solving over teamwork, how does this impact your team? Do your decisions reinforce your organization’s values?
Knowing where you stand on important workplace issues allows you to create consistency even when things change. Making decisions is a whole lot harder without values to guide your process.
These are just the starting points. Leading with agility only works when a leader has an accurate awareness of themselves and their impact on their team. You can’t build agility without guiding principles, beliefs, or values that help you make consistent decisions in an environment that’s constantly changing.
So, when you hear about agility, think about the core before you worry about adaptation. Your core philosophy, identity, and values are what make you capable of adapting to any situation. They provide the foundation upon which a leader operates.
Organizations don’t really want agile leaders; they want leaders who have the foundational skills that make agility a leadership strength. They just haven’t figured that last part out yet.
Do you have the foundation needed to be an agile leader?
Until next time,
Rick
P.S. I wanted to share an AI tool I actually use just about every day. It’s called Wispr Flow, and it’s the most accurate transcription tool I’ve used.
Better prompts. Better AI output.
AI gets smarter when your input is complete. Wispr Flow helps you think out loud and capture full context by voice, then turns that speech into a clean, structured prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant. No more chopping up thoughts into typed paragraphs. Preserve constraints, examples, edge cases, and tone by speaking them once. The result is faster iteration, more precise outputs, and less time re-prompting. Try Wispr Flow for AI or see a 30-second demo.