Agile organizations need agile people.
Agile is the buzzword of the moment. Every day we read about the necessity of developing agile organizations—but shouldn’t we be talking about agile people?
Agile teams and organizations stress speed, experimentation, continuous learning, role mobility and flexible resource allocation, which are key to competitiveness. I’m concerned that there’s a missing element so obvious we take it for granted. According to the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group research, agile transformation requires nothing less than a change of mindset on the part of every employee. In a time when we need agility in business, we need agility in life. We need agile people.
Deep down in the charts, graphs and bullet points showing how to change an organization, descriptions of agile transformation note that employees who are asked to adopt a radically new way of working need to adopt a radically new way of thinking and feeling about work, including the ability to reinvent, the courage to fail fast and the empathy to work well in diverse teams. They need to communicate constantly, be accountable, be customer-focused and above all be open to change. Are your employees mentally and emotionally equipped with the resilience to handle this radical change?
The urgent need to reinvent companies as agile teams makes resilience a competitive advantage. Resilience empowers employees and leaders to develop greater emotional intelligence and self-awareness. And resilience helps people focus under pressure, manage their impulses, solve problems creatively. These are important building blocks for agile teams.
Every employee must learn the skills that make them adaptable, help them deal with stress and remain emotionally connected to work. Resilience enables all three. When leaders and employees embrace these skills, powerful things happen.
Becoming adaptable
A Fortune 50 company I work with has an award-winning healthy lifestyles practice, but because it is an information technology firm, its people are continuously assaulted by the speed of change. In response, leaders and employees built a company-wide resilience initiative that focused on each individual developing personal skills according to their needs. Not surprisingly, many tech-oriented employees at this firm took a logic-based approach to an emotional challenge, identifying exactly what was causing stress and tackling it head-on with dispassionate analysis and new work styles, such as handling difficult customer calls with emotion control or dealing with a work challenge with flexibility and focus. They are more self-aware and adaptable. With resilience, employees are learning to manage the relentless changes with confidence.
Train the mind to manage stress