5 ways corporate leaders can support business agility

In preparation of an upcoming leadership workshop I am facilitating, I've been mulling over what experiences I have had over a decade as part of teams and as well as coaching agile product teams. I realised it's less about the agile frameworks we adopt or decisions around whether to use SaFe, Nexus, the Spotify model etc. It is a lot more about the how technology is impacting every aspect of the way we live and leadership at corporates are feeling the pressure. A byproduct of the fast rate of technological change is the increased need for large companies to adapt to an ever increasing world of uncertainty. The global pandemic meant companies had no choice but to shift to making remote work, actually work. The rise of social media has lead to a consumer that expects to connect emotionally with people, not brands and requires more transparency from companies than ever before. Questions around a companies environmental impact, the diversity of employees, gender-pay gap add to the pressure. This is creating a sliding scale on the spectrum from control + governance to more trust + transparency. Essentially company leaders are now grappling with deciding what they need to do to empower teams but still have enough oversight and assurance that the overall company is delivering on its promise to customers.

The frameworks are overrated and systems of execution are undervalued.

As an Agile Product Coach, I love working with teams on constantly surfacing their assumptions, framing problems and experimenting with ideas to solve problems. This process is widely referred to as Product Discovery and ultimately reduces the risk of building something nobody wants whilst increasing the confidence teams have on building products that customers love. I recently did some discovery around why leaders are finding it hard to support their businesses in becoming more agile and responsive to change and below is a summary of my findings.

5 Things Leaders Can Do Today

I believe the 5 core pillars necessary for supporting business agility are:

1. Mindset
2. Environment
3. Objectives
4. Key Results
5. Psychological Safety

The 5 pillars above in combination lay the right foundation leaders can address in their organisations to enable teams to work with business agility. Ever organisation will be at different points of the journey but with each pillar, ask yourself, "how am I performing with this pillar?" and "what one small thing can I do today to make a commitment to change?" Start small, keep it simple and take action.

Mindset

There are usually two camps of employees. Those that believe in serving a mission bigger than themselves that aligns with the company mission. Or those who are in service more to their own self interests. It comes down to a personal choice on what each person believes. It is detrimental to companies who want to have business agility to have closed minded employees who are not willing to change. It is fundamental that employees who display an aptitude to continuously learn and prioritise team collaboration over individual incentives are promoted to leaders of teams positioned to change.

Environment

With mindset, we touched on incentives. Often HR policies & rewards are aligned to personal, siloed wins for individuals. Awarding Amazon vouchers for good work, setting personal annual goals that feed into rewards. Whilst this may motivate some individuals it comes at the detriment of collaboration over competition.

Even more disempowering is when leaders set the objectives and task the teams to deliver on their ideas. Leaders need to create environments where they set the strategic themes/ pillars and empower teams with a sense of ownership over the objectives and how they pursuit achieving them. A sign of truly flat, collaborative organisation is one where a leader can share their idea and are fully comfortable with team treating it as a hypothesis to validate alongside their other ideas. It is fundamental that leaders provide a channel for teams to share exactly what they need from them in order to succeed. Pre-mortems are a helpful exercise for teams to tease out the big risks and dependencies they need leadership support on unblocking.

Objectives

I have ran a dozens of OKR (Objective and Key Results) setting sessions and find it astonishing how many teams dive straight in without starting with WHY. Why does the team exist? what would the company do if the team didn't exist? what would customers do if the team doesn't exist? These are fundamental questions to remind teams of their fundamental purpose. Without a clear understanding of the teams purpose and vision, it is difficult to really set objectives that should ultimately be leading teams to achieve a long term vision. Always start with why and keep objectives, short, concise, timebound and small in number when starting out. Consider what increase, growth or improvement you are trying to achieve that delivers customer and business value. Again as emphasised above, the environment should allow for teams to be empowered and accountable for setting their objectives which feed into the strategic themes of the company. The key question to answer with each objective is, "what can we achieve in the next quarter to help us reach our long-term goals."

Key Results

Key results are meant to be quantitative measures of success that measure your progress towards the objective. Each objective ideally should have no more than 2-3 key results. Less is more, it is about your ability to focus and experiment with different ways of achieving your key results. Teams often struggle with setting key results for two reasons. The first is that they don't really have control over the outcomes they are contributing to. Often you hear these teams say, "it is difficult to measure" or "it is hard to show how we directly impact that metric." Playing devils advocate this makes me question what value the team delivers if it can't be measured and attributed to the teams efforts. The second flaw is often when teams don't have psychological safety.

Psychological Safety

It is so sad when I witness teams who don't want to set OKRs they will be held accountable for because they fear for their job and don't feel their voices will be heard or acted on by leadership. I am a big advocate of truly diverse and inclusive teams which is why I always challenge teams to think about "who is not in the room, when making that decision?" With the rise of remote facilitation, it is important to consider liberating structures that encourages every participant to make a contribution to the solution together. There are small ways to make teams feel safe and encourage contribution that can go a long way. From sharing stories lessons learned with leaders not only the success stories. Reframing failing fast more to the importance of learning fast. Encouraging teams to name their teams, and add things to their ways of working which makes it fun and pleasurable. From dancing to yoga. Most importantly, each member of the team should have an opportunity to speak, present and teach whether in small team meetings or with leadership too. All these human centric things help people wake up and look forward to work and the people they are working with.

This journey requires patience and commitment to the long game. It may start with an individual, team, department, region, country and compound from there. Great ideas are infectious and its difficult to be patient as you want it NOW. But change is a counterforce that requires a patient systems of small, iterative continuous execution and the 5 steps above are a good place for leaders on large enterprises to begin.