Andre Shojaie is CEO at HumanLearn and a successful entrepreneur helping individuals and organizations perform in a changing world.
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After working for the past 20 years in business and in agility development in the public and private sectors, two concepts are emerging today in the search for performance and well-being in a VUCA environment: behavioral and emotional agility.
What Are They?
Behavioral agility in an organizational context is the ability of a team to act together, depending on the context, in order to achieve a common goal whose meaning is shared—i.e., what behavior(s) you need to adapt in your reality in order to perform. By changing our behaviors, we change our outcomes, thus ultimately changing our beliefs and culture. Emotional agility refers to an individual's ability to recognize, understand and manage their emotions and those of others. Being emotionally agile paves the way for productivity.
These two types of agility are complementary and should be combined to allow you to be aware of your emotions and act accordingly on your behavior to be as in tune as possible with your environment.
Behavioral Agility
Through my various interviews with managers on the subject of individual performance or on how to reduce time-to-value, I've observed that behavioral agility is the key to innovation and value creation because it allows individuals and teams to respond quickly and effectively to changing contexts and new challenges in dynamic environments.
To integrate this agility into your organizational culture, you can coach employees to develop skills such as flexibility, collective intelligence, transparency and creativity. In other words, it is about developing the behaviors the organization needs to navigate an ever-changing world. What I have personally tested is bringing a playful experience with horseback riding.
It is experiential coaching aimed at establishing a relationship with the horse in order to develop its behavioral skills or soft skills. It is a question of experimenting with your feelings and emotions in front of the horse in order to:
- Better understand yourself and act as accurately as possible.
- Contribute to the performance of the company.
- Develop well-being.
Emotional Agility
Susan David, a psychology researcher and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, defines emotional agility as the ability to be with our emotions with curiosity, compassion and, most importantly, the courage to act in accordance with our values. Within organizations and, in particular, in contexts of transformation (digital shift, regulatory change, etc.), everyone must recognize and regulate their emotions, develop self-awareness and accept discomfort to seek the benefits of change in order to grow personally and grow the organization.
Support for developing emotional agility can be approached in different forms: coaching, training, etc. Going back to the previous coaching example, the horse prefers above all emotional coherence, that is to say, expressing the emotions as they are without trying to hide, control or modify them. This coaching exercise also allows participants to learn that their agility, much more than their emotional intelligence, can allow them to better manage their emotions.
A Tool To Become A Better Leader
These two skills also have a direct impact on leadership by positioning leaders as proactive players, in particular, in the context of a business transformation and adaptation process. This agile leadership develops through six abilities:
1. Self-awareness: Recognizing and understanding your personality, emotions and skills. Become aware of your power to act and persevere.
2. Adaptation: Develop your ability to adapt and react effectively to change by anticipating your actions, cooperating with others in a satisfied relationship and innovating just enough to stay relevant in your market.
3. Regulation: Accept and embrace difficult emotions by improving your ability to regulate emotions and behavior.
4. Cultivate mindfulness: Focus on the present moment to create a highly collaborative work environment and foster positive relationships.
5. Solicit feedback: Getting feedback from others can help you identify areas for improvement.
6. Be credible: Beyond professional competence, it also means demonstrating active listening and empathy, managing stress, knowing how to communicate and mobilizing your team.
Main Challenges
While both concepts are important, challenges are to be anticipated when it comes time to put them into practice in an organizational context. This list is not exhaustive, but it concerns the challenges that I most often encountered in recent years:
1. Lack of understanding: Many people may not understand what emotional and behavioral agility is and why it is important. As a prerequisite, it is essential to obtain the buy-in and support of leaders by demonstrating the benefits (the why) for the employee and for the organization.
2. Difficulty measuring success: Emotional and behavioral agility can be difficult to measure (intangible vs. tangible). It is important to identify beforehand the criteria for success that make sense in your environment or the specific, achievable goals to be able to show the benefits for employees and the organization.
3. Resistance to self-reflection: Encouraging self-reflection and openness to feedback can be difficult. You may see resistance in some people to examine their own behavior and emotions. Here again, experience shows that it is important in this exercise to be accompanied by experts (HR and professional coaches).
Conclusion
In today's fast-paced environment, you may feel as if you're always being pulled in a million different directions. However, organizations still have a need for performance, and it has now been proven that the well-being of people (personal development) at work contributes to an increase in productivity (professional development). From this perspective, behavioral and emotional agility are two key skills that help individuals and organizations achieve their goals more effectively.
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