To succeed, companies have had to respond quickly to this year’s adversities.
As companies work not only to survive this global pandemic, but also to thrive in a rapidly changing world, speed and agility are paramount. To succeed, companies have had to respond quickly to this year’s major disruption, adapting their operations to deliver what their customers need.
How companies are adapting to the pandemic
There are countless examples of companies that adapted to the demands imposed by COVID-19. They made transformational changes in weeks, changes that in the past would have taken months or years. A few examples:
Attention management is essential to agile leadership.
Attention management is the most relevant and effective path to productivity.
Leaders often claim they can’t manage their attention because their teams need them to always be available for help, questions and decisions. But for their businesses to be adaptable, these leaders require the ability and opportunity to apply deep and sustained attention to their work over extended periods of time.
The problem of perpetual availability
Leadership roles often require knowledge and creativity, but leaders who prioritize availability are constantly interrupted. These interruptions make it much more difficult for leaders to focus attention on their most important tasks.
Without the ability to control attention, it is impossible, especially for leaders, to devote sufficient mental resources to generate innovative ideas or solve the problems that inevitably arise throughout any change process. Perpetual availability is therefore a major impediment to a company’s ability to adapt, especially at this time when speed and agility are crucial.
Now, more than ever, micromanagement is the enemy of the productivity of your entire team. It’s time to step back and empower your team.
Key steps that foster adaptability
Are you a manager or leader who feels like you can’t get important work done because your team always needs it? If so, here are three steps you can take to make sure you’re not the bottleneck in your organization. Following these steps will help your teams feel empowered to be innovative and make decisions, free from the organizational bureaucracy that can’t be allowed to hold them back.
1. Demonstrate confidence
Before the pandemic, client leaders and managers complained of constant “visits, received by the minute” throughout their days. During this telecommuting time, these interruptions take on a new form: excessive phone calls, meeting requests, text messages and urgent emails asking for approval of decisions or guidance on situations that team members find challenging.
Everyone likes to feel important and needed, and being available to your team can seem like the primary function of a leader. So it can be difficult to recognize this as a problem. But to be agile and adaptable, companies need team members who are skilled at creative and independent problem solving. If your team is used to you running things and collaborating on decisions, you may be inadvertently reinforcing the idea that this is necessary or required, which inadvertently disempowers your team. This dynamic drives too many decisions to the top and creates obstacles and bottlenecks that are roadblocks to innovation.
Change this habit by using the phrase “I trust your judgment.” Respond to emails with it. If your team members call you on the phone, tell them, “Actually, I can’t talk right now, but I trust your judgment.” Same thing when they ask you for meetings outside the regularly scheduled times when you connect with their direct subordinates.
Develop a cadence of weekly or twice-weekly meetings with your direct reports. But these meetings are not the time to collectively make decisions, solve problems or grant permission for things. Shorten the meetings and make them much more efficient by using the time to update your team and offer constructive feedback to help them learn and grow.
2. Mentor in retrospect
Mentoring your team is one of the most important roles as a leader. It provides a model of good leadership that will spread throughout the organization. Mentoring helps you attract and keep good talent, and it helps prepare employees to advance within the organization.
However, people learn by doing, so mentoring is less effective when advice is given up front than when team members have the opportunity to experience their own successes and failures and discuss them with you later.
Try opening scheduled one-on-one meetings with direct debriefs using questions such as, “what problems or challenges did you face this week, how did you deal with them, how did it work out for you?”
This will give you an opportunity to reinforce good decisions, celebrate victories and offer constructive guidance based on experience when employees stall or make a mistake. By sharing your own lessons learned, you will inspire the team to generate new ideas, see things in different ways and be willing to take risks.
3. Be tolerant of mistakes
Remember, great employees “quit on their boss” more often than they quit on their organization. None of the above ideas will work if you don’t really trust the judgment of your team members or if mistakes take them “to the doghouse.” Create a safe environment for making mistakes by making sure your team understands the parameters of their responsibilities. For example, empower customer service teams to make customers happy by giving them a budget for “delighting the customer.” Anything within this budget does not require approval.
Make sure employees understand the ultimate goals of their positions and the consequences of their actions. Then they can consider both as part of their decision-making process. If a decision falls within their responsibilities and will not cause irreversible damage, accept that the speed and agility that result from independent decisions justify some potential mistakes along the way. Mistakes are great teachers and companies that do not take risks cannot adapt.
Follow the adage of “praise in public, correct in private” when a team member makes a decision in the moment that didn’t work, as long as the decision is ethical and in good faith. Keep in mind the term “correct,” not “criticize.” The goal is to help your direct reports learn and keep them motivated to try new things. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt unless and until they prove they don’t deserve it.
Speed and agility are the keys to maintaining business productivity in times of disruption. To help your organization succeed, focus your attention on your most important work and empower your team to do the same. The above suggestions will make your organization more adaptable, help your employees grow, and allow you to unleash your own genius, creating success for you, your team, and your organization.
Source: https://forbes.es