Trust is paramount
The common theme running through this is trust. To put these three imperatives into action, leaders need to start placing greater trust in their employees. To illustrate this point, we’ll draw on insights from Rachel Botsman – trust fellow, author and lecturer at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School.
Botsman defines trust as “a confident relationship with the unknown”. She says it’s not the same as transparency, because transparency assumes everything is ‘known’. In the context of organisational agility, this means leaders don’t need to know everything that’s going on, because they should trust employees to do the right thing, even when they’re not looking. In practice, this translates into decentralised decision-making.
At Baringa, we believe trust has to work both ways. Just as leaders need to trust their people, they also need to earn people’s trust. We apply this principle both internally and in our work with clients.
It’s surprising when organisations say they are going to build more trust. You can’t build trust… You have to earn it, and to do that, you have to demonstrate that you are trustworthy all the time. This relates to the imperative around fostering psychological safety. Executive teams need to prove they are trustworthy by consistently reacting well, ESPECIALLY when things don’t work out.
This idea is echoed in Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman’s study of leaders who are trusted by their employees. Their research highlighted three behaviours that help executives earn trust:
- Building positive relationships with other people and groups. This includes staying in touch with others’ concerns, encouraging cooperation between others, and giving honest feedback in a helpful way.
- Exercising good judgement. Trusted leaders make sensible decisions, and use their knowledge and expertise to make an important contribution to organisational results.
- Demonstrating consistency. This is about having a transparent set of consistent principles, being a good role model and setting a good example.
To pair these behaviours with agility, executive teams need to tread a fine line…
- How can they stay in touch with others’ concerns without micro-managing?
- How can they make an important contribution without overshadowing their employees?
- How can they set a good example without getting bogged down in day-to-day operations?
This is a puzzle that still needs solving in most organisations today. If employees trust senior leaders, they’re more likely to follow and support them as they innovate and transform the business. Common alignment in your organisation’s strategic vision is everything. Trust and strategic alignment are proportional – so the greater the trust, the less effort is spent on communicating, convincing and corralling. This means more time can be dedicated to outcome-focused transformation and delivering value for the customer.
Debunking agile myths
Let’s be honest, a lot of businesses (and not to mention, a lot of consultancies) are talking about Agile and agility, but each one has a different approach to implementation. To get off to the right start, executive teams must be aware of common myths and recognise some important truths.
- You can’t just run fast with zero planning. We’ve seen many organisations try this. It never works. Yes, in an agile organisation, the plans may look different, but planning is just as important. The key is to start small, think big, and go fast. Leadership teams should adopt a mantra of ‘start less, finish more’.
- Outcome-based objective setting. The Agile manifesto was originally written to guide developers as they build and enhance technologies. In that environment, people are clear on what they are looking to achieve when they rapidly experiment, fail fast, and perform quick, successive launches of new features/functionality. Outside that context, things are less clear-cut, and people need more direction. This means leadership must provide clear objectives and key results (OKRs) before they set their teams to work. This shifts an organisation’s lexicon to an outcome-based language. This linguistic shift can be challenging, but, once achieved, the pace of real change accelerates exponentially.
- Stability is not the enemy. It sounds counterintuitive, but to foster agility, organisations do need a degree of stability. However, that stability can take many different forms. It might be long-serving members of the leadership team, or self-forming communities within a business spanning multiple organisational levels. Alternatively, it could be a thin governance framework, or a regular sprint cadence. These small elements of stability act as an axis around which the rest of the organisation can gravitate. If everything changes at once, without a stable centre of gravity, all you achieve is chaos. So, in short, agility requires stability.
What have we learned? Organisational agility isn’t easy to develop, and it won’t materialise overnight. Executive teams require real courage, and a willingness to change their own behaviours as well as their organisations. A fluid organisation combined with a high-trust culture has been proven to deliver a wide range of results, without trade-offs.
Organisations with a high degree of agility can achieve greater speed, higher quality and lower costs in parallel. The evidence is strong across all sectors. Baringa’s research and our client delivery results show that organisational agility, deployed well, can provide on average:
- 50% increase in speed-to-market
- 30% increase in employee engagement
- 35% decrease in cost of change
- 50% improvement in quality
Organisations that are engaged and can transform in a fluid way hold the key to short and long-term success. Agility provides the DNA, with the right leadership culture helping engrain in into the organisation.
Rather than seeing transformation, change, operational excellence and agility as separate capabilities and teams, we encourage our clients to bring these underlying skillsets together. Many organisations will hire new people, without realising that much of the combined skillset already exists within their organisations. By upskilling and repurposing their existing talent pool, organisations can achieve faster and more sustainable transformations.
Facing into these challenges as early as possible widens the gates of opportunity for an organisation. Equally, as executive teams look to respond to the constant volatility around them, one thing is clear – for those that do take the leap toward agility, the shift is transformational and the benefits are vast.
If you think we can help you solve the agility paradox at your organisation, email us today at agility@baringa.com