Point of View — The Right Amount of Agility
“First you need to know where you want to go but where you want to go has to fit with your culture. Both depend on each other. You cannot generalize it.”
- Geert Hofstede
The interest international start-ups have in becoming more agile is a popular topic and there’s absolutely no one-size-fits all solution to becoming one. Like many other start-ups trying to survive in dynamic and unstable contexts, it’s not news that you probably have done your own homework and R&D in implementing best practices — proven methods or frameworks to outperform your “idea” as everyday offers new challenges. Yet, it is never a good call to try to apply what worked well in another organization operating in another country as the optimal solution for yours. Your context is unique, the founder(s) of your organization are different, and the social-economic landscape and your national culture are all likely to be different.
On a fundamental level, agility demands for a cultural transformation along with multiple mindset shifts. It is better to take national culture and culture of your organization into consideration as well when adopting best practices and to have the courage to play around with these best methods and frameworks proven to work in other contexts. Just mix and match, fail and learn and find the equilibrium where you will better able to establish your own way of working and doing.
“Culture” is an additional tool for YOU!
Gallup takes its stance in pointing out eight factors that drive agility in a workplace and attributes that agile workplace cultures require which I couldn’t agree with more:
1. Cooperation
2. Speed of Decision Making
3. Trial Tolerance
4. Empowerment
5. Technology Adoption
6. Simplicity
7. Knowledge Sharing
8. Innovation Focus
According to Gallup’s study, those eight factors work together and must evolve in parallel. Yet, these are of critical importance, I’d also add “service orientation” just as important to the above. Let me tell you why.
More and more start-up organizations want to transform themselves and be more agile, but not all organizations need to force themselves into something that is “unnatural”. To dig deeper, not all functions within a start-up environment should be equally flexible and agile. Take for instance, finance team vs product development team or other support functions that inherit routineness in their day to day lives vs end user facing delivery functions.
The reality is that to support agility in required functions within an organization, support teams need to fuel value creation through service orientedness which puts internal customer service as a main priority so teams being served become healthier, wiser, freer and more autonomous — this is a shift in behavior that inverts the norm by acquiring growth while your organization grows as well due to the teams growing commitment and engagement.
Leaders too need to embrace giving service to others by taking responsibility for extracting out the potential in people and processes and has the courage as Brene Brown coins the term in her book Dare to Lead, to develop that potential. The “how” of this slice is the challenging part of all. As a leader, how much self-awareness do you have? Are you aware of your fears, your layers, your armors? In what conditions do these come into play and impact your reactions? Ed Catmull, former president, Pixar and Walt Disney, is another leader who inspires me by leading with heart. In fact, I think his last book Creativity Inc., is a manifesto on courageous leadership. Ed explains that recognizing, naming, and managing our emotion is essential to leading. So, it’s also the time for leaders to step up and make an honest connection with their hearts and their surroundings in owning their vulnerabilities. What is the reward? Far greater creativity and innovation. Your organization will more likely to take risks, to try something new, to deal with the discomfort of failure being an option.
You want to be more agile, but do you have the culture and courage to support it?
The real agility lies in tailoring organization culture appropriate for the organization as a whole and for its separate functions. “Culture” is one of those concepts that carry a number of meanings and connotations. The two pioneers of management and organizational culture theorists that I personally look up to in analyzing organizations are Schein and Hofstede. An organization’s culture can be viewed from multiple angles, and that its characteristics can be reflected in a number of overlapping dimensions — be an observer and you can too assess your organization’s culture at three simple levels:
› Visible Layer: Artifacts –The facilities, office, furnishings, dress-code, and how people visibly interact with others and with outsiders, logo, colors used, gestures. Also, heroes within the company like company founders, role models; and, rituals like greetings, celebrations and meetings.
› Less Visible Layer: Values — Transmitted by the environment we grow up in. Your way of working, practices and strategies, norms. That’s where the national culture comes into play.
› Invisible Layer: Assumptions — Unseen and not consciously identified in everyday interactions between employees. Assumptions are more of how you see the world, what you think is “true”.
Find your Optimal Culture!
Keep in mind that your organization’s culture should convey artifacts as such that best support your strategy on going agile. If your goal is to gain some flexibility or go all the way to being agile, then re-visit your assumptions to shape behavior which in turn will reflect on your practices as artifacts.
Please note your organization’s culture is constantly evolving no matter how you assess it and where you stand in cultural dimensions right now. It can be shaped and changed when you are making a change to strategy, structure or process. When agility requires for a culture where what matters the most is the outcome, start working on your practices because in functions where agility is required then people will have to focus on what is being done instead of how it’s done.
If your organization is not outcome-oriented enough and not easy-going enough as set forth in the Gallup’s study in the intro, see ways of introducing practices that will ease things up a little with gradual shifts — the key is to find the right ones for your company. There are no universal solutions but there are a lot of alternatives to choose from — so you can aim for a culture that best supports your strategy.
Dilge Dogan, Head of People @TeamDefineX
