AgilityINsights «Fit for your future» - Blog Einträge

Agile Organisationen müssen Wahlfreiheit ermöglichen

LukasMichel — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:08:31 +0200

For years managers have driven efficiency into their operations. Projects focused on cost savings, quality enhancements, or productivity improvements. In today’s fast-paced and volatile environment, efficiency is the ‘table stakes’ but not sufficient to compete when change is a constant. Flexibility and speed are needed – agility as the organizational capability for the new era.

Agility is a holistic organizational capability that brings together people, culture, leadership, and systems as articulated in their norms, beliefs, and the operating model. Choice, next to trust, awareness, and focus is one of the four prerequisites for people to flexibly react to early signs, act on them quickly to capture relevant opportunities.

The ability of people to have choice is a fundamental principle of responsibility. It means to have autonomy to decide and the freedom to act on information. Choice as a managerial principles is not a given. In fact, most of us have experienced the opposite – the ‘command and control’ approach that is still deeply embedded in today’s leadership practices. Agility requires creativity and initiative to flourish. “Being told what to do and how to do it” blocks all innovation. Creative people need choice to apply their knowledge, skills, and ambitions in the most productive way. This is the reason why agility needs choice.

Choice sound so obvious, but it seems that we are far from using its potential. Embedding choice as a dominant leadership practice is not easy as our dominant behavior to “tell people what to do” has been deeply anchored in our habits. Embedding choice into the leadership culture requires that all managerial principles are designed in ways to offer choice rather than standard operating procedures. For example, performance management needs to be designed as a thought model rather than a detailed prescription of what to do. Management by Objectives should be a principle to work from rather a detailed set of forms and predetermined employee conversations…

The advantages of choice as a prerequisite for agility are evident. Principles that offer choice can cope with an ambiguous future as people know how to think about a new situation rather than to follow a process that does not meet the specific context and problem. Having choice means using responsibility, being agile – capture relevant opportunities and acting on them.

Enabling choice first requires change in institutional principles and then change in individual leadership behaviors. Following this order prevents that organizations spend millions in leadership development with little success. It is more effective to change the fundamental rules that guide effective leadership than trying to fix individual leaders within an inadequate environment.

How do your principles and leadership practices enable choice in your organization? Use the AgilityINsights Diagnostic™ to measure, decode and develop your organizations ability to cope with a volatile and ambiguous future.

Here is the test

Talent Management funktioniert nicht – wirklich!

LukasMichel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:02:43 +0200

As HR professional you know the problem. You hire only the best talent. This takes time, and it is rather costly. You develop and coach the talent extensively to discover that they are gone before they get to real work. The exit interview is a nice chat on opportunities and often the manager – but “no critique, only suggestions”. You dig deeper because you want to understand: Employee surveys always show the same result: Strategy is unclear, leaders don’t understand, and communication doesn’t reach the destination. The cycle starts again. Even better talent is hired … – you know the rest of the story.

As a professional you don’t need any deep drill analysis to exactly know why attrition is where it is. But we are caught in our own environment and context. We also know the cost – it is high – despite the fact that the organization just now needs to reduce its cost. We try to cope with the problem by “fixing” leaders, with more precise talent processes and systems – with little success.

The perceived reality in organizations often is a combination of cultural, leadership, and systems related interferences. Here is an incomplete hit list:

Erroneous systems: Bureaucracy, formalism, faulty design, revisiting past decisions, slow implementation, decision making at the top, lack of routines, …
Faulty leadership: Control, no time, hidden in the detail, sense-less, focus on numbers, little value placed on soft issues and skills, …
A toxic culture: Faulty operating procedures, values without consequences, cynics, upwards delegation, outdated reasons for centralized decision making, technocrat view of decision making, …

The list is long and always different. With such interferences organizations stall: Knowledge walks elsewhere, creativity doesn’t produce innovation, engagement doesn’t release productive energies, and implementation is always the challenge. In line with this, organizations are slow in adapting to the changes in the market place and competitive advantage is at stake.

To break out of the negative talent cycle, leadership, culture, and systems need to be free from viruses. With the AgilityINsights diagnostic, you can start your virus test. With the results from the diagnostic, you will gain deep insights into what it takes to create an operating environment where people are challenged, want to contribute, and grow.

How many good decisions have you made today?

LukasMichel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 09:58:15 +0200

Imagine that everyone in your company made the right choices and took the right decisions, regardless of context and hierarchy. Good decision making is increasingly recognized as the key competitive advantage in today’s complex, ambiguous and uncertain operating environment.

We tend to think of decision making as something that happens at the top of organizations, is done by individuals or small groups of highly experienced people. In fact, only a small fraction of decisions are made at the top. In particular, stakeholders’ experience is shaped far more by a myriad routine, daily decision that are made by the employees at the periphery of the firm, then the major, big stakes decisions made at the top.

The challenge lies in enabling good decision-making at scale, regardless of location in the hierarchy or context. To consistently outperform competitors and remain flexible without adding risks, it is critical to embed good decision making practices throughout the organization. Improving decision making is not simple in an operating environment with multiple geographies, functions, organizations, and products. In larger firms training is often focused on individuals or teams. But the real challenge is to address the underlying rules, routines, and tools to consistently enable good decision making at scale.

How do you get there? No data without intervention. The AgilityINsights Diagnostic gets you started. You will precisely know how what to do to create an organization that makes good decisions and is ready to cope with the challenges of the future!
How many decisions have you made today?

It’s so obvious “People are the most important assets” …

LukasMichel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 09:57:11 +0200

But, good intensions are not good enough to win the game in today’s complex, uncertain, and knowledge driven environment. The task is to make it real. It is a fact that in a modern society up to 75% of jobs requires knowledge more than physical work. The implications for corporate leadership are twofold. First, decision making becomes the core skill of people and, second, leaders can rely on the ability of people to adapt fast to a changing environment.

HR leaders are not only challenged by the difficulty in hiring the best talent, but in making sure that the talent sticks and translates its knowledge into productive action. Talent management is worthless unless people have the opportunity apply, share, and develop their knowledge and skills.

To get the mileage from valuable assets, organizations need to enable good decision making throughout their organization. This means to relate people to collaborate and provide means to find purpose rather than command and control. It further means to enable leadership teams to provide choice, to raise the awareness for what is important, and to help people to remain focused on the things that matter most.

How do you make it real? No data without intervention. The AgilityINsights Diagnostic gets you started. You will precisely know how to make people stick in an organization that is ready to cope with the challenges of the future!

Has change had its days?

LukasMichel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 09:54:59 +0200

It’s too obvious: Change is a disruptive intervention in every organization. Too often, the results are invisible or questionable. Often initiatives are stopped before they are completed or the next initiative is coming before the first one has had a chance to succeed.

With most change processes, we look for altered behaviors, different action, better decisions, or other thinking. It is the “fixing” of people that we are going after. Such change is without any doubt interference to what people do. They are encouraged to do things differently. Stress, tension, fear, all the things we know that reduce human performance, are the result. To make up for it, we then “motivate” people for the respective change – with “motivation” having the same effect: Outside control, less initiative, waiting for the next wave, … . By now, a huge “fixing” industry has developed to keep doing more of the same – with the same results.

But, to win in an increasingly volatile environment, leadership teams must be agile – flexibly react to early signs and act on them quickly. Good decision making is the fundamental capability in organization to cope with higher dynamics, ambiguity, and complexity. It builds on knowledgeable people that want to be creative and contribute. So why not build the capability of superior agility and speed? Why not build it on, what I call “people centric leadership”? … The skills, the thoughts, the motions, the ambitions that already exist in humans?

It is time to change the way we manage change – rather build the capabilities for agility and speed: But, no intervention without data. The AgilityINsights Diagnostic gets you started. You will precisely know what to fix where and how for an organization that is ready to cope with the challenges of the future!