Thrive In Turbulent Times With Agile Leadership

Change management is an oxymoron

Change management. Those two words make about as much sense together as “holy war,” “non-working mother,” “rap music,” “help desk,” or “political principles.” Change can’t be managed. Change can be ignored, resisted, responded to, capitalized upon, and created. But it can’t be managed and made to march to some orderly step-by-step process.

The pandemic has brought massive disruption to many organizations. It’s shown that the world’s moving way too fast for traditional approaches. They’re too rigid. Organizations that will survive — even thrive — in these disruptive times are fast and flexible. They’re much more agile. 
 

Agile approaches began a few decades ago with software development. According to the Agile Alliance, “One thing that separates Agile from other approaches to software development is the focus on the people doing the work and how they work together. Solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams utilizing the appropriate practices for their context.”

In this new age, there’s a growing movement to apply agile principles to leadership and organization development. According to the Agile Alliance, “If you extend the idea of Agile as a mindset, then people seeking Business Agility ask themselves, ‘How might we structure and operate our organization in a way that allows us to create and respond to change and deal with uncertainty?’ You might say that business agility is a recognition that in order for people in an organization to operate with an Agile mindset, the entire organization needs to support that mindset.”

Three vital leader shifts are needed to deal with today’s seismic disruptions:

The Pandemic Could Reboot and Re-energize our Organizations

An old Yiddish adage reminds us, “Man plans, God laughs.” It’s been said that anyone peering into a crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass. At risk of joining the swelled ranks of failed forecasters crunching on glass shards, here are my thoughts/hopes of the good that could emerge from this these tumultuous times:

 

• Interconnected and Interdependent — it’s even clearer how much we need each other and must work together.
• Teamwork and Collaboration — we’re seeing that successfully getting through this crisis depends heavily on intertwined support systems.
• Hiding/Ignoring Bad News Leads to Disaster — what we don’t know can — and often does — hurt us.
• Openness, Transparency, and Trust — highly effective leaders foster a culture that welcomes and addresses “the brutal facts” — often touchy and difficult issues.
• “Relationship Capital” Pays Big Dividends — the “soft skills” of connecting, caring, and communicating give us healthy relationship accounts we can draw from during tough times.
• Rebalancing Virtual and Face-to-Face Work — online meetings and working from home can complement daily commuting and travel for increased effectiveness and better work/life balance.
• Separating the Vital Few from Trivial Many Tasks — an urgent crisis helps us reassess our overload of meetings, e-mails, projects, and daily tasks to focus on what really matters.
• Agility Determines Change Victims or Victors — highly effective leaders will emerge from this crisis reflecting on lessons learned and how to prepare for the next wave of change they’ll inevitably need to deal with.

 

Keys to Building an Agile, Change Adaptive Organization

“Workers are more adaptive and optimistic about the future than their leaders recognize.” That’s a key conclusion of a major study by Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute. The study encompassed 11,000 lower-income and middle-skill workers and 6,500 business leaders in 11 countries. They found “the two groups perceived the future in significantly different ways.” Workers didn’t share their leaders’ change anxiety and “revealed themselves to be much more eager to embrace change and learn new skills than their employers gave them credit for.”

The authors of Your Workforce is More Adaptable Than You Think, report that “workers are seeking more support and guidance to prepare themselves for future employment than management is providing.” They identify five ways leaders can provide stronger change leadership:
 

1. Don’t just set up training programs — create a learning culture.
2. Engage employees in the transition instead of herding them through it.
3. Look beyond the “spot market” for talent.
4. Collaborate to deepen the talent pool.
5. Find ways to manage chronic uncertainty.

Here are a few steps for leading in a new age:
 

• Increase shared leadership throughout your entire organization around the critical concept that “leadership is action, not position.”
• Strengthen coaching skills to help managers “leadershift” to better energize, engage, and enable their team members.
• To get partnering behavior, treat everyone like partners. Share financial and other “confidential” information openly so everyone can see how his or her efforts contribute.
• Ask frontline service providers what systems and processes would better help them serve internal partners or external customers. Get their involvement in prioritizing the areas to be changed and improving them.
• Use focus groups (a cross-section of frontline staff) to test new management directions before making grand announcements to everyone. Even if you press on against the advice of the focus groups, you’ll have a deeper insight on how to face the issues the new direction may raise.
• Systematically collect internal and external complaints and trend them to see which ones come up most frequently. Get input on the top priorities and get frontline people participating in addressing them.
• In small group meetings ask for “the dumbest things we do around here,” “biggest barriers to reaching our goals,” “major implementation issues we need to address,” “pet peeves,” “dumb rules and forms,” “things that drive you crazy,” or the like. List each point. Cluster similar points into major groups. Identify those things you directly control, can influence, and don’t control at all. Prioritize the things you control and get ideas/volunteers/plans to address them. Do the same for things you can influence. Discuss how you can all accept and let go of the things you can’t do anything about.

To build agile, change adaptive organizations, the action of leading — taking initiative, seeing new possibilities, encouraging and supporting, reframing, harnessing the winds of change to grow forward, and overcoming helplessness with hopefulness — needs to be broadly shared by everyone everywhere, regardless of formal roles or positions.

Whether change is a threat or an opportunity depends on preparation. Whether we become change victims or victors depends on our readiness for change. As Abraham Lincoln (“I will prepare myself and my time must come.” That’s change agility.

Jim Clemmer is an international leadership and organization development speaker, author, facilitator, and coach. Jim’s seven international best-selling books, blog, columns, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of leaders worldwide.  Visit www.clemmergroup.com  Connect Jim Clemmer