How Leaders Can Improve Their Thinking Agility

https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/How-Leaders-Can-Improve-Their-Thinking-Agility

Jesse Sostrin is a director at PwC’s U.S. Leadership Coaching Center of Excellence.

Interesting insights

Leaders operate with near-constant deficits of time, energy, resources, and focus, which keeps them locked in a perpetual state of catch-up. This reality erodes quality contemplation. Although there are strategies to help you react to the urgencies of the day without sacrificing time to reflect, the value and impact of your thoughts are not simply a measure of minutes. Rather, they can be measured by the thinking agility you apply to changing priorities and circumstances. 

More specifically, your capacity to reflect dynamically amid the constantly shifting work landscape is what counts most. The strongest lever you, as a leader, have over how you manage your people, projects, and priorities is your own thinking. Yet worry about being able to equip a new generation of leaders with this ability is keeping a majority of the world’s CEOs up at night… 

…Leaders, you can increase your thinking agility — and develop these related competencies — by leveraging the following three strategies. 

Know your thinking sweet spot. The first step is to develop greater awareness of your thinking tendencies…. 

Uncover your thinking gaps. Knowing your thinking sweet spot is crucial because we instinctively develop habits and patterns of behavior around them. These well-worn patterns may be the cause of our success, but as our roles evolve and the challenges we face shift, leaders need to branch out beyond the sweet spot and develop broader thinking skills. Filling in these thinking gaps by exploring the domains you tend to avoid will allow you to more easily collaborate with and influence people. 

As situations change, let your thinking change too. Not all thinking is created equal, which is good because not every task requires the same response. Once you know your thinking sweet spot, and your gaps, you can begin to cultivate thinking diversity by considering the ideal response in a variety of situationsnking Sweet Spot