How Agile is Your Leadership Team?
With ever present uncertainty and a rapidly changing world, there are very few knowns right now and many of the past playbooks are no longer effective. That means that one of the only ways to survive (let alone capture opportunity or gain advantage) during this crisis will be to stay agile. Specifically, organizations need leadership teams that can effectively sense the environment, metabolize key inputs and make adjustments at a pace well beyond what most are used to or capable of sustaining. To better understand what makes a leadership team agile, we break down the three key components:
Sense
Leaders, teams and organizations need to obtain information proactively, ideally as real time as possible and on leading indicators to make sense of the economy, customer trends, competitor moves, and government actions. Reliable internal information – employee health and morale, supply levels, capacity, etc. – is also needed to make sense of the what’s happening. Without good information, signals can be missed, opportunities may pass by and the risk of competitive disruption increases.
Metabolize
Having enough of the right information is one thing. Processing it effectively is another. Leaders and teams need to draw proper conclusions and quickly identify the important implications. Now more than ever, systems thinking and an enterprise mindset are needed to discern what matters, connect the dots, and identify the right actions for the organization to not only react to the crisis, but hopefully thrive going forward.
Adjust
There is a time to analyze and a time to act. Agile leadership teams know when to move to action and mobilize others to reposition the organization. Employees do not embrace new priorities or fix problems they don’t recognize or understand, so effective leadership is required to rapidly gain buy in around a new or evolving reality. Once bought in, proposed solutions are better received and more likely to yield swift execution.
So how agile is your leadership team?
You can use the self-assessment below to quickly assess how your team is currently performing against each of these three components. As you review your ratings or do this as an exercise with your whole team, where is the greatest opportunity to improve agility? What adjustments will you make to better respond to the crisis and be better positioned to capture opportunity?