Impediments for Org agility - Part 1

All my previous newsletters have been highlighting the importance of agility among the stakeholders. From now on, planning to share a few of my knowledge points on a bigger view apart of the stakeholders.

we are connected due to the business and making profits or money from our contributions

The relationship between the stakeholders and the business is just the money-making activity or profit generation for the investors. It might appear to be rude, yet, it is the ground reality. Anyways, keeping the emotions aside, the business should also be agile enough to survive. One of the best examples of this is, most quoted, Nokia. I don't have to explain in detail about Nokia, as everyone is very much aware of its history.

Following are my points from two decades of experience with various business entities. Inspired by a blog post from ScrumForTeamSystem.com, I started my experiments with SCRUM in 2006. Have learned a lot, not only from SCRUM, but also from various other frameworks. If I have been able to succeed in my projects it is because of two things. The first is my experiments with various frameworks and the second is the team that I have worked with, without their support, I would have not achieved anything.

I have interacted with CxOs as well and questioned them about their roles and responsibilities towards the business. From all such interactions, it is clear that most of the time following points have become evident to me.

Siloed Org Structure

Agility at any business unit level refers to the ability of the unit to quickly adapt to changes in its environment while still maintaining productivity and efficiency at a constant level. The unit that has a structure that is siloed and hierarchical shall make it difficult to implement agile practices and processes, as it can create a lack of collaboration and slow decision-making.

As the teams in that unit operate independently of each other, with little collaboration or communication, results significantly and impact on unit's agility, as it can create a number of barriers that hinder the business ability to respond quickly to changing market / surrounding conditions. The siloed units create a culture of "US (vs) Them" in which different departments or teams become more focused on protecting their own interests than on working together to achieve shared goals.

One of the main impacts of a siloed structure is that it can lead to a lack of visibility and transparency across the organization. This can make it difficult for leaders to get a clear picture of what's happening at all levels of the business, and can make it harder to identify emerging trends or issues that need to be addressed.

Wrong Motivations

Leaders of the business should be the decision makers and should mostly be visionaries. They should not be the individuals that work towards proving the other stakeholders wrong and their point is always right. There are tons of examples of such individuals in the recent history. Below are few ..

• Chanda Kochhar of ICICI?
• Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos
• Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom
• Sanjay Kumar of Computer Associates
• Jeff Skilling of Enron
• John Rigas of Adelphia Communications?

Sense of Ownership

This is a double edged sword. People like Bill Gates, Tata, Warren Buffet, are exceptionally talented leaders, who know how to and when to own and delegate the leadership or ownership to the right individuals at the right time.

An ownership by the leaders mentality helps all stakeholders provide a feeling of faith, trusted, respected, and dependable. The leaders should build a business practice towards developing ownership mindsets is to always make sure to lead by example, demonstrating their team members that the leaders are always reliable and trustworthy. They should nurture the concept of feeling secured, rather being fired from their power or authority for any failure or wrong outputs or outcomes by their involvement. I'm not highlighting the concept of OUTOFBOX thinking, but, thinking uniquely. This ability to think differently (or) being united yet connected themselves with everyone has to be the important thing. Not just that, one has to find opportunities to serve clients and energize their teams in new and exciting ways leads to enterprise-wide agility.

Lack of Urgency

I have seen the ASAP, Need it YESTERDAY, kind jargons from CxOs. It is true that the leaders would also have pressure from all dimensions. That doesn't mean that they pass their tension to their reporting teams and cause tension all around. I have dealt with mid-managers and how they waste their team's time for preparing for their work. For example, a director of a business unit is visiting. To showcase a 10 min presentation, the respective reporting folks waste hours of preparation, modification, redoing by not only themselves, but, the entire team. If there are 4 members of the team and they discuss for 3 times to an hour, it is about ( 5 X 3) 15 hours of time for a 10 mins presentation. This is one kind of waste that I wanted to highlight apart from being attentive to the situation.

Most CxOs, don't take decisive actions for the benefit of their teams. To avoid this, it is important to give attention to the crucial elements that make sense to the business. This attention has to be transformed to the focused actions. At the same time, the attention has to be urgent to the situation. There is a caveat of this urgency can be treated as deadlines and productivity.

Thus, the leaders should clearly communicate the importance of their value towards the collective productivity rather than the milestones or deadlines. True, that, there has to be a roadmap and milestones, yet, they should not become the measures to record the achievements.

There are many more things that I'm aware in this dimension. As the readable limit is approaching, pausing here for now. More in the next newsletter. Until next week, stay tuned and happy time with work and life.