The pace of business is accelerating, enabled by technological advancements. Add VUCA to your professional vocabulary. We live in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous times.
It isn’t enough to adapt and evolve. Companies must anticipate and nimbly respond to ever-changing market dynamics and customer preferences. Those that fail to do so risk becoming obsolete.
Strategic agility
Market leaders in the new economy will be those firms that have cultivated strategic agility. A strategically agile enterprise is focused, fast and flexible. A strategically agile organization operates like a well-oiled machine, all parts working in sync.
- Strategic agility is achieved through the development of three interrelated competencies:
- Strategic sensing: the ability to foresee and quickly react to changing market conditions, proactively.
- Organizational/operational fitness: the strength, speed, flexibility and resilience needed to succeed in an increasingly turbulent market and competitive business environment.
- Shared accountability: engagement, commitment and alignment of organizational behavior to accomplish common objectives.
Agile leadership
The ongoing development of the proficiencies listed above is the collective responsibility of the business leaders. A strategically agile organization is built on the premise that we can only go as fast as we can all go together. To enable the organization to move with confident speed, agile leaders should:
- Foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
- Define and develop common ground and shared purpose.
- Cultivate strategic thinking.
- Develop an innovative, entrepreneurial culture.
- Focus on possibilities, rather than problems.
- Perceive the organization as an integrated, interdependent system.
- Promote collaborative planning, problem solving and decision making.
- Foster learning, discovery and renewal.
- Build successive levels of engagement from the top down.
- View planning as a process, not an event.
The leadership challenge
Agility demands teamwork at the top. But here’s the problem: not all executive teams are teams. Many are simply collections of independent-minded individuals whose primary allegiance is to their own units and objectives. A senior team capable of routinely “firing on all cylinders” is a rare phenomenon.
Team training and team building retreats are great for bonding but carryover to the workplace is limited. The simple truth is you become a team by doing the work of the team. So, what is the work of the executive team? What are the outputs for which business leaders are solely and collectively responsible? Here is a sample of responses generated in a recent leadership workshop:
- Strategic direction, business and organizational development priorities, and key performance indicators.
- Investment focus, asset deployment and resource allocation.
- Enterprise-level problem solving and decision making.
- Leadership and organizational development.
- Organizational synergy, cross-boundary issue resolution.
- Behavioral alignment to core values and company culture.
Systems, processes and policies to support achievement of company objectives.
Working in the business vs. working on the business
To meet the challenges of an increasingly demanding business environment, leaders must possess the capacity to work on the future while executing in the present. In other words, they must work on the business, not just in the business. How is your team spending its valuable time together? Is the team focused on the big picture, or getting bogged down in minutia? Are the members of the team interested in exploring the synergies that will advance the enterprise as a whole, or are they engaged in departmental turf protection?
What will it take to get the team operating like a well-oiled machine so that it can move at the speed of business?
