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:
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
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.
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:
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:
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/