Leadership necessities for Organizational Agility

As successful leaders we need to ensure that our organization can attract and retain resilient, agile, nimble, adaptive people. Beyond managing change, a proactive HR can help the current employees develop this capacity. It calls for concerted efforts to transform the work environment, organization, and climate that enables HR to deliver the workforce needed for the future. However in many organizations, existing HR systems are major impediments to creating agile workforces. For the most part, HR systems are designed to reduce variability and to standardize behavior, not to promote flexibility and adaptive behavior.
This move toward agility has created a new role for the HR function as HR organizations tend to become smaller. Hiring criteria and processes need to be altered to reflect agile attributes. Additionally job descriptions and compensation systems need to be re-designed to pay relatively more for enterprise-wide results and relatively less for individual outcomes. The HR department needs to create an organization that constantly builds its capacity through building the capacity of the people it employs.
The Agile Work Environment
Multiple layers of management that separate people from information, customers, and the ability to make knowledgeable decisions slow down an organization…hence they do not find place in the new agile reality. Neither will people who want to do one job, make limited decisions, take no risks, and pass each challenge to their supervisor. Direction and focus, in this agile work environment, is provided by leaders who drive and communicate the organization’s strategic vision throughout the workplace, daily, incessantly, and consistently while allowing individuals internalize this vision and perform their work to maximize its attainment. There are mainly three critical characteristics of the nimble organization:
•Hire only the agile -When staffing the organization for nimbleness,80% of the resources should be directed toward hiring people already prone towards the desired attributes, and then training and coaching them to expand their capabilities even more. No more than 20 percent of the resources should be allocated to assisting those who say they are willing to work against their own instincts and biases and try to develop completely new propensities… to become nimble and resilient.
•Spread resilience - when change is introduced, it is typically better handled by resilient people. It is better integrated by people who are used to constant change and who are not taken by surprise by the announcement or request.
•Build a core competency around handling ambiguity - People who handle change most effectively recognize that change can be scary, perhaps unpleasant, and that it always requires something different from them. Despite this, they continue to rise to the occasion and effectively perform their job responsibilities.
_ anshumali.saxena@soilindia.net