The decade of agility: a key skill of the future

As cited by Alvin Toffler, more than 50 years ago, one’s ability (and willingness) to learn, unlearn and relearn new knowledge and skills have never been so important. This is particularly true nowadays as globalization and digitalization have continued to grow at an unprecedented rate resulting in a continuously changing, dynamic world. This shift places unique demands on various organizations across the globe and requires many different capabilities from workers of all hierarchical levels.

A global study by Oxford Economics conducted more than a decade ago examined how globalization and corporate environment transformations will affect future workforce needs. Being ‘agile,’ innovative, having the ability to consider multiple scenarios, dealing with complexity and managing paradoxes were predicted as some of the in-demand skills for the decade (Oxford Economics, 2012).

The decade of agility: an emerging indicator of high potentials

Within the academic setting, agility itself has been found to predict employees being identified as high potentials (by a factor of 18!); a significantly better predictor than job performance (Dries et al., 2012).

As predicted, a global industry survey conducted by Talent Strategy Group in 2015 found that agility has become the most frequently used criterion to measure leadership potential, with 62% of the respondents from the world’s largest organizations citing it. Other aspects, such as emotional intelligence, personality and intelligence, were cited much less often (“Potential: Who’s Doing What,” 2015). Church et al. (2015) also found that over 50% of them have begun incorporating agility in their high potential identification and senior leadership assessment, higher than other essential constructs such as resilience, executive presence and cognitive skills.

The decade of agility: a tested measure of future leadership

In a meta-analysis study of 19 different agility studies in the last 15 years, De Meuse (2017) found an overall mean correlation coefficient of r = .47 (p< .001) – i.e. a strong relationship – between agility and the success of leaders, both now and in the future.

Standing true to the test of time, agility has still been seen as a critical 21st-century leadership need. “Leading with speed and agility through complexity and ambiguity” is very much the unique requirement of organizations’ future leaders (Deloitte, 2019).

Agility is now an increasing part of modern organizations’ leadership models and high-potential frameworks (Rotolo et al., 2018). Inquire today to discover how your organization can be a part of – or even lead – this global trend and transformation.