Introducing Module Six of the Leadership Skills for Non-Supervisors series, focusing on the development of agility and resilience as essential leadership competencies. It outlines practical strategies to strengthen these skills and examines how behavioral styles influence a person's ability to adapt and persevere through change.
Key Insights
- Agility involves adapting quickly and effectively to change, helping individuals remain solution-focused and productive in shifting environments.
- Resilience enables individuals to recover from stress and challenges while maintaining focus and optimism, contributing to emotional regulation and long-term effectiveness.
- Leaders and team members who demonstrate agility and resilience build credibility and trust, which supports organizational adaptability and mission alignment during uncertainty.
This lesson is a preview from our Leadership Skills for Non-Supervisors Course and Leadership training courses. Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome back to Leadership Skills for Non-Supervisors. We're going to be working on Module Six now, which is Agility and Resilience. For this module, we want you to understand the role of agility and resilience as leadership skills, and we're going to review agility and resilience for non-supervisors.
We're also going to discuss how we can strengthen our agility and resilience, and we're going to map the DISC behavioral styles to agility and resilience. So let's start off with understanding the role of agility and resilience, and we're going to go back to OPM's Executive Core Qualifications. Agility and resilience are defined as anticipating and adapting to change, new ideas, new information, and new conditions; being committed to continuous improvement; dealing effectively with pressure; and remaining optimistic and persistent even under adversity.
We can define agility as the ability to adapt quickly and effectively when circumstances change. Think about someone who's very agile—they can quickly adapt when things are difficult, when change occurs, or when a crisis happens. They're able to adjust so they can stay productive, remain focused on solutions, and maintain a positive attitude even when plans or priorities shift. If we can be agile, it helps us be faster and smarter in our response to change, and we know change is likely to happen.
It's just a part of life. There are a lot of people whose natural response to change is to resist it, but if we have agility and we've strengthened our agility, we're likely to have a faster response to change and be able to adapt more quickly to it. Agility also encourages innovation because it helps us stay open to new ideas or feedback. Agility really builds credibility for leaders—and even for non-leaders—who are able to adjust gracefully when things happen. In general, agility helps organizations stay competitive and stay mission-aligned even when the environment is uncertain.
Resilience is the ability to recover from challenges, setbacks, or stress. It means that when these things happen, we're still able to maintain focus and optimism. Often, very resilient people realize that they learn and grow when difficulties occur. Having strong resilience helps leaders maintain a calm, confident, and clear-thinking perspective under pressure. When people see their leaders being resilient, it really builds trust. People trust and feel confident in those leaders because they remain calm, confident, and clear-thinking.
Being resilient also promotes emotional regulation, which helps prevent burnout. When we are able to manage our stress, we're going to be more effective long-term because, through our resilience, we can turn stress into a learning opportunity. Agility is about moving away from getting caught up in “but this wasn’t the plan” or “this wasn’t supposed to happen” to adjusting to “here’s how we’ll succeed anyway.” Resilience gives us the opportunity to transform adversity into a growth opportunity.
