Leadership Lessons in a VUCA World

Today's dynamic, fast-moving, and complex business climate needs organizations to rethink and reimagine the old ways of doing work. As VUCA engulfs the business world, it becomes more than a corporate jargon that can be cursorily dismissed. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, or VUCA for short, are adjectives influencing every aspect of the business world. These forces demand enterprises rethink their organizational strategies and optimize them for this new disruptive world.

Economic uncertainty, dynamic change, technological evolution, shifting regulations, and evolving business, employee, and customer demands are compelling businesses to improve their resilience and responsiveness. Driving successful business outcomes in this dynamic and complex world characterized by quick changes that are often uncontrollable and virtually unpredictable needs organizational agility.

The VUCA vortex has impacted every industry and every organization, irrespective of its size. As turbulence is swirling around most organizations, tipping us this way and that, it becomes clear that organizational leaders now must carefully negotiate their way through the complexities at play. They need to create sustainable organizational structures that ensure that the organization moves forward and the people stay focused.

To that end, here are some leadership lessons in a VUCA world that I found personally relevant.

Flexibility and Focus are Key

Flexibility drives organizational resilience. As such, leaders must now focus on building equitable, flexible, and scalable structures without compromising on clarity and direction.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it was the value of flexibility. Those organizations that could be flexible could navigate this situation better than others. Having a culture and processes that are amenable to change becomes crucial here. The right technology investments become enablers of business continuity and, as such, must assume strategic priority for leaders.

Leaders must build clarity and focus into the organisational direction along with creating flexible systems and processes that enable anytime, anywhere work.

Personally speaking, the last three years helped us re-evaluate our entire organizational structure. We took this time to focus on refining our positioning and building up crucial skill sets. We set up the right technological structures that helped us drive collaboration, communication, innovation, and business continuity even when most struggled.

Rewire, Refine, and Reconfigure – Keeping Your Ear to the Ground Is Non-Negotiable

The 'don't fix it unless it's broken' approach is no longer relevant today. Leaders must have their eye on multiple balls and constantly rewire, refine, and reconfigure the way business works, its competencies, improvement, and investment areas regularly.

To combat VUCA, leaders must quickly identify opportunities to improve business outcomes. For example, one of the things we did once we had refined our positioning was to create clear and scalable structures that would promote growth. We had defined three clear focus areas for ourselves – Product Engineering, Quality Assurance Practice, and Cloud Engineering and placed experienced and passionate people to lead each of them.

So, yes VUCA might also demand a leadership shake-up to navigate challenging times and might demand organizational restructuring. With the right people taking the lead, organizations can tap into wider markets with greater impact.

Measure to Manage

VUCA can cause a dent in productivity since it brings chaos and unpredictability. The role of leaders thus not only needs them to lead teams with confidence and clarity but becomes more focused on driving enablement at work when work happens.

Identifying the employee skill gaps and barriers to productivity, improving career pathing initiatives, and delivering complete operational support become leadership responsibilities.

At?Forgeahead, for example, we identified the need to create systems that could measure organizational performance better. We also realized that organizational performance is more a journey than a destination and needs continuous improvement in many areas.?

Measuring outcomes in the context of plans, optimizing resource utilization, ensuring continuous improvement across areas, and delivering value to the people who matter (customers, employees, stakeholders) are essential to navigate VUCA skillfully.

Focus on the Most Valuable Assets

A laser focus on skill development and employee engagement is non-negotiable in the VUCA world. Organizations must become more flexible in hiring and retaining the best talent as the skills gap increases. Companies with policies preventing them from re-hiring employees might want to reconsider their move. The complexity of VUCA demands greater agility in hiring and retaining employees. Boomerang employees are easier to onboard, are well-versed with the organizational culture, and are better equipped to take on more responsibility in many ways.

Creating an enabling and progressive work environment where employees get safety, opportunity, and equity becomes essential to attract the boomerang gang. It is also important to put forward powerful motivators to attract this talent in the face of a growing skills gap.

Almost 10% of the people we hired in the past 12 months are boomerang employees. They were excited to work with us since they are aware of our culture and equanimous work environment. We have also grown and are now an AWS Select Consulting Partner. This, in itself, is a great motivator.

Elevate Communication and Collaboration

Efficient communication and collaboration are critical skills to thrive in a VUCA world. Today, hybrid work is the new normal. Tomorrow it could be something else. Developing a culture that is steeped in communication and collaboration thus cannot be a reactive effort.

Enabling employees to self-manage and control their schedules works best for organizational resilience. Along with this, communication and collaboration across teams, departments and stakeholders have to be seamless and simple. Building processes and workflows that enable collaboration, reduce effort and remove silos across business processes, departments, and teams must become strategic imperatives for leaders to navigate VUCA.

The Bottom Line

No one is immune to the impact of VUCA. Some navigate it better than others. For us, the last few years have been good despite the challenges of the times. We, however, have made many shifts at the leadership level to help us traverse this situation and bake resilience into our organizational DNA. Technology upgrades, new areas of focus, evolving HR strategies, listening to employee demands, and building an equitable and high-performing workplace are some of the shifts we made.

While we admit there are there will always be changes that we cannot predict and plan for, we have made sure that we have created a robust leadership ecosystem that can guide the organization if/when the going gets tough.