It’s a competitive world out there and businesses often find that market conditions and customer needs shift rapidly and unpredictably. Industry research shows that how companies respond to uncertainty is strongly correlated to their financial performance and, in companies that outperform, leaders make faster decisions, build more flexible operations, and embrace new business models more quickly. It’s becoming clear that agility is a critical success factor in today’s hyper-competitive, global business environment.
There are five key attributes that are common to agile organizations:
1. They actively develop strong, diverse leaders and management teams. Executives focus on hiring leaders who can adapt and who have some comfort with ambiguity.
2. They focus on strategic decisions. Company leadership knows the difference between decisions that affect day-to-day operations and those that guide long-term strategy and direction.
3. They accelerate decision making. Executives and leaders at all levels push to match decision making speed to market conditions in order to adapt more quickly than competitors.
4. They make data driven decisions. Leaders understand the value of data that provides insight into customer needs and drivers, and invest in and use data from many sources.
5. They build organizations that can act quickly. Leaders arm their managers and teams with what they need to take action and quickly measure results in order to course correct.
In order to succeed, business leaders need to develop their organization’s ability to learn, communicate, and act—across all dimensions of the business. But it can be difficult to get teams comfortable with adapting to a changing landscape, or to ensure they feel empowered to make rapid assessments and decisions.
What it takes is a high level of trust between leaders and teams, clear and consistent communication, effective and collaborative relationships, a shared vision of the desired outcomes, and permission to fail, learn and try again. These are all capabilities that can be built and strengthened with the right coaching.
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