How to Foster Organizational Agility – A Primer
Is your company scrambling amidst the Covid-19 virus and its impact to your business?
If you haven’t been motivated to invest in your organization’s agility, this pandemic presents a real-life situation that brings the need into sharp focus. Regardless if it’s this virus or a natural disaster or a change in the business environment, we all know times are uncertain, but what keeps us from figuring out how to make our organizations more agile and to truly live in agility?
There’s a pay-off for those companies that invest in agility and make it work.
An MIT study found that agile companies grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-agile companies.
Agility takes leadership and investing in an organizational structure and culture that supports it:
Creative, inspirational leaders who set a strong vision and expectations for continuous improvement, movement, and changing direction when needed
Innovation investment supported from the top down
Established values that guide leader, team, and employee behaviors
Clear alignment around roles and rules for decision-making
Breaking down of silos, allowing for open sharing of information
Technology enablement that facilitates collaboration and speed
For more on how to be an agile leader, read this McKinsey article.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) just came out with an article by a couple of Bain leaders that offers great insights on how the C-suite needs to operate to support their agile organizations.
A few highlights:
Not all functions and processes within an enterprise need to follow agile practices. Like McKinsey’s guidance noted below, some aspects of the business should be standardized and stable, while others are innovated.
A benefit for executive leaders is that an agile leadership approach allows them to spend more time on strategy and less on operational details, empowering their direct reports to step up, lead, and own their scope of responsibilities.
A critical part of these efforts is to make time for leaders to be available daily to make decisions, provide feedback, and remove barriers to teams moving forward.
In many companies, innovation is thought to be a place to put “second tier” talent. Many in those roles would object to such a classification. I agree, and in fact, innovation and agile practices, especially when knew, should be staffed with different talent and some of a company’s best talent.
Leaders need to coach more and dictate less. That is accompanied with holding more work sessions, not meetings, to problem solve with their teams as a thought partner.
It might seem contradictory, but process and structure actually facilitate agility.
McKinsey offers the most that I’ve found on becoming an agile organization. They talk about it as what can provide the “stable backbone” to allow for “dynamic” elements:
The backbone is the structure, processes, and governance, which brings some operational discipline.
This can then support dynamic, small teams and processes that allow for agility and fast cycles.
For more on “five trademarks of agile organizations,” read this McKinsey article.
Another good HBR article by Bain leaders provides context on getting your arms around agile practices.
A few takeaways:
Know where in the organization and the situations that should exist that best correlate to agile practices.
Start small and build on successes.
Support agile teams from the top and by breaking down barriers internally to support their success.
Outside of what’s traditionally known as “agile methodology,” borrowed from software development, there are tools that can be build agile thinking practices, if you will.
Consider (not a comprehensive list, but a start):
Futures thinking
Business model innovation
Scenario planning
Open innovation
Integrative thinking
It’s hard to build these skills in a time of crisis. But you may just have to quickly put things in place.
Start here:
Keep your team focused on your purpose and set expectations that priorities may change regularly.
Re-focus your team on your values or establish new values you want your team to embrace during this time.
Make sure roles and rules for decision-making are clear.
Be open and transparent with information.
Establish small, problem-solving teams to address key issues and bring solutions to leadership.
Hold daily stand-up meetings for feedback and decision making.
Hold weekly learning and planning sessions to chart your next steps.
Create a team to think through scenario planning. You might as well put this tool to use now.
Then, once the organization is past the initial crisis reaction to the pandemic, commit to starting, testing, and then further building and deepening long-term, agile practices into your organization. It will require a commitment from the top to make it real.
Sources:
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-agility-pays
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