3 Critical Skills to build Agility with Change

I was recently asked “What skills does a business leader need in order to build agility in change in their team?”

According to me, these are the 3 critical skills that any business leader needs to start building in their team that will help the team be more agile in responding to any change. These are meta-skills that you need whatever the industry or size of the organization:

Emotional resilience 

When I talk about emotional resilience then I’m talking about the ability of a person and a team to bounce back from failures and setbacks and try again, or try something else. Implementation of any change – whether it is a change in processes or systems or rules and regulations or technology – will mean that there are times when things don’t work. What happens to your team when that happens? Do they dust themselves off, take a pause, re-calibrate and then start again? Or do they become discouraged and withdraw into their shells?

One simple way that a business leader can do this in their team is to start including stories about their own resilience stories in their conversations with their teams. When their leaders share about 

• the mistakes they made and
• (this is very important), how they moved on from them

 this gives their team members permission to do the same – make mistakes, learn from them and move on. The more recent the stories are, the better and if it is something that the team members have actually seen happen then it is even more powerful. 

I am not talking about stories about spectacular failures – I am talking about the presentation that didn’t go as well as expected, the idea that didn’t work and had to be axed, the time a proposal was rejected.

The Ability to Learn 

a critical skill that everyone, including business leaders, need in order to be agile with change is the ability to learn – be it new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking about things. Unfortunately, this is not a skill that is taught at school. Our younger generations in Singapore are benefiting from the reforms introduced in 2013 but those of us who are already in the workforce went through a system that didn’t teach us this. Therefore, it falls to business leaders to help their teams to develop this. And also know their own learning preferences. In order to be efficient learners, you need to:

1. Know how you learn – what is your learning style? Some people learn better by seeing, some by hearing and some by doing. As a business leader you need to know how everyone on your team learns. And they need to know each others’ preferences as well
2. Know What to learn – in today’s world we are inundated with information and knowledge. Which makes it very important to be able to focus on exactly what you need to learn – as a business leader what would be the most important thing for you to learn right now to help this change be implemented smoothly? 
3. Know When to learn – this is very important. Even if you know the first two and don’t have time to learn then the end result is the same – you are not able to learn and change. As a business leader, providing your team members with time to learn – specific chunks of the day or week – is really important. Otherwise learning is one of the things that gets lost in myriad daily activities. Remember, sometimes to save time you have to spend time.

Communication Skills 

By far the MOST important skill of all that you need to help your team build is to help them build their communication and relationship building skills. And I am talking about the broader definition of Communication – which includes not only presentations, emails and conversations but also your actions. Sometimes your actions speak louder than words. Change is going to mean that they need to:

1. Understand and Respect others – no change can be made in isolation, collaboration is a pre-requisite of agility in times of change. In order to persuade people to change you need to understand their ‘model of the world’. You can only influence and persuade people from their perspective, not your own.
2. Share ideas – in order to share their ideas clearly and memorably, they need to know how to present them impactfully – whether in formal or informal situations
3. Deal with Disagreements and Conflict – any time that you are looking at creating change, there will be many different points of views, ideas and ways of doing things – just as I shared in the story about my friend earlier. Your people need to know how to deal with these, they will need tools and techniques that will help them whatever the situation.

What other skills do you think are critical to creating successful change in an organisation? I would love to hear from you. Please email me at Meenakshi@TheChangeBusiness.com or send me a LinkedIn message.

This article was first published on my LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/meenakshisarup/