By Peter Behrens, Senior Trainer and Consultant, Corporate Education Group

4MUST-HAVEAGILE TRAITS YOUR COMPANY NEEDS TO SUCCEED

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The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed

Organizational agility is the ability of an organization to effectively and quickly adapt to changes in the marketplace in order to attract and delight customers. While most organizations today can learn and apply Agile practices, making them stick and leveraging them toward future market needs is a challenge.

Organizational agility is the difference between “doing” an Agile process and “being” an Agile organization. To accomplish this, an organization must lead agility from the “inside-out” - that is, starting with leadership aligning cultural values toward agility and building structures within the organization to support agility.

A primary reason for the failure to sustain and grow agility within organizations is because they are focused on “doing” an Agile process outside-in, without consideration of the structures and cultural values required to support it. Thus, like a product without a well-established architecture, it will likely cripple under the pressure of growth and change.

Enterprise-Level CommitmentOrganizational agility is an enterprise-level agility. Team-based agility is common and many companies find it relatively easy to accomplish. Multiple independent team agility is more difficult, especially if the organization has a high-degree of role specialization and difficulty with single team focus. Organizational agility is a culture of agility and works across many inter-dependent teams, departments, and locations to accomplish common goals or objectives. Organizational agility requires leadership guidance, flexible organizational structures, horizontal team engagement and focus, and shared values espoused through leadership.

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The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed

Agility is a necessary response for an organization to not only keep up with these changes, but outpace competition in order to delight customers, succeed and grow.

Without rooting agility in the culture and structure of the organization, leadership in many organizations finds it challenging to sustain healthy and effective Agile practices. They introduce Agile as a process and encourage teams to practice. However, without deeper Agile stabilization, organizations will often change their approach frequently since they have little clarity about what agility looks like or how to accomplish it. They wind up thrashing through their Agile discovery (represented by the red line in the chart below).

Adopting and Sustaining Agility

Leveraging external guidance and structural patterns often enables organizations to achieve a healthier and more effective Agile implementation more quickly. This can be seen in currently popular Agile scaling frameworks and consultative guidance. However, again without leadership to drive the alignment of agility with organizational culture, once the initial Agile change initiative concludes, these organizations are often challenged to sustain agility. They often recede to previous working modes that people find more comfortable. This “rolling agility” is represented by the blue line in the chart below.

Sustaining agility is critical because neither the organization, nor the external marketplace, is static — both are evolving. And due to ongoing technology advancements, the marketplace is evolving faster each year. Agility is a necessary response for an organization to not only keep up with these changes, but outpace competition in order to delight customers, succeed and grow. When agility is rooted within organizational culture, and structures have been established to support it, organizations can adapt and grow. This inside-out approach enables an organization to not only succeed in the short term, but sustain for long-term changes and growth. This is represented by the green line in the chart below.

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The 4 Agility Must-Haves for Every OrganizationAgility is a means to an end. It is an engine that enables an organization to meet its current and future objectives more effectively. Agility allows an organization to adapt as conditions change. The following four traits should be embodied by any organization seeking to “BE” and not just “DO” Agile.

1. A Growth Mindset

A key pitfall of many organizations seeking to be, or become, agile is in the lack of awareness and maturity of dealing with change. Agility is the means to adapt and change — our thinking and our actions. And because change is difficult for everyone, leadership is responsible for creating a culture of change, starting with their self — being open to multiple perspectives, seeking and using feedback and self-awareness of their own thinking and organizational impacts.

Carol Dweck, Ph.D. describes this growth-mindset orientation as a desire to learn by embracing challenges, persisting through obstacles, seeing effort as a path to success and an ability to learn from criticism. Does this describe people in your organization?

2. Catalyst Leaders

Most organizational leaders operate in an expert or achiever mindset. That is, they operate based on their expertise from when they were a contributor or based on their heroic ability to direct others in accomplishing goals. And while these operating mindsets can be effective early, they limit the growth and maturity of the organization to address future challenges.

Developing these leaders’ growth mindset and catalyst behavior unleashes new potential and value within the organization. The term “catalyst” originates from the chemistry definition as a change agent – the primary element sparking the change in the system. As through this change, the catalyst is changed as well – true catalyst leaders change first to change others. The leadership awareness and competency development is represented in the graphic below.

The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed

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3. Agile Organizational Values

Thinking outside-in treats Agile approaches as a process to be implemented by the organization. The truth is, Agile approaches come with a built-in value system – as created in 2001 through the Agile Manifesto. Introducing Agile without regard to its value system often creates friction in organizations that leads to a reduction in effectiveness and lack of sustainability.

Google spent millions of dollars researching the underlying traits of effective teams in a project called Aristotle. Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing team norms were the keys to improving teams. A team culture, which enables psychological safety for all members of the team to take risks, is a common characteristic of all of their strong teams.

4. Customer Value Delivery Focus

The first focus of most Agile initiatives is the last point of my Must-Haves. There is a purpose to this re-orientation. While customer focused, cross-functional teams are the heart and soul of an effective Agile approach, when leaders focus here first, without regard to the first three Must-Have’s outlined above, limited effectiveness and sustainability ensue.

Due to the high complexity, uncertainty and rapid pace of change, organizations learn most effectively through doing – this requires a balance between planning and doing, and a recognition that most learning occurs through implementation, not thinking. Leaders must attack waste, bottlenecks and other organizational friction while providing clear direction on value toward customers.

The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed

Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing team norms were the keys to improving teams.

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team customer

The Agile Leadership CompassThese four agility “must haves” come together to form the Agile Leadership Compass. Leaders should start with their personal growth mindset and catalyst behaviors before seeking to “push” agility onto the organization. Organizations should seek to understand and align their values towards agility before seeking to “do” an Agile approach with a focus on delivering customer value.

The Agile Leadership Compass enables leaders and organizations to succeed, grow and sustain agility in times of turmoil, complexity and rapid change — a high likelihood in most industries today.

Corporate Education Group (CEG) a provider of talent development solutions for more than 27 years, can help you navigate your way toward organizational agility. We can help you launch an Agile transformation by assessing your Agile organizational maturity; identifying and selecting optimal tools; and aiding you to develop, adopt, adapt or scale Agile methods and techniques. Whether at the team, division, or organizational level, implementing Agile practices to achieve business results can be accelerated when combining consulting and coaching with assessments and training.

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The 4 Must-Have Agile Traits Your Company Needs to Succeed

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About the AuthorPete Behrens, trainer and consultant for Corporate Education Group (CEG), is a leadership and organizational agility coach guiding enterprise Agile transformation for more than 15 years. Through his unique “inside-out” approach, Pete guides organizational leaders in assessing, integrating and transforming their organizations through Agile leadership maturity, cultural alignment and organizational agility. He has been instrumental in some of the most successful Agile transformations, is leading the formation and definition of Agile leadership and enterprise Agile coaching, and is sought out as a master Agile coach for other coaches. As an active member of the Agile coaching community, Pete led the development of the Certified Enterprise Coaching (CEC) program and the Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) program for the Scrum Alliance.

About Corporate Education GroupCorporate Education Group (CEG) helps leading organizations solve talent development challenges with solutions at all stages of the talent lifecycle, from consulting and assessments, to program design, training delivery and measurement. Our more than 27 years of experience rooted in corporate training enables us to engage in collaborative partnerships where we identify the right solutions to unlock business value and optimize employee and organizational performance. Through our strategic alliance with Duke University Management Training, we offer premiere certificate programs backed by a renowned higher-education institution.

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