Change agility is the key to the future success of your organization and team. In essence, an agile organization can adapt swiftly to a circumstance and revert with an almost instantaneous response to changes in markets, competitors, products, services and customers.
In a day and age where a change of internal and external factors is the norm, the ability to adapt to this change quickly is fast becoming a competitive advantage. This is leverage with which an organization can truly thrive.
This change agility needs to exist at team level, as teams ultimately contribute to the competitiveness and success of the organization.
Change agility is not just a buzzword: it’s a skill! It becomes crucial in not just keeping up but getting ahead. An agile workplace and team are equipped to:
- Deal effectively with challenges.
- Create a productive and positive work environment.
- Encourage leadership.
- Foster critical thinking.
- Enhance productivity.
- Increase engagement.
Why should every executive, HR, learning leader and manager cultivate a mindset of change agility within their teams?
If change agility is a skill, then executives, HR leaders and managers need to actively work toward cultivating this trait amongst their teams. Some may even go as far to suggest you recruit for change agility, meaning it’s less about tools and more about individual traits and an overall organizational culture.
These are some recognizable traits of change-agile individuals:
- A learning mindset.
- Enabled to take risks.
- A problem solver.
- Keen focus.
- Someone who questions and is exploratory.
- Resourceful.
- Outcome centric.
- A team player.
Skilling your teams to change agile is a process. This can be accomplished by:
- Introducing the concept that change is inevitable and an expected occurrence.
- Implementing frameworks for continuous productivity and decision.
- Building resilience and emotional intelligence.
- Empowering them to continuously innovate.
5-step framework to instilling change agility in your teams
Prepare your team to anticipate and plan for change. Explain to them that by preparing for impending change, they can take an active role on how those changes occur.
- Transparency and information are key factors that can help your team process change and cultivate a mindset to deal with change.
- Allow time for reflection and processing the emotion associated with change.
- Provide outlets to practice tacit knowledge gained through the change experience.
- Implement problem solving scenarios where teams need to develop five or more options. Be specific with five solutions, because at first solutions may flow easily, but by the fifth you need to really stretch the innovation muscle.
Recognize and communicate to your team what you can and cannot control. Teach them to evaluate your circumstances realistically and focus on actions within your control.
Much of our frustration about change comes from raging against things that are out of our control. This is a needless exercise that simply diverts your energy from adapting.
Instead, assess the situation objectively, so you can decide where to invest your time:
- Where can you have a meaningful effect on what’s happening?
- And when are you just spinning your wheels, feeling frustrated?
Whenever change happens, always identify what stays the same. Take note of what will remain predictable to soothe anxiety.
Another way to ease your fears is to recognize all the things that won’t change. We all tend to focus on the negative, especially when we’re stressed.
Instead, make a list of all the elements in the workplace that will remain perfectly manageable. Like a gratitude practice, it shifts our mindsets from what’s lacking to what we still have.
Teach your team to accept ambiguity in the decision-making process when dealing with change.
Dealing with change effectively requires swift decision-making, and often in the face of ambiguity, or with incomplete information. In this instance, an emotional response would be decision-making paralysis, resorting to biases.
Providing employees with frameworks to address decision-making, with a logical step-by-step approach could help provide the right guidelines, to process decisions effectively without hampering progress or productivity. This empowers employees to make decisions and move forward, in the face of ambiguity — as most issues are ambiguous and concurrent.
At any given point an organization could be striving to expand market share with new product development. Teams within an organization could be considering collaboration on new projects. Individuals in teams could be working toward gaining new skills. With so many moving parts, change is inevitable.
Preparing your organization mentally and for the inevitability of change means they are able to process this change faster and get on with strategies to move forward.
Reflect on your personal usual response to change. Think about how you usually react to change and pause before following the same pattern.
We all have our go-to coping mechanisms, which aren’t always healthy. What did you do the last time you faced a major change? Some people stay in denial for too long, or complain without offering solutions. Perhaps you over-analyze the situation or get angry. Make a list of how you naturally respond (don’t forget to ask friends and family!) and then stay alert for these negative behaviors. Awareness is the first step to change.
For example, have you recognized that change makes you irritable, to the point where your colleagues have mentioned it? Take notice of the changes in your body (like shallow breathing or tension in your neck) so you can inhale, stretch and pause before acting on your annoyance and affecting your team.
