Flexibility

You've probably been working for a while now, and have some fixed ideas about right, wrong, good, and bad. Many of those ideas have been hard-won, and are useful - but not all of them.

If you're not careful, you will stiffen over time and become that out-of-touch leader you swore you'd never be. It happens to the best of people, because as you ascend in your career, you lose many of the touch-points that kept you aware and learning - including truthful feedback and accountability from your peers.

Flexibility: an introduction

Flexible leaders are awesome at responding to change - they relish it. This flexibility provides them and their organisations with a huge sustainable advantage as the world continues to shift.

Being flexible as a leader is about staying attuned to your environment, taking responsibility for your behaviour and learning from your experiences so we can keep adapting. You stretch by embracing the paradox of boundaries and openness: committing to your values and bottom-lines, then wholeheartedly embracing change and all the risk and failure that brings.

How to become more flexible

Every interaction, disruption or problem is an opportunity to build your awareness, agency and resilience.

Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin made a point of focusing on one virtue each week and practising it daily. Cultivating flexibility can be handled in the same way.

Here’s some ideas:

• For one week, concentrate on curiosity – read a different article daily and start a conversation with three strangers. When you have ideas, notice them. Write them down. Make them visible and share them with others.
• In another week, try being more confident – speak up in meetings, question decisions that don’t make sense or support a lone dissenter.
• Schedule two meetings with people you trust to get a new perspective on your environment and behaviour.
• Next time you read a report, ask three tricky questions about what might be missing.
• At the end of your next project, practise reflective questioning.
• Next time something negative happens, think of three different interpretations that might be more useful.