- Ready to renew your corporate culture?
- Ready to maintain performance over time?
- Ready to facilitate innovation?
- Ready to align your vision in your context?
- Ready to transform the relationships between the members of your organization?
Are you ready for agility?
What’s the difference between desiring something and being ready for something? Being ready for me is such a strong desire that it makes you take action.
It is by taking action and sharing that we transform.
Taking action means being on the ground. It is: choose, act, give feedback, adapt and start over. In order not to do “anything”, it is important to be in action within a direction.
Being on the ground to act generates results.
Sharing simply means talking about your projects in our environment. In fact, this is one of the coach’s techniques, he listens to your shares. And this coach’s tool helps you find your own solutions.
Saying out loud what you feel and what you think generates results.
Since I started my coaching practice, I have focused on the development of leadership skills. Over time, I completed professional coaching training, certified on a psychometric personality profile, and created content.
Everything was going well, until one day a colleague told me about behavioral agility and its practical use. I drew a parallel with my old life (in computer science!). I became interested in the subject, experimented with it in the workshop and then I was trained.
Since this fall, I have a new tool in my trunk, tailor-made for those who want to take action!
Here is the story of my encounter with agility, as well as a brief history.
I encountered agility in 2005. At the time, I was working in a project management position at a digital entertainment company.
Once assimilated, the principles of agility propelled performance and transformed team leadership.
Subsequently, when I held a management position, I was inspired by the principles of agility to develop a method for managing my business objectives.
In 2001, a group of computer scientists was looking to increase the success rate of IT projects. At that time, 70% of software development projects ended in failure. They wrote a manifesto and created an agile project management method applied to IT (the Scrum method).
Essentially, the method in question is:
- Individuals and their interactions more than processes and tools;
- Operational software more than exhaustive documentation;
- Collaboration with clients more than contractual negotiation;
- Adapting to change more than following a plan.
To do this, the method has a rigorous iterative process, generally between 2 and 4 weeks where at each iteration, the development team and the client, review together what needs to be done to create the most value in relation to the initial vision and the context. They inspect what went well, what can be improved, and plan for the next iteration.
The failure rate of projects managed with the agile method has increased to 30%.
Applied to business, this method allows you to always be aligned with your context and to adjust the direction.
A concrete example? When I was an IT director, I managed operations, nothing to do with software development. The mandate I was given was to bring together 4 areas of activity, including two departments at war and an emerging issue that was not a joy: happiness for a girl who loves challenges! 🙂
We – the team and I – created a new vision and every year we had measured performance targets. I created a process every 6 weeks, which allowed us to recall the vision, our raison d’être, to follow up and adjust our objectives according to the context. To this, there were other elements that I measured, such as motivation, priority management, etc.
A 2-hour meeting with 45 people every 6 weeks was a very profitable investment: the direction was clear, the state of progress too.
In a short time in this context, the hardware and software investment budget has decreased by 30%, the staff turnover rate has decreased from 20% to 5%.
Leadership agility
Following the success of the Scrum method, other people have looked at agility and pushed it to the level of individual and organizational leadership. This led, among other things, to the behavioral agility created in 2009 by Agil’OA.
Bringing agility to the behaviors between the individuals of the organization, therefore to the level of “acting together”, makes it possible to maintain performance over time.
It speaks of doing, being and acting. If all of us together are aware of the context, have the structural possibility of inspecting our ways of doing, being and acting within short iterations that are relevant to our context, I don’t see how the context can win over the organization. It’s the pinnacle of proaction!
The benefits of business agility
- Alignment of the company’s vision with its context: its market, its employees and its shareholders.
- Empowering employees to increase performance.
- Establishment of a culture that allows it to constantly adapt to the pressures of the environment.
- Increased employee engagement levels.
- Development of the relationship between the different members of the organization. (acting together)
- Facilitating innovation.
Agility results in these benefits by bringing the notion of the individual to the level of the organization. This requires the creation of a meaning to be shared and a culture where communication on business issues is done at all levels of the organization. Since performance is at the level of culture, it is first with the company’s management committee that the agility workshops are held and that agile leaders are trained.
Conclusion
In 2016, with four generations active at work, an unstable and globalized economy, agility is the answer to maintaining performance over time.
Applied to strategic planning, it allows the management committee to transform the culture of their organization, to create meaning and to share it. This will have an impact on the commitment and autonomy of all levels of the organization. Leaders will propagate this culture of performance by acting together and facilitating innovation.
If the agile company is a group of people who constantly anticipate and adapt to changes in the environment to achieve a common goal with a shared meaning, it needs agile leaders.
This fall, I created The Agile Leader: A Book, A Journey, and Workshops.
The agile leader is the development of the following six abilities: Competence, Credibility and Courage (Leadership described by Management Coaching Inc.) and Anticipate, Cooperate and Innovate (Agile Behavioral Agility).
Here are briefly described in the context of the agile leader:
- Competence: This is the most useful leadership knowledge to develop in an agile framework. They are: knowing how to listen, knowing how to communicate, knowing how to engage and mobilize as well as knowing how to surround yourself.
- Credibility: When we are in the presence of leadership, we accept to be influenced. And to be influenced, the leader must be trustworthy by knowing how to manage his stress, his emotions and show empathy.
- Cheer up: It is a question of taking the risk of looking bad, of telling the truth, of delegating and of deciding.
- Anticipate: Anticipation in agility allows all individuals in the organization to make decisions at their level by keeping in mind the impacts of their decision on the company’s vision and direction. The leader who anticipates understands strategy and operations, knows how to set performance objectives and manage sensitive information.
- Cooperate: Cooperation is not ephemeral in the way that collaboration with a colleague on a specific issue might be. It is a group of individuals who work together in the same direction and make sure that everyone does it. What are the impacts of your decisions on your colleagues? What could you do to facilitate their work and results?
- Innovate: Innovation is about materializing ideas for a market. The agile leader sees that everyone in the organization, customers, and partners can contribute to innovation. He is open and listens.
This article is also on LinkedIn