Increasing the Agility of your Human Capital

Increasing the Agility of your Human Capital

Human Capital agility is nowadays critical for organizational success. Organizational agility is the resultant effect of the various individuals agility or lack of agility.
With certain agility instruments a core group of agile human capital can be identified and be spread across the organization to expedite and strengthen the organizational agility.
Leaders who lack agility must acknowledge that and be supported by high agility subordinates/colleagues.

Welcome to the Organizational Agility forum of 12manage.

Here we exchange knowledge and experiences in the field of Organizational Agility.

❗Sign up now to gain access to 12manage. Completely free.

Continue for free

Please sign up and login to continue reading.

Here we exchange knowledge and experiences in the field of Organizational Agility.

❗Sign up now to gain access to 12manage. Completely free.

Comments by date▼

Comments by rating

Rating

Daniel Schneider
Business Consultant, United States

Hire and Deploy Agile People

Thanks for the comments, Omar. Agility has become a buzzword, but that doesn't lessen the impact of the principles involved.
You are entirely correct to encourage inflexible leaders to surround themselves with agile persons. The person/organization with the most flexibility controls the system.

Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands

Developing an Agile Workforce

How do you actually achieve a higher degree of human capital agility in practice? In other words, how can you transform your leaders and teams towards more agile ways of decision making and working together?
Ferrazzi discusses this question and rightly highlights one major issue with establishing such teams with strong agile capabilities: many firms traditionally have a strong focus on developing leadership competencies rather than on developing team competencies. If you emphasize leadership skills over team skills (like candor, collaboration, accountability and continual improvement), becoming more agile as organization will be difficult. He recommends following techniques to shift the focus more towards developing agile skills, behaviors and competencies:

COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
BULLET-PROOFING of upcoming initiatives. (Virtual) meetings aimed at collectively gathering and capturing feedback, constructive criticism, risks and mitigation for a project.
MEETING PRACTICES like:
- CANDOR BREAKS (=short breakout session around the question: "What's not being said?").
- RED-FLAG REPLAYS (=short breakout session around a supposed violation of norms/values in a recent interaction)
- SAFE WORDS (=an agreed-upon word or phrase that cues everyone to listen attentively and without interrupting to the person who used the safe word)
to make people comfortable to share and receive constructive criticism.
OPEN 360S. Transparent performance feedback. Coach and develop each other.

Source: Ferrazzi K., "A New Social Contract for Teams - Members must commit to new behaviors to accelerate innovation and growth", HBR Sep_oct 2022, pp. 88-97.

John Henry
Project Manager, United States

Creating More Agility Among your People

Understand the Agile Mindset (look up agile manifesto) Realize that Agile Visioning and Implementations are key to the entire process...
First- really know Where you are. What your reality is, your good and your bad, your successes, and the failures. Recognize and accept them.
Next- Identify Where you want to be. Your vision, mission, Goals, etc.
Then identify the incremental improvements needed from step 1 to step 2, Utilize the entire team to identify these improvements, and experiment with them to find the ones that will bear fruit in incremental (think short term) blocks.
Always critique each increment, what works, what is problematic, how can you improve it more, is it beneficial, does it provide value?
After several incremental changes, reevaluate, are you closer to your goal, has the goal changed, has the current reality changed... Adapt, and be successful.

John Henry
Project Manager, United States

Bending Inflexible Leaders

@ Daniel Schneider: Encourage the inflexible to utilize flexibility... Seems like a right path. But HOW? I would suggest that much of the issue, is the relative inflexibility of leadership. Getting your leadership to recognize the need for change, and then to identify the best follks to drive that change ( hint: probably not the inflexible leader) will be a needed learning experience. Establishing the agile processes are incremental short term improvements, many of them identified by the organizations own rank and file workers, and then organized into a plan of action to allow everyone to benefit from the individual improvements... Forming a leaderless (positionally) team where the collective group is emboldened to make decisions and changes that will benefit everyone is a large key to this process. Maybe calling it process improvement, instead of agile process change, is a good first step for the "inflexible leadership" But the real key will be to get them to embrace the the process change process.