Feeling stretched? Six ways to increase team capacity by creating a 90-day world
Many of the clients in our network are telling us that time, capacity, and resource constraints are limiting their ability to create adaptive workplaces and keep pace with constant change.
We have learned from COVID and remote work the importance of effective teams that take ownership over the solutions to challenging customer and business problems.
As we come through the pandemic, we are starting to see the rise of organizations understanding that business is a team sport and that mindsets and structures are needed to increase overall ability to adapt and pivot during periods of relentless change.
To offset this challenge, progressive companies are leveraging the premise of “new starts, new beginnings” by creating 90-day worlds that allows teams to refresh, pivot and use change as a force of momentum rather than being victims of change.
A 90-day mindset is important but is also not enough if not backed by the structures that offer teams direction and guidance. Progressive organizations are constantly working on shifting structures and business models to make the shift to a 90-day world.
Below are six steps you can take to leverage change and take advantage of more effective teams:
1. Shift mindsets from change management to change capacity
The world has headed into an exponential age where agility and adaptability beat slow and steadfast and progressive organizations are designing their workplaces to take advantage of unlimited growth and opportunities.
For example, 70% of the world are using smart phones and combined with 5G networks more and more people have access to knowledge in real time. The immense amount of innovation and network effects that mobile is creating driven by the surge in connectivity dwarfs what we have seen in the past.
Traditional approaches to managing change are linear and slow and do not allow legacy organizations to embrace and take advantage of emerging opportunities. Instead, embedding change into day-to-day work and enabling non-linear ways to build capacity is needed to take advantage of defining, delivering, and taking advantage of new sources of customer or end user value.
Specifically, this means leveraging traditional change methods such as impact analysis while incorporating agile principles, design thinking and behavioural science into day-to-day operations as ways of building capacity.
Giving people and teams a voice in identifying and solving important business problems helps organizations become more adaptable. The legacy approach of identifying needs and planning for change in the exponential era will always be slower than empowering teams to take ownership, make decisions and learn to embrace change.
2. Incorporate agility not Agile
Employees perform best when learning is self-directed and when they need to learn something in real time to solve a real customer or business problem. Organizations spend a lot of money on structured learning programs and often pull employees off the job to take training that is based on an organization’s agenda.
By the time this type of learning is organized and deployed, organizations risk delivering learning that isn’t relevant to the problems that teams are facing as customer priorities shift or new technologies emerge.
Bring learning closer to the problem by allowing teams to define what they need to learn on a 90-day schedule. This can be achieved by using agile principles.
Agility is the ability to adjust priorities on a continuous basis, enable employees to make quicker decisions, and respond to uncertain problems combined with a mindset that change is an opportunity to get better and improve experiences for customers and end users.
Think about leveraging agile principles that help your people and teams anticipate and plan for change effectively by delegating authority for quicker decision-making, prioritizing initiatives, actively identifying and mitigating risk, and ensuring teams have the skills needed to innovate and deliver change.
3. Customer-centric cultures win
Customers (internal or external) are the ultimate beneficiaries of the products and services that teams deliver each day. Customer centricity is both a mindset and a way of doing business that focuses on creating positive experiences through the full set of products and services that your organization offers.
Customer-centric organizations generate greater profits, have higher engaged employees, and more satisfied customers. Customer-centric organizations create the resiliency, sustainability, and alignment needed to fulfill their mission. All customer-centric enterprises deliver whole-product solutions that are designed with a deep understanding of customer needs.
When customer-centric enterprises makes decisions, they consider the effect decisions will have on end users. This includes motivating teams to use segmentation to align and focus on specific, targeted customers or end users. They move beyond listening to customers and invest time to identify underlying and ongoing needs; and, thinking like a customer to see the world from their point of view.
The combination of agile principles and design thinking, specifically empathy maps, customer personas and customer journey mapping are excellent tools that can be used to understand the lifetime value of customers and to focus teams on creating longer term relationships based on a clear and accurate understanding of how customers appreciate value.
4. Enhance learning through self-directed teams
Progressive organizations consider both constant change and the need for teams to constantly upgrade the products and services that they produce. Legacy organizations continue to push down learning by assuming that the organization knows what teams need while progressive organizations are empowering teams by unleashing control over what learning is needed to solve customer or other team issues and challenges.
The adoption of self-directed learning is interpreted by employees that the organisation values their contributions and is perceived as a commitment to team growth.
Self-directed teams enjoy improved productivity, satisfaction, and reduced absenteeism and attrition. This is due to the sense of autonomy, increased motivation, and commitment when compared with working in traditional structures that reinforce the status quo.
At minimum, self-directed teams that leverage agile principles and understanding customers using design thinking are 3 times more productive over traditional teams. This is the result of flatter structures, diversity and inclusion, improved decision-making and being closer to understanding customer or end user problems.
Self-directed teams pull learning and absorb more when the content is decided by the team and transferred to the workplace. Whereas traditional learning interrupts work and can be distracting; self-directed learning is seamless as employees pursue skills that interest the team and deliver workplace performance improvements.
5. Identify behaviours that predict performance
Most organizations are adept at measuring past performance such as sales, revenue, compliance (safety, environmental, social). The problem with these metrics is the results are in the past and are not enough to assess future performance.
A leading indicator is a predictive measurement that is tied to behaviour that drives performance. For example, the number of people wearing hard hats on a building site is a leading safety indicator. The lagging indicator is the number of accidents on the site. The difference between them is that leading indicators influence change, and lagging indicators record what happened.
All too often we concentrate on measuring results, outputs, and outcomes because they are easier to measure. Lead indicators are more difficult to determine than lag indicators. They are predictive and therefore do not provide a guarantee of success.
A combination of leading and lagging indicators results in enhanced business performance overall. A lag indicator without a lead indicator will give no indication as to how a result will be achieved and provide no early warnings about tracking towards a strategic goal.
Equally important however, a lead indicator without a lag indicator may make you feel good about keeping busy with a lot of activities, but it will not provide confirmation that a business result has been achieved.
6. Decentralize important team decisions
The idea of decentralizing decision making and encouraging employees to take risks, experiment and make decisions that solve business problems was introduced by Dennis Bakke, who grew AES Corporation into $8 billion in revenues and 50,000 employees.
Under Bakke, AES made work exciting, successful, and fun by limiting the number of people in head offices to make all decisions. Every decision made by an executive at head office takes responsibility away from people who are closest to the work and to customers.
It seems that the autonomy to make decisions leads to more satisfaction, commitment, and fulfillment. This is based on the Iceberg of Ignorance study that revealed senior executives only see around 4% of the organization’s problems, while frontline staff see 100%.
So why not involve frontline staff in decision making when a team sees a problem or opportunity. At AES, the teams who made important decisions come from the area most affected and discovered the problem or saw the opportunity.
Creating capacity for change is important for organizations to shift from surviving to thriving and progressive organizations are adapting the mindset of enabling people and teams to take more ownership over understanding customer problems and learning together to solve them.
Today’s world is in a state of constant change caused by new and emerging technologies, shifting consumer and other social changes. The legacy mindset of centralized control and decision-making is too slow and bureaucratic for this world.
At NimblShift, we offer tools and support to help teams be more effective including NimblTracker a diagnostic tool that assesses effectiveness and NimblTeams which uses agile principles and design thinking to help teams thrive and solve important customer or end user problems.
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more.