Leading an agile organization: are your solutions part of the problem?

Citation

Bajer, J. (2010), "Leading an agile organization: are your solutions part of the problem?", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2010.37209bab.001

Leading an agile organization: are your solutions part of the problem?

Article Type: Strategic commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 2

Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and its direction for the future

Javier BajerJavier Bajer is the founding CEO of The Talent Foundation.

Do you sometimes feel like things will never change in your organization? Have you already tried programs with the intention of driving culture change and been left, instead, with various justifications for why things could not change this time? The good news is that it is not the size of the group that stops people changing position or direction. Being agile has to do with having more commitment than attachment. Too theoretical? Please read on…

The urgency around agility

Everyone wants people and organizations to be agile, as taking too long to adapt to changing environments could endanger their survival. The challenge is to develop agility before it becomes too late. For a group of people to be agile, two things need to happen: they need to want to get hold of something that they do not already have (commitment) and, at the same time, they need to be able to let go of something they do already have (attachment). This sounds rather obvious, but not many leaders see it clearly enough when they inform their day-to-day decisions – and this is how organizations loose their agility.

While boards fill up their wish lists with bullet pointed hopes for behavioral changes in their organizations, they may unknowingly be feeding the drivers for stagnation. Let me give you an example. I recently spent some time with the leadership team of a large services organization that wants to develop a “responsible and entrepreneurial culture” across its entire workforce. This makes complete sense from a business perspective as failing to do so would slow down its response to its local markets, further reducing its overall market share.

However, during a recent board meeting the team discussed a proposal to drive greater centralization of the accounting function. There were obvious cost benefits to this new initiative and it seemed like a good idea. Everyone agreed to go ahead with it. However, buried in the data-bursting slides, there it was – from now on, local leaders would have to get authorization for things they were perfectly able to do before. No big problem. Sure? How was this new proposal going to connect with the existing intention of developing a responsible and entrepreneurial culture? How would people react if one day they heard that the organization wanted more entrepreneurship and later that afternoon found out that their budgets were “regionalized?” How would this misalignment produce agility at scale?

The danger of attachment

Most leaders are serious about developing agility in their organizations. The challenge is that, while being enthusiastic about creating new commitments through setting inspiring directions and communicating them in all sorts of ways, they also build attachments through rules, policies, systems, processes or structures – very much needed to run an organization these days. Attempting to increase the commitment levels of a workforce will not develop agility unless we reduce attachment at the same time. And that is more easily said than done.

Of course, we want it all. We want organizations that can turn on a dime, happily embracing change and following the pendulum of our frequent re-designs and reporting structures. We also want to manage performance tightly, develop specialist skills and offer career models with somewhat predictable outcomes, giving people some certainty about their futures.

Attachments are things that, although they hold us back, get us to play “safe.” They produce predictability, without surprises or rocking of the boat. Despite what most people would say, great pleasure and comfort derive from attachments. The problem, though, is that they kill agility straight away and we are left wondering why we are finding it hard to adapt to changing markets and business priorities.

The need for coherence

The paradox is getting more extreme by the day. We want more adaptation speed, but also more compliance. We want more collaboration, but create competition through forced ranking methods. We want more trust and risk taking, but we reduce our headcounts a bit too quickly. I believe that in the world of work, like in our own families, living inside conflicting “messages” (driving both commitment and attachment) not only reduces our capacity for adaptation – agility – but also increases our stress and frustration.

Humans are naturally adaptive animals and have proven this for a very long time. However, our agility works at its best when we see coherence in our environments. Maybe us, as leaders, are at last approaching the time when the only way to take our organizations forward is to be guardians of the coherence between our beliefs, intentions, promises and actions. And that will release agility at scale, naturally.

About the author

Javier Bajer works closely with the boards of global organizations such as Shell, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, The Economist and HSBC, helping them develop leadership at scale and re-engaging their workforces. In 1998 he also became the founding CEO of The Talent Foundation, the international network of businesses and academia created to find concrete answers to the challenge of unlocking human talent at scale. Javier Bajer can be contacted at: javier@workforceperformance.com