Applying agility in the workplace has become a trend during the past few years for its wide range of benefits, such as adaptability, faster work speed, and innovation. However, some companies fail to implement it in its correct sense and gain its fruits. This raises several questions: is it because agile is only successful for software companies? Or is it because some companies may have a limited or ambiguous understanding of the concept and its implementation?
What does Agile mean?
Despite the fact that agility is one of the most popular and challenging concepts, there is no one common definition explaining it. A study explained that there are four main factors that most definitions highlight to define agile organizations. The first two are the organization’s ability to act to change in internal or external business environments at the right time and its response to act proactively on and predict change to make the most of it as an opportunity.
The third component involves learning and continuously expanding or accumulating skills, knowledge, and experience. Last but not least, agile organizations have to build a network structure, a people-centered and purpose-driven culture, as well as iterative processes to improve/enhance a product, service, and the like. Taking into consideration those factors, Petermann and Zacher define an agile organization as “a network of self-organized teams in which employees are able to autonomously make decisions and change the course of action”.
How to apply agility in your workplace
Although the rate of organizations applying agility in the workplace is accelerating, not all organizations are applying it in the right manner which might affect the employees’ performance in a negative way. This is not because agility works only in IT or software companies; agility can be implemented in almost all types of organizations. It is because companies are not embedding the concept in the right sense.
There are several building blocks for developing agility in the workplace such as strategy, values, agile team, organizational structure, agile leaders & managers, culture, and processes. These building blocks can be grouped into two categories: organizational level (strategy, organizational structure, culture, and agile leaders) and team and individual levels.
Organizational level
Strategy: For companies to successfully embrace agility, they should create an agile strategy that is aligned with their overall business strategy. This would create a clear roadmap for applying agility in the whole company.
Organizational structure: Having a long hierarchy that does not allow smooth decision-making does not allow for the successful implementation of agility.
Culture: Companies should embed agility and its components into their culture to successfully implement it.
Agile Leaders: In applying agility, leaders are not only knowledge experts or experienced managers anymore; instead, they are supportive leaders that allow decision-making and delegation within their teams.
Reward systems: Ashutosh Muduli (2019) recommends that allowing nontraditional rewards – like skill-based pay systems, improvement-based incentives, and nonmonetary rewards – do help in fostering workplace agility.
Information systems: They are crucial to boosting operational speed and flexibility within the workforce agility. Muduli pointed out that information systems will help in giving access to timely information associated with the customer, accounting, and business performance, as well as management, organizational leaders.
Team and individual levels
a. Team level (definition and characteristics)According to Petermann and Zacher, agile teams are defined as “teams that use agile methods in their daily business”. Despite a wide range of agile methods and practices, most of them involve common characteristics. Those characteristics include self-organization, delegation, a quick exchange of information, rapid and continuous two-way communication, and feedback with the customers as well as within the team.
Based on those factors, agile teams are able to develop high transparency and a method to measure progress. They have the capability to use iterative processes and respond to changes efficiently and successfully. Agile teams will be able to direct their attention on simple designs that reveal incremental steps that are easy to understand for everyone included.
b. Individual Level (definition and characteristics)
There is not one common definition for agile individuals that is accepted by everyone. Petermann and Zacher describe agile individuals as “people who have the abilities, knowledge, and skills to proactively seek opportunities, and are able to quickly adapt to new situations.” They are also characterized as people who have the required skills to predict, apply, and make full use of and derive benefit from changes.
c. Individual characteristics and team formation
Since individual characteristics and team formation are critical for implementing agility, Petermann and Zacher suggest that companies should re-evaluate their recruitment and development practices. Recruiters should highlight agility skills in their job postings in order to attract candidates with an agile mindset and personality. During interviewing and selection phases, HR people should focus on personality characteristics and cognitive abilities that focus on change.
Training and development are also very important to help agile teams adapt rapidly to changing market requirements. Agile teams need to get updated with the latest skills and knowledge to respond successfully to market changes. Leaders should also be provided with training to lead their teams successfully and efficiently.
Moreover, organizations should train their employees about various methods and tools (such as scrum) that could aid them to apply agility in the workplace. However, it has to be noted that not all circumstances are treated with the same amount of agility and not all methods and practices can be applied in all workplaces. Companies need to ensure that the methods they are using do suit their environments.
There is no doubt that implementing agility is not a piece of cake and companies need to understand the concept and its implementation thoroughly. You can find below some ideas on how you can do that:
Start small: It is better to apply agility on a smaller scale. For instance, you can start with the research and development department. When the team members master agility, they can transfer the knowledge and methods to other departments.
Stop and review: During the implementation phase, you should always stop and assess the current situation to make sure that you are applying agility in the right way, whether in decision-making, meetings, processes, or others. This will also help in assessing whether the teams do really understand the concept of agility or not.
Communicate: Always allow for two-way communication and feedback within the team members and from top-down and down-top in the company. This will enable feedback and continuous learning across the organization.
To sum up, agility can be applied in almost all companies and in any industry, however, they need to make sure that it is applied in the right sense to gain its fruits. Moreover, companies need to make sure that they need agility in the first place before they go into the hustle of its implementation rather than just trying to follow a trending concept.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on January 07, 2022 and has been updated as of October 09, 2024.
Catalyzing teamwork and supporting people to work towards the company’s vision is very important. Having a common belief among people inside the company is what needs to be established first. The beliefs of people refer to their values.
Values serve as the guiding principles of the organization. They need to be set not only by managements’ input but also by employees who will need to comply. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has done this when he was leading a change from a mainframe maker to a robust provider of integrated hardware, networking, and software solutions back in 2002.
Samproposed three (3) value statements: commitment to the customer, excellence through innovation, and integrity that earns trust, which then changed as per input from the workforce and after being shared with employees to comment on. However, this is not the end of the story. Collaborative effort to set the values is one side of the coin. Believing in them and steering the company forward through these values is the second side that compliments the first side. The new agreed-upon values are dedication to every client’s success, an innovation that matters for our company and for the world, and trust and personal responsibility in all relationships (Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart 2004).
Teamwork is always a key to change. Creating the right team that evolves and gets bigger along the process of change is important. Putting together the ideal team creates the needed collaboration and energy to change. It can start with a few numbers of people and eventuallygets bigger. While there are tools that can create harmony between team members, ensuring they all follow the same direction to the desired change is crucial to success.
Creating harmony among teams and team members involved in the change is important to minimize resistance. Resistors are everywhere and can be created at any time. They exist due to the fear of change, not understanding the big picture, and how they will fit in. This is where leaders of companies and leaders of change teams need to create the urgency to continue. Even if achievement was gained, it still needs to be reflected in other areas of the organization.Change needs to be absorbed by the culture to maintain and sustain its outcome.Sustainability can’t be achieved in short periods. It requires continuous efforts to build harmony among organizations on any achievement andto introduce sustainable practices gradually into the surrounding environment. (John P. Kotter 1995).
Attitude and behaviors of employees are important to keep at high levels during any change. To steer this positively, employees need to be the ones who acknowledge the small changes related to a big change in place. They need to share their perceptions of how things are being led and how this is resulting in new consequences that can relate to a big change.
Employees are the ones who are executing the change. To acknowledge this and empower it, leaders need to listen to employees and use their perceptions and insights as valuable input to make any modifications to the plan for change (Ron Carucci 2019). Getting the buy-in from employees means that they need to be part of setting the actions forward and developing the change plan. Asking “how can we do this?” and “how they can contribute to this?” or “how they can support us in this?” is crucial to bring people into one group feeling empowered, cared for, and letting employees be convinced that their leaders truly believe in them. No change can happen without such an important asset which is the employees (Harvard Management Update 2008).
Creating a common purpose for employees and driving them forward with hope is essential for value-based management. Motivating them to realize the need to change leads to more agility and the achievement of objectives (Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart 2004). Motivating employees to be part of a change is not easy, especially if there were previous attempts for change that have either stopped or failed. Failed attempts at change can cause employees not to trust any new change or choose not to be part of it. Employees can even not put forward all their potential during a change if they are not motivated. Therefore, it’s important to build employees’ resilience to change and maintain it along the way. Keep them part of the developments and achievements and share successes with them (Ron Carucci 2019).
Conclusion
Change is part of any business now. Leading it efficiently and effectively is needed to sustain the business. Proper leadership enables organizations to tackle the external factors affecting business anywhere in the world while building on internal capabilities, assets, and employees. Leading change requires leaders to work hand in hand with their employees. Working as a team is a game-changer to handle the different details and aspects of the change and transformation in their businesses. This can be done by strengthening the teamwork between employees, team members of the change team, and departments to eliminate silos. Working as a team also develops a collaborative environment between everyone.
Leading change is always aligned with value creation. We always look at the value of what is being delivered to customers. We also need to understand that value goes through different stages to be created. This chain of stages needs to be supported by having a clear guiding principle shared among all employees and having leaders talk the walk and walk the talk to be the role models for their teams.
Communication is another aspect that is very important for leading change. It needs to be well managed and executed to ensure it is done properly. Effective communication in leading change gets the needed buy-in from everyone while also keeping them all in the loop of achievements, success, and progress. This will support building the needed motivation among employees who are executing the change. While employees know they will not be put aside but referred to and considered by their leaders, organizations should empower their members to share perceptions and ideas continuously to ensure the success of the change journey.
They say excellence and changes are also a journey that does not end by achieving the result of a new change. But they will require continuous efforts to embed this change in the business’ working environment and daily operations to ensure sustainability and reflection on customers and financial numbers.
To widen your knowledge about defining your organization’s strategy in times of change, establishing appropriate customer trust, and creating the right balance between team members, visit The KPI Institute’s website and sign up for Certified Strategy and Business Planning Professional Live Online Course.
It’s a matter of differentiation. Leaders focusing on differentiation should not only link it with brands. But with the customer experience driven by salespeople who will need to add value to it; thus building the right trust with customers. This includes the customers of the customers along the value chain of the sales. So, adding value will always be important to enrich the experience of customers throughout the chain. Leaders making changes in business models are not only about aligning them with the brand and what is being delivered to customers. But aligning them with employees and what they believe in; this is what matters and what supports efficient alignment across the company. It will drive the change forward and deliver the right value to customers (Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart 2004).
IBM realized that to continue to create value and manage their company in 170 countries, they have to do this through their people by empowering them to make the right decisions aligned with their direction and mission. This could be done by ensuring they identify the gaps between; what values they call for and what is being practiced on the ground. This is where leaders are continuously striving to live the values and ensure everyone does this to lead the changes forced by the external environment. Also, to meet the needs of their internal environment that are based on their human resources (Paul Hemp and Thomas A. Stewart 2004).
Building the right value along the new change in any organization needs to be aligned with the right culture for change. It includes eliminating the blame culture and admitting mistakes by all, especially leaders. Leaders need to set the example that everyone is a human being and humans always make mistakes. But what’s more important is to admit these mistakes. Allow other people to tell you if you did something wrong and do your best to learn from it and transform it into a success afterward (Harvard Management Update 2008).
Value is always created through a journey of developments and improvements. Then, get reflected into whatever services or products are offered to customers. Managing value creation in any change or transformation requires managing efforts in a modeled way. All aspects are interrelated like a red thread and intersect in a way that they push each other forward and affect each other positively towards the result of the change needed. A model can include multiple criteria like an organizational chart which needs to be analyzed and reshaped to support the change and drive it forward. Plus, the workplace, in a way where leaders need to identify how people involved in the change can interact with each other, do their work, and add the needed inputs. This can involve physical workplaces, virtual or even hybrid where leaders embed flexibility in accordance with the organizational structure and ensure more agility are in place.
Other important criteria of the model are people skills and competencies which are considered an important asset in any organization and enablers for change. If needed skills and competencies are missing or not at the required levels, they need to be built internally or acquired from external sources.
Rewards and penalties are other criteria in a model which play a vital part. Rewards are the sparks needed along the way to celebrate successes, even small ones, to motivate employees, and to bring in a sense of recognition. On the other hand, penalties are also important, not to punish employees or to demotivate them. But they can be used as the red lines that leaders don’t need to cross. It is not because leaders want to limit creativity and innovation. However, crossing these lines has proven negatively in past experiences and based on setting expectations for the future and this takes to the fifth criterion which is tasks.
Tasks refer to the existing processes that manage work and ensure inputs, operations, outputs, and outcomes are well defined, understood by everyone, and linked properly to the objectives of the change. The alignment between change objectives, processes, and tasks is very important to support that more efficient work is being conducted with the most possible utilization of resources, thus more efficient operations driving the change.
The sixth criterion of the model is information distribution. It refers to the flow of information among the change team and inside the whole organization. When any information is shared with the receiver, the receiver becomes responsible for sharing the information.
The seventh criterion is decision allocation. It refers to the governance structure in the change team and how it is aligned with the organization’s governance structure. Decision allocation is mainly related to identifying who makes decisions, how, when, and based on what.
Measurements are one of the criteria; if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it (Peter Drucker). Measurements are collected after setting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the performance associated with the change from all aspects (Gregory Shea and Cassie Solomon 2013). KPIs can measure; risk, outputs, outcomes, impact, efficiency, effectiveness, quantities, quality, and other aspects depending on the change being led. Such measurements will be associated with targets to help identify where we stand compared to our planned results and what we achieve from them (The KPI Institute 2020).
Leading change in a demanding industry will always be affected with communication directed to customers from the different channels like TV, Radio, word of mouth, etc. since this will trigger the need to have more accurate and on-the-spot information about the products. But this is where trust is built between customers and salespeople. Those customers will rely more on the right and well-equipped salespeople to enrich their knowledge whenever and wherever needed (Thomas A. Stewart and David Champion 2006).
In addition, leading change wants intensive communication internally conducted among all levels and a continuous basis to ensure everyone realizes the need to change and to understand clearly where they are going, how, when, and through what means. Buy-in from everyone is important, and it’s the spark for any change. This is where leaders should play their role by embedding but not forcing the change; by convincing people with the need for change but not under-communicating the related details; by opening channels with people to express their opinions and support them to digest the need to change (John P. Kotter 1995).
Leading a change and managing communication internally with change teams and employees move hand in hand. It includes using all means of communication like emails, newsletters, executive meetings with employees, inviting experts from outside the company to explain the change, one-to-one meetings with employees, and many more; all of this requires efforts from leaders. But it is highly needed to ensure change is understood and enough buy-in is granted from people inside the organization (Harvard Management Update 2008).
We consider leading change as part of leadership style and one of the ways of doing work. We propose that leading change consists of some aspects that need to be considered as a whole, not separately, to drive change towards success. Because change is currently a norm in any organization, sector, or region, it’s important to tackle it as a journey that creates internal and external value while catalyzing teamwork, morality, motivation, and employee empowerment to develop the needed assets and tools for change.
We found that leading change is an art that requires modeling efforts and directions to create a sound and integrated direction for everyone involved while ensuring that past patterns need to be considered as inputs into this model, resulting in efficient and effective change leadership towards the desired results. Furthermore, we show that uniting behind a purpose and progressing towards a clear vision are important to align the change teams and thus align the change among the different areas of the organization while ensuring continuous communication among all levels of the organization to explain the needed change, share successes, and exchange ideas and perceptions among employees and leaders.
Below is a series of articles I wrote about leading change, published in three installments:
Effective interpersonal skills are a part of an individual’s professional toolbox. Such skills play an important role in daily interactions at work and relating to others in general.
By nurturing interpersonal relations, people become more at ease in their work environment and collaborate with other teams smoothly. This may also reflect on one’s productivity and ability to deal with clients.
Poor interpersonal skills could lead to negative feelings and unsatisfactory results at work. It can cause people to feel left out, experience self-doubt, and get into conflicts at work.
Individuals who make efforts to improve their interpersonal skills can contribute to several areas in their organization:
Teamwork and Productivity. A group of people who can communicate to each other has a higher chance of completing a goal. Being encouraging and helpful in their language can help improve productivity.
Conflict management. Friction is inevitable in the workplace. Managing conflicts requires careful use of language, ability to listen to all sides of the story, and understanding motivation.
Leadership. Leadership skills are applied to interpersonal relations when you have to provide constructive feedback and motivate others to achieve your goals.
How to Improve An Organization’s Interpersonal Skills
With practice and support from management, organizations can improve their interpersonal skills.
Identify areas that need improvement. This can be done by asking a colleague, leader, friend, or family member. What are the things that make it hard for a person to understand another person’s words? Where does misunderstanding usually start? Companies can also hold workshops and seminars about business communication or workplace interpersonal skills.
Practice active listening. Ask everyone to pause and pay attention whenever a colleague is expressing his or her opinion. Remove distractions, such as mobile phones, to let the person talking knows that his or her opinion is valued. While individuals can express their ideas and opinions, listening can help them understand each other better and make each other feel respected and valued.
Develop empathy. Being able to place oneself in someone else’s shoes allows you to better understand the motivation and reasons behind their words and actions.
Keep a positive mindset. Having a positive outlook when you are interacting with others allows you to become objective, strive for fairness, appreciate what the other person is saying, and create interactions that will help you get your desired outcome.
Focus on encouraging others. Encouragement can be shown through acknowledging others’ achievements, offering to help someone who is having a bad day or a difficult time, expressing appreciation for team members, or giving simple compliments.
Be aware of your emotions. Whenever there is tension, conflict, or any source of negative emotions, try pausing for a while or perform breathing exercises. Once you are calm, you will be able to think clearly and communicate your feelings and ideas effectively.
