3 STEPS TO BUILD BUSINESS AGILITY:
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SHIFT ORGANIZATION CULTURE
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EQUIP, ENABLE AND EMPOWER EMPLOYEES
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PROMOTE CONTINUOUS LEARNING AND INNOVATION
Agility is a key ingredient to staying relevant in today’s volatile and disruptive market environment. Covid is one thing. But changes in technology and customer needs come just as quickly and unexpectedly. Today’s winning companies practice how to adapt and respond to changes. They practice agility, and get better and better at it.
These 3 steps will help your company develop business agility:
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Shift the Organizational Culture
Building agility starts with a vision of the future. Leaders need to clearly communicate the vision. Not one time, but all the time. In every meeting, every one-to-one, every town hall. Leaders also need the right mindset to enable and support agility, recognizing it’s a journey filled with twists and turns, speed bumps and potholes.
Managers and Supervisors set the tone for any business change. These front-line and mid-level managers need to advocate for what the vision and change means for every employee. Doing so enables them to create the right environment where employees are able to experiment and continuously learn how to improve what they do and how they do it.
Trust is a major cornerstone in building agility and the culture to embrace it. Leaders must trust their teams to get the job done but also provide the security they need to not be afraid of making a mistake or two. True agility includes faster feedback. The kind of constructive criticism aimed not at individuals, but focused on steps along the path to improvement. Don’t expect perfect outcomes the first time, but celebrate wins in the right direction.
Bottom line: The culture shift starts at the top, with leaders walking the talk, supported by managers and supervisors behaving differently. They need to support more collaboration and teamwork, and will need training on how to do it. Successful organizations begin with the shift in culture, and continue by investing in employees in new ways.
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Equip, Enable, and Empower Employees
The key to agility is to ensure that everyone in the company is able to pursue change. This means that you have to ingrain change and agility in your organization’s backbone – your employees.
Encourage ideas, listen and really listen to those ideas, ask employees why their idea matters. Ask to understand and learn. For employee growth and learning, make sure to incorporate training on how to collaborate, to work in teams, to think bigger than their immediate roles.
Organizations with high agility have a bias for action. This “Go Live” attitude is evident in teams who are not afraid to experiment to get feedback faster. High agility teams recognize that small changes are more beneficial than big changes. Teams should be empowered to call the shots. Bureaucracy is removed so that teams can execute rapid but well-informed decisions.
Teams are more nimble to assess and adjust their projects when they approach projects with an experimental mindset. When learning is the focus, teams become more creative and innovative. This leads to a better product overall.
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Promote Continuous Learning and Innovation
Face it, new ideas usually don’t work right the first time. When your employees and teams make a mistake, ask questions to help them think through what they learned and how to do better next time. The most agile companies have team celebrations to share what they learn, not only what they achieve. Sure you want to celebrate wins, every win, no matter how small. Because you’re celebrating people and their efforts to try new ideas.
Feedback is a key ingredient to continuous learning and innovation. Encourage feedback to your teams from all directions – Quality, Sales, Finance, and customers. That’s right. Customer feedback is a powerful motivator for employee ideas and change. Encourage employees to talk with customers directly.
Launch your Business Agility
A culture that supports business agility is a Collaborative Culture. What is a Collaborative Culture?
- Doesn’t mean giving up controls, processes, discipline or metrics
- Trust people to do the right thing
- Less telling, more asking
- Less coordinating, more coaching
- Encourage teamwork for problem solving
- Recognize team successes, less focus on individual heroes
Learn more about the shift to a Collaborative Culture and our Team Development Training that supports it.
Learn more about our Culture Development process
