Here is an excerpt from an article written by J.P. Flaum and Becky Winklerfor Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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On the surface, John looked like the perfect up-and-coming executive to lead BFC’s Asia expansion plans. He went to an Ivy League B-school. His track record was flawless. Every goal or objective the organization had ever put in front of him, he’d crushed without breaking a sweat.

But something broke when John went to Asia. John struggled with the ambiguity, and he didn’t take prudent risks. He quickly dismissed several key opportunities to reach out for feedback and guidance from leadership. It became clear that John had succeeded in the past by doing what he knew and operating rather conservatively within his domain. It also became clear that the company was going to massively miss the promises it had made to the Board and the Street if John remained in the role.

With a heavy heart, BFC’s CEO removed his promising protégé from the role and redeployed him back in the US. He decided he had no choice but to put a different kind of leader in the role – Alex.

While talented, Alex had come to be known behind closed doors by the moniker “DTM” – difficult to manage. He marched to the beat of his own drummer, and he wasn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. He loved a challenge, and he was comfortable taking risks. It turned out to be the best move the CEO ever made.

No stranger to ambiguity, Alex was flexible in formulating his strategy and sought feedback from the people around him. He made a risky move at the beginning that backfired on him. But as a result, he learned what not to do and recalibrated his approach. That was the key to success. His tendency to buck the established BFC way of doing things was exactly what was required for the company to successfully flex its approach and win in the new territory.

What Alex’s success exemplifies is the importance of “learning agility”: a set of qualities and attributes that allow an individual’s to stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and rise to a diverse array of challenges. It’s easy to assume that those qualities would be highly prized in any business environment. Flexibility, adaptability and resilience are qualities of leadership that any organization ought to value.

But in practice, this is not the case. As a rule, organizations have favored other qualities and attributes – in particular, those that are easy to measure, and those that allow an employee’s development to be tracked in the form of steady, linear progress through a set of well-defined roles and business structures.

Learning agility, by contrast, has until recently been hard to measure and hard to define. It depends on related qualities such as emotional intelligence that are only just beginning to really be valued. It also relates to behaviors – such as the ability to recover from and capitalize on failure – that some managers would prefer not to think about.

According to the researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Center for Creative Leadership, learning agility is defined as follows:

Learning agility is a mind-set and corresponding collection of practices that allow leaders to continually develop, grow and utilize new strategies that will equip them for the increasingly complex problems they face in their organizations.

Learning-agile individuals are “continually able to jettison skills, perspectives and ideas that are no longer relevant, and learn new ones that are,” the researchers say.

The Pillars of Learning Agility

The research identified four behaviors that enable learning agility and one that derails it.

The learning-agility “enablers” are:

o Innovating: This involves questioning the status quo and challenging long-held assumptions with the goal of discovering new and unique ways of doing things. Innovating requires new experiences, which provide perspective and a bigger knowledge base. Learning-agile individuals generate new ideas through their ability to view issues from multiple angles.

o Performing: Learning from experience occurs most often when overcoming an unfamiliar challenge. But in order to learn from such challenges, the individual must remain present and engaged, handle the stress brought on by ambiguity and adapt quickly in order to perform. This requires observation and listening skills, and the ability to process data quickly. Learning-agile people pick up new skills quickly and perform them better than less agile colleagues.

o Reflecting: Having new experiences does not guarantee that you will learn from them. Learning-agile people look for feedback and eagerly process information to better understand their own assumptions and behavior. As a result they are insightful about themselves, others and problems. In fact, in prior studies, Green Peak Partners discovered that strong self-awareness was the single highest predictor of success across C-suite roles.

o Risking: Learning-agile people are pioneers – they venture into unknown territory and put themselves “out there” to try new things. They take “progressive risk” – not thrill-seeking, but risk that leads to opportunity. They volunteer for jobs and roles where success is not guaranteed, where failure is a possibility. They stretch themselves outside their comfort zones in a continuous cycle of learning and confidence-building that ultimately leads to success.

The learning-agility “derailer” is:

o Defending: Being open to experience is fundamental to learning. Individuals who remain closed or defensive when challenged or given critical feedback tend to be low in learning agility. By contrast, high learning-agile individuals seek feedback, process it and adapt based on their newfound understanding of themselves, situations and problems.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

J.P. Flaum is the Managing Partner at Green Peak Partners. In addition to managing Green Peak, J.P. spends most of his professional time coaching CEOs on critical leadership and human capital objectives.

Becky Winkler, Ph.D., is a Partner at Green Peak Partners. Becky leverages a rich background as both a business consultant and an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist to help organizations make decisions around the selection, promotion, and development of key executives.