More business agility with new leadership skills

Responding quickly to changes in the market and to your customer’s needs gives your organization an edge. How do you ensure your large (or growing) organization remains agile? And how can you, as an agile leader, facilitate this business agility? Read more about strategic agility, how to measure it, and how you can contribute to increasing agility as an agile leader?

Business agility is about the speed at which your organization can respond to new technologies, legislation, and regulations. And how quickly you respond to competition and opportunities in the market. Read how to get started with your team’s agility, and how to measure progress with the Time-2-Learn metric.

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Case: business agility after upscaling

Rapid customer and/or employee growth can compromise business agility. This was the case with an international financial services company. The major shareholder asked Re-lead to help them increase their agility tremendously.

We went to work on the design and implementation plan of a new, more agile organizational form. Re-lead also conducted several workshops. The results were:

Higher employee engagement
Successful international product launches, and faster testing thereof with end users

Coaching the major shareholder provided him and the organization with:

More insights into his talents
An eye for the right balance between micromanagement and anarchy
the skill to make important decisions faster and more carefully

Measure business agility: Time-2-Learn metric

Do you want to know how fast the turnaround time of feedback is in your organization? Then use the Time-2-Learn-metric. It measures the days, weeks, or months between creating a new or an updated product, and the moment teams can learn from the product’s real users. The quicker the feedback time, the higher the learning speed.

Agile leader as a mentor

This example shows that business agility has to do with the organizational structure and culture, and the type of leadership. As an agile leader, it is your job to stimulate and support this agility. So, teams dare to ask customers for feedback quickly, even about ideas that aren’t finished yet.

In addition, it is important that teams are given the time to invest in how to deal with feedback properly. This means investing in tools and methods to collect feedback and incorporating these in the planning and objectives. Next, your people must have the freedom to actually make decisions themselves.

To summarize: it is the job of the agile leader to direct the teams’ goals, and to stay away from micromanagement, in order to enable more business agility.

Increase learning speed

There are different ways to increase the learning speed and thus increase business agility for every organization. Nevertheless, there are 3 tips that always apply:

In the sprint review, also discuss feedback and figures from products or services that were delivered a few sprints earlier. This helps stakeholders focus on user facts.
Each week (or sprint), assign success criteria to one or more items. For example: within 1 month, 20 percent of our customers are using this functionality. Or: within 2 weeks, the marketing conversation rate increased from X to Y.
Appoint (strategic) themes for what you want to achieve. So instead of ‘launch marketing campaign A’, formulate it as follows: ‘In the week following the launch of marketing campaign X, we have Y additional visitors per day to our website’.

Do the online quick scan

As an agile leader, you may already have insight into opportunities to increase business agility. Is there a lot of ‘low-hanging fruit’? Then fill out our online quick scan. And immediately get easily applicable tips for your organization.

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Agile Leadership: unlock the passion, drive, liveliness and ownership of your teams. So they can unlock awesome customer value.

Peter Koning Snapshot Coach Agile Leadership