Agile organizations need agile people.
This post is the first in a series of six articles on organizational agility.
I used to get to the office early and stay later than anyone. As a leader, I wanted to demonstrate my dedication to our success, and I also wanted to set an example. What began as an aspiration became a habit and finally, in my mind, one of the secrets to my success. But more recently, it just wasn’t working for me. As my days increasingly became blocked off into nonstop 45-minute increments, it was becoming harder and harder to stay on top of things. I tracked my activities throughout the day and recognized that I could get more done if I worked from home for two hours in the morning — no meetings — and drove in after the rush hour.
Wow! By taking care of email and catching up on reports first thing, I could be more productive, less stressed, and entirely present for my team. But squaring this new way to working with my belief that face time equals productive time – that was hard. And even harder to confront and adapt was my “baked in” belief that people should be at work when they are working, and that teams are more productive when they are working together. But one of the foundational skillsets we need to embrace to be resilient is to be self-aware and to leverage that awareness, discarding behavior that is no longer effective for us, for our teams, for our business.
Agile transformation is the theme of the decade. We’re saturated with reports, books, charts, infographics and white papers describing the agile organization. In their eagerness to restructure, leaders too often miss a decisive truth: Agile transformations depend entirely on the human factor. A McKinsey report says simply: “Change yourself first, then the organization.”
Far more than understanding how agile systems work, the real change starts with us as leaders needing to find the courage to reinvent ourselves and publicly model these behaviors across our companies. Simply put, as leaders, we have to be open to changing our own habitual ways of working, of evaluating success, of interacting with our colleagues – and we have to be willing to own it, be open and honest about it, and empower others to change as well.
This may seem like a trivial example of change, but look again: all around us we see examples of changes in our business processes, our methods of working and getting results, the way we interact with our customers and colleagues. As leaders we set the pace for change, model it and enable it in others. The alternative is to be disrupted into irrelevance. We find examples every day in the business press of companies who failed to institutionalize changing business processes at their own peril (hello, brick and mortar retailers).
To know what to change about your own attitudes and behaviors, begin by accepting that business now is in a permanent state of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), and we are all affected by those forces. There aren’t any hard and fast rules, so start modeling the behaviors that will make you more effective and successful. That is, become agile yourself.
Agile leaders are agile learners