11
AGILITY
Maximize Speed and Flexibility

Strength in the post–Great Recession environment is based on agility. Effective, efficient execution demands it. Agility means responding to change of any kind with speed and flexibility, whether it’s a new client demand or a paradigm shift. Handling new challenges on the fly, swerving onto a new course, stopping suddenly, and reversing direction—it’s all in a day’s work for the modern business professional.

The theme of flexibility has run through this entire book: triage tasks, embrace change, avoid techno-traps, improve continually, and facilitate tasks, to name just a few.

All that really matters in terms of productivity are results—another of this book’s primary themes. It doesn’t matter how many hours you put in or how many to-do tasks you scratch off your list; what matters is whether you’ve produced at a high level or not. No one can afford to just serve time until the end of the day, or the end of a career. Nor can you allow paralysis or procrastination to slow you down.

As Darren Smith of John Hancock Investments noted in our interview,

The velocity of change in business is constantly accelerating, so in order to remain competitive, it is critical to stay agile. The landscape is littered with examples of companies like Blackberry and Sears that were once dominant franchises that didn’t stay flexible and lost their edge. So, agility and flexibility are more crucial than ever.

However, a company must also have a clear corporate vision, definite strategic objectives, and very clear operating priorities that form a solid foundation for success. If this structure is in place and is adhered to, then necessary adjustments can be made as business conditions change, but it doesn’t derail the company or undermine the firm’s strategic plan.

Speed and flexibility are especially important at a team level. Crisis requires a tight focus on the need of the hour and a rapid response time.

IMPROVEMENT: WORKING HARD ON THE RIGHT THINGS

If you’re having trouble determining whether your team is productive or just busy, assume the latter. Productivity should be glaringly obvious. But if any doubts linger, consider these points:

• How measurable are your goals? Everything you do should contribute to something profitable. Clarify your goals with your team if they’re confused about priorities. If you can’t tell how an activity moves you toward your goals, then it’s suspect and may be ripe for elimination. Always track results with easily readable metrics.

• How’s your ROI? Does your team’s output consistently earn the organization more than it pays you? If not, start honing ROI. Outsource tasks that people outside your team can do better and cheaper. Stop doing tasks below your pay grade, and don’t micromanage. Always look for a more profitable alternative to every task.

• Is your meeting meter running? As you rise in leadership, you’ll be spending more time in meetings, because they represent your work—decision-making. But they can steal your time if you’re not careful. If a meeting doesn’t come with a purpose, an agenda, and decisions to be made, skip it. Leave at the promised end time. Encourage others to be brief and stick to the point with their comments.

• Are you proactive or reactive? Do you and your team leap into action only when prodded, or do you review your strategy on a regular basis so you greet change with enthusiasm and aplomb?

My friend Randy Pennington puts it aptly in his book title, Results Rule!, and he’s right. It boils down to this: productive teams produce results; busy teams produce busywork. Unless you work for an organization such as an international charity in which results aren’t immediately apparent, it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to determine if your team is being productive.

Leveraging Agility

Given today’s go-go-go approach to modern business, agility is applicable to most fields. Software development already has its model of Agile Project Management (APM), which doesn’t rely on the classic “waterfall” model of sequential project management, where one stage can’t proceed without results from the preceding stage. The obvious problem with the waterfall model is that if only one stage of a workflow cascade dams up, everyone down the line stalls out until someone clears the blockage. This is expensive and wasteful, and most of us have experienced it.

A more flexible model breaks a project into manageable pieces, all with independent milestones, due dates, and testing phases that team members can handle independently if necessary. That way, when a delay occurs in one area, it doesn’t stop the entire project dead in its tracks. Take these actions the next time you assign your team a new project:

1 EXAMINE IT CAREFULLY FROM ALL ANGLES. Focus on the needs and requirements first. Think about where and how you can split the project into discrete pieces that particular team members or subteams can handle. Film crews have used a piecemeal process for decades. They will shoot unrelated scenes back-to-back based on factors like weather, actor availability, lighting, access to a location, etc. Often, one unit shoots one set of scenes as a second shoots another.

2 CUT THE DIAMOND. You can easily “part out” some projects, but you will have to deal with others more carefully, much like cutting a diamond. Once you’ve determined you can split the project into pieces, do so. Take your chisel and tap it carefully with the hammer to break the project up. Hand the pieces out to the people best suited for them, complete with their own specific milestones and deadlines.

3 BUILD IN FLEXIBILITY. There’s a reason your skeleton consists of many pieces that can bend and stretch in several directions. Your bones could be a lot stronger if your arms, legs, spine, and the like were all single pieces, but if that were the case, you’d sacrifice all flexibility and agility—and that’s just not acceptable. Plus, if one bone breaks, it doesn’t render your entire body useless.

A project built from many independent parts is naturally more flexible than a sequential “waterfall” project. It more easily absorbs the need for changes, additional testing, and new features as they arise. You can also implement feedback more quickly. As Janie Wade, Senior Vice President of Finance for Baylor Scott & White Health, points out in an interview,

Even though we plan, we know unexpected opportunities will come our way. We allow flexibility in our planning to take advantage of these opportunities. We might have to push another project out a year if we determine that we don’t have enough time or resources to execute both strategies simultaneously or if we think too many initiatives at once will negatively affect front line staff. Front line staff care for patients. We want them to be able to focus on that.

4 PUT IT BACK TOGETHER. As sections of the project come in, slide them in place, leaving space for the later bits to allow greater flexibility in terms of responding to customer and market needs. This requires careful planning and preparation, perhaps more so than traditional project management. Yet, it not only saves time overall but also facilitates decision-making and eliminates waste. You don’t have to wait until the end to cut out what doesn’t work and graft in better concepts and newer features.

You can learn a lot from software designers and film crews about the agile approach you need to not only succeed but also blow people away—and you don’t have to sacrifice a speck of quality to do it.

No One Should Be Indispensable

If you want your team, division, department, or company to truly improve, you have to hire for versatility, not indispensability. If someone is indispensable, then you can’t replace them. If you can’t replace them, the team can’t advance without them. So if that person dies, leaves, or even takes a vacation and forgets to leave the keys to the filing cabinet (metaphorically speaking), the team is unable to move forward.

No one on your team should be indispensable. Ever. Not even you—or your company can never promote you. Would you want a car with irreplaceable parts? Of course not; eventually it would break down, and you could never fix it. The same holds true for a business team.

Instead, make sure your teammates are somewhat interchangeable, so you can maintain your productivity no matter what.

Building in Backup

Keep these four strategies in mind:

1 HIRE FOR REDUNDANCY. While you may not need two writers or three coders for your new video game, it’s still a good idea to hire people with a range of skills that overlap, just in case. As you build your team, look for people who can act as pinch hitters when necessary or those you can groom to take over another position in the future.

2 CROSS-TRAIN. To maintain the integrity of the team, send members to classes so they can better understand what their teammates do. Host brown-bag luncheons where one person explains the details of his or her job, or have one team member “shadow” another to learn that person’s duties. Make the training appropriate to their positions; your support staff may not need to master the latest programming languages, but your programmers certainly do.

3 DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Record each task each person on your team does in plain English, complete with graphics, so anyone with basic knowledge of the discipline can pick up the manual and roll with it. No one does this better than McDonald’s, which is why the company can quickly train inexperienced teenagers to produce a consistent product worldwide.

4 PLAN FOR THE FUTURE. Someday, you’ll retire or move up; you may even leave for another company. Therefore, you’ll need to groom a successor to handle your duties, either when you leave or when you can’t be at work due to illness, travel, or vacation. The same goes for your senior team members. Succession planning is a basic duty of all organizations. Hire with succession in mind. When we nominate new board members of the National Speakers Association, we always ask, “Can we see this person becoming president of NSA someday?” If you don’t handle hiring personally, impress your precise needs upon your HR reps. Once you’ve chosen a successor for a position, start providing the training needed to move that person up as circumstances require.

Up or Out

It may sound good to be indispensable or irreplaceable—but don’t you believe it. The truly indispensable person is stuck, and heaven help their team if something happens to them or they quit.

Rather than let anyone become indispensable, make sure everyone is replaceable. That way, you can safeguard team productivity while rewarding individual competence and initiative.

SPEED TO THE NEED OF THE HOUR

One aspect of flexibility leaders often overlook is that their management style has to change according to the situation or person. For example, you may have to be more stringent during crunch time to complete a project on time and within budget, but that need only be temporary before you return to your normal laid-back self. You also have to understand how to handle individual team members—and know when they need a manager as opposed to a coach, or vice versa.

That means cluing in to the differences between managing and coaching, while knowing when each is called for.

Despite what some people may think, business leadership is no walk in the park. I can tell you from personal experience—and from the testimony of plenty of clients—that the combination of mental work, social interaction, project juggling, time management challenges, high pressure, responsibility, and variability makes it one of the most demanding types of work anyone can take on. The hours are long and the stress inevitable.

But if organizations expect to accomplish anything of consequence, they must have managers. While managers may not directly produce what an organization makes, they facilitate and organize team productivity, which clears the way for others to succeed.

Yet a true leader is more than a manager driving the team’s performance. He or she acts as a coach in the best sense of the word, laying out the general strategy with talented, trusted team members who then run with the ball while the coach steps out of the way.

So when should you be one or the other—a manager versus a coach?

The Managerial Side of the Job

Managers often have to tell others what to do. You may have to act from greater experience, knowledge, or training, directly passing on your requirements to your team through tasking, directives, and initiatives. This most often occurs in situations where immediate needs are paramount, and you need to achieve specific outcomes quickly. Your team looks to you for answers—and rightly so. You want them to think for themselves, but sometimes a team needs someone to coordinate all the pieces of the project.

As a pure manager, you direct from a position of authority while guiding your team toward a specific outcome. Situations where you need to manage include:

• Dealing with crises that require fast results.

• Handling inexperienced personnel, especially those tackling a task for the first time.

• Making sure your team completes a low-level or unpopular task.

• Meeting difficult deadlines when every minute counts.

These situations require quick, decisive action focused on high productivity and achievement.

The Flipside: Coaching

In this era of independent thinkers who must often execute instantly without awaiting permission, the leader’s job has expanded. No longer does a leader just tell people what to do: a leader guides their team in their work, clears obstacles from their paths, and supports their immediate and long-term career goals.

Trusted, experienced, and efficient personnel form the hub of the true wheel of productivity, so coaching skills should take the lion’s share of your time. Coaching works best in situations when:

• You work with highly motivated people who admit they don’t have all the answers.

• Your team members trust you as the coach.

• You support your team members while guiding them in their career goals.

• You work together with your team to define and facilitate the best strategies for both the team and the organization.

• You share the organization’s mission, vision, and goals transparently with all team members.

• You invite them to join you in a quest for success.

• You facilitate everyone’s progress toward the goals you’ve mutually set as well as toward organizational goals.

When you coach, you teach your people the ropes as necessary, acting as a mentor rather than an autocrat. You make suggestions in real time concerning what they can do to tweak their performance toward an optimum. When they don’t quite reach a standard, you praise what they did right, then outline where you think they showed weakness and what they can do to improve. You provide the tools they need to succeed—because when they succeed, so do you.

Coaches create the kind of engaged, empowered employees needed for business survival today.

Reaching for Improvement

Today, workplace reality is undergoing a shift that’s been coming on for decades. We see the technological innovations of the era combine with a desire for independence to bring employees and managers ever closer to each other on the employment continuum. No longer does the autocrat hold sway; a dictator is no longer needed all the time. Yes, leaders must have a firm hand occasionally, especially during crises and when dealing with green recruits. But otherwise, the coach has the upper hand over the autocrat in the drive toward excellence and a bountiful outcome.

The leader-as-coach provides the flexibility and agility businesses require on their road to success. Coaching also provides the motivation and confidence individual team members must feel to take you there. It seems a preordained conclusion that the importance of managing as a coach rather than an autocrat will increase in the foreseeable future.

If you haven’t already started the shift yourself, it’s time to begin.

BOOSTING ROI THROUGH LEARNING

Return on investment is as important in teams and individuals as it is for machines, buildings, and other tangible assets. Many people don’t like this comparison because it equates human value to material wealth, yet it’s been common in business for decades. Efficiency is a key component of producing good ROI.

But what comprises true efficiency in a useful business sense?

That’s a question worth pursuing; the answer isn’t necessarily what you might expect. Business “efficiency” has evolved beyond its classic dictionary definition, which is essentially minimizing the resources required to do something. That’s fine as far as it goes—but what if the thing done right isn’t the right thing? If your mechanic changes the wrong tire on your car, it doesn’t matter how efficiently he does the job; you’ve still got a flat tire.

As Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” What we really want, then, is effective efficiency.

Running a Tight Ship

Maximizing personal and team productivity requires effective efficiency. As you strive in your efforts, ensure these activities get your attention:

1 LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY. Embrace and encourage new trends, devices, and software as they appear. Let your workers use their own devices for business purposes if they want. Why not take advantage of a productivity source you don’t have to pay for? Meanwhile, provide instant “anywhere” access to workplace information. Let team members work from alternate locations with Wi-Fi when it’s practical. When a member of my office manager’s family is ill, it’s easy to let her work from home for the day, so she can still be productive. With Wi-Fi, Evernote, and all the snazzy apps we have access to, workers can tap into work information no matter where they are. Give them a secure, reliable way to share ideas and communicate, allowing more flexibility and change-responsiveness.

2 SET AND TRACK EFFICIENCY GOALS. Once you’ve pared your ideas down to size and established goals with your team, set specific schedules for achievement. As with any project, break those goals into manageable pieces, each with its own milestones and deadlines. Once you’ve achieved a goal, retune and set a new one.

3 MEASURE EVERYTHING. You can better influence things when you can understand them, so keep an eye on all the metrics that matter for your team. Use an accountability system, project management software, SharePoint, a common spreadsheet on Google Docs, Outlook Task Assignments, or a scoreboarding system that tracks important team metrics. The systems you use can be off-the-shelf or proprietary—it doesn’t matter as long as you use them consistently.

4 BRAINSTORM REGULARLY. Meet with your team periodically to exchange ideas on how best to achieve your strategic priorities and improve processes and procedures. Look for areas of overlap and eliminate redundancy. Discuss what your team is doing that doesn’t provide value. Remove steps that no longer apply when a platform changes, and make sure each person documents everything, so a new person can get up to speed quickly. Remove your thought-filters and let your ideas cross-fertilize to see what kinds of interesting hybrids result. Consider concepts from other fields, and how they might apply to yours. What would you love to do if it were possible?

The Benefits of Consistent Training

For your team members to be productively efficient and effective, they need the right tools. This is an indispensable ROI tactic. (Yes, it’s okay for tactics to be indispensable, even though people can’t be.) Some personnel need blazing-fast computing power; others need smartphones and tablets that let them work on the go; still others might require specialized instruments to maximize their performance. Whatever the case, all of them need consistent training, undertaken as often as necessary to stay ahead of the changes rolling through your field.

No one wants to spend money if they don’t have to. But remember: in business, what matters isn’t what you spend now, but how much money you make later. You have to make short-term investments for long-term gain. It’s all about ROI. Done correctly, training produces the extraordinary levels of ROI you need to stay ahead of the game.

Why Training Matters … and Works

• Training improves confidence and therefore performance. When people know they’ve been equipped to do their jobs properly, it boosts their spirits and reassures them they can achieve levels of competency and productivity they haven’t realized in the past. Further, when employees understand why their work matters and how to do it, they’re more likely to hit the mark or go above and beyond. While instructor-led classes are still popular, webinars and online learning are catching up. When the Montreal Transit System implemented an immersive e-Learning system, employee performance increased 32 percent, while training time decreased by 50 percent.³⁸

• Training saves the company money. Well-trained employees make fewer errors and require less direct supervision. Furthermore, they spend less time thinking about problem solving, because they already know what to do. Consistent training also decreases employee turnover—a big drain on corporate costs.

• Training earns the company money. While money saved is equivalent to money earned, directly fattening the bottom line makes people sit up and take notice. A few years ago, Nations Hotel Company invested heavily in coaching and saw an ROI of 221 percent.³⁹

• Training increases employee productivity. Motorola long since realized that every dollar invested in training can yield as much as a 30 percent gain in productivity within three years. That let the company cut costs by $3 billion and increase profits by 47 percent in 2000 alone.⁴⁰ According to another report—“The 2001 Global Training and Certification Study” by testing firms CompTIA and Prometric—as little as a 2 percent increase in productivity can result in a 100 percent increase in training ROI.⁴¹

Researchers have consistently observed this effect over the years since. For example, Dillon Consulting, an international consulting firm, quadrupled its profits by 2009, after instituting a Project Management Training Program four years previously.⁴² Similarly, in 2013, BSkyB, a top pay TV service in the UK and Ireland offering broadband and telephone services, reported a significant ROI after delivering 850,000 hours of training to its customer service representatives over a twelve-month period.⁴³

Big-Time Payoff

Good, consistent training more than pays for itself in terms of employee confidence, performance, productivity, reduced turnover, and dollars earned on the bottom line. Rather than view it as a necessary evil, treat it as a positive expense—just as you would any initiative that promises to increase profits and benefit everyone all the way down the line.