The 3 things that make a team truly Agile
Tips for hiring the right people for your company.
Agility is all the rage these days. It seems like this concept has become the Graal all organizations aspire at finding and implementing within their structure, their processes, and more importantly, within their people. Everybody talks about Agile, everyone wants to be Agile, but besides a bunch of new, fancy job titles popping up on Linkedin (“Agile Project Manager”, “Agile Coach”, “Agile Consultant”, “Agile Scrum Facilitator”, …), it seems like there aren’t so many people out there who can tell you what being Agile truly is all about.
In the meantime, there has never been a more important shift in the structure of organizations and the nature of their teams. Large companies growingly feel the need to move from expert, specialized teams working as separate, heterogeneous blocks (Marketing, Communication, Sales, Finance, IT, …), to small, cross-functional teams whose members’ skills and knowledge are complementary rather than identical.
The need to fasten the pace in large, leading businesses is all the more relevant now that the entry barriers to traditional businesses are getting easier to break, torn down by the eager new entrants : startups born with the digital revolution, pure players, …
We see a lot of corporate partners coming to NUMA, working in transversal, agile, intrapreneurial teams, to launch new services or products at startup speed. Some of them encounter dazzling success. Some of them fail. Most of the time, when a project fails, the team swipes off the initiative by saying “this wasn’t the right time”, or “the product wasn’t good enough”. Except most of the time, failure isn’t due to the product, or the idea, or the timing — it is due to the team itself. A company doesn’t become agile without their employees. So how do you recognize the people who will be able to drive agility?
Well, there is no good answer to that question. However, there are some essential pointers, on which you should focus when you are meeting with the people you’d like to recruit to build an efficient team. Last week, we sat down with Jeff Gothelf, acclaimed speaker and author of the wonderful books Sense and Respond, and Lean UX, and Claudio Vandi, Learning and Transformation Programs Director here at NUMA. We picked their brains on the topic of agility, and discussed what are the key personality traits you should look for when hiring the ultimate team.
CURIOSITY — curious people are the ones always eager to look for new ways of doing things, to challenge the status quo, to relentlessly run out of their comfort zone. This quality is essential in a team where people are expected to move fast, and continuously learn from their successes and failures.
CREATIVITY — creativity comes under many forms, so- let’s clarify something here — we’re not telling you to recruit the new Salvador Dali or Lady Gaga. What you should be looking for is someone who’s eager to experiment unusual approaches, to blend ideas, people, in an unexpected way, or simply to take new paths to look into a problem and come up with a solution. What you should be looking for are problem solvers with a ‘Hacker’ mindset: an ability to come up with new solutions to existing pain points.
HUMILITY — even if the person in front of you is displaying extraordinary levels of curiosity and creativity, the one thing you shouldn’t forget about is their capacity to remain humble in a team. Some people, no matter how talented or brilliant they are, can simply not grow and maintain harmonious working relationships. Don’t confuse humility with shyness — a humble individual thinks about the way their ideas and actions will benefit their group or organization before themselves. They don’t have a problem with speaking up for themselves, and defending their position but if they’re wrong, they’re willing to admit it and to change their mind.
These qualities offer fertile ground for a functional and agile team. But beyond recruiting the right people and building the right teams, organizations need to think long-term and ask themselves how they can encourage, and cultivate a culture of creativity and curiosity in a corporate environment.
Most of the time, large companies adopt a ‘top down’ approach, assuming that the upper management has all the answers, defines the strategies, and simply expects operational teams to execute the solutions.
This approach is simplistic and irrelevant in the digital era — the key to stay competitive, is to switch to an emergent strategy (the ‘bottom-up approach). The people who are confronted to the field are the ones who are the closest to the reality of their market. Their ideas should be listened to, and they should be able to experiment their suggestions without tedious validation processes. Only then can a team be truly Agile.
The more large companies adopt this approach of cultivating creativity, autonomy and creating an environment which reacts quickly to continuous learning, the better the products and services that launch on our markets will be.
At NUMA, we build corporate programs to empower operational teams and managers grow the mindset and the skill set they need to adapt to the new ways of working. Take a look at our programs or feel free to reach out if you’re interested in the topic!
