Managerial agility has acquired a particular dimension with the health crisis, which, by highlighting the instability and complexity of the modern world, has led to a need for organizations to review their operational, managerial and strategic practices.
A large Lecko study on managerial agility suggests that while at the beginning of 2020, most companies defined themselves as agile, they applied so-called " agile " methods that varied widely. Two main visions of agility seemed to be current and coexist. The first equated agility and responsiveness, telescoping both around a definition of limiting agility. The second was to use standard and theoretical " agile " methods that left managers little room for manoeuvre to test more innovative agile solutions.
However, a third category of organizations existed: those who, " without knowing it", were developing their own vision of agility. The Lecko study on managerial agility focused on the latter in order to analyze how the unprecedented situation of health crisis has encouraged the managers of these particular organizations to continue to find innovative agile solutions on their own to ensure the effectiveness of their teams. Through this study, we can measure why moving away from the main theoretical principles and embracing a more concrete and pragmatic vision of agility can be beneficial on several levels. This allows, on the one hand, to give yourself the opportunity to reread the needs of your organization, and on the other hand, to move the lines by moving towards new and creative agile practices in order to guarantee the sustainability and success of your company.
The modalities of the investigation
In partnership with YouGov, Lecko surveyed a panel of 500 managers from organisations with more than 250 employees at the beginning of March 2020. Five key areas were highlighted: the definition and sharing of objectives, the structure and functioning of the company, the role of management expected by the company, collaborative practices and operational functioning.
Using projective scenarios, the managers interviewed took a dual look at both their organization and their team. The results obtained made it possible to assess agility on a five-level scale, with the lowest level representing the most process and least agile companies, the highest level the most agile companies.
What does an agile organization have in addition?
The expectations and obstacles of organizational agility in the field
The Lecko survey identifies four main qualities associated with organizational agility: adaptability to change (strategic, operational, human), the ability to mobilize employees around a common project, the rapid discovery of innovative solutions aimed at achieving a specific goal, and the propensity to respond positively to a customer's needs and create additional value by driving personalized operations.
The results of the study show that only 2% of the managers surveyed believe that their company is agile in all the areas mentioned. At the other end of the spectrum, 7% of respondents see their organization as conventional in all areas cited. The following are identified as markers of discrepancy between the agility desired by companies and its application within teams:
1/ Overly rigid frameworks around the management of objectives
2/ A global desire for managerial agility that does not manifest itself concretely in the teams
3/ Experimentation with agile practices is less easy when employees collaborate with each other in a conventional way
How can an organization become more agile?
Six practices to promote agility
The study also shows us that the more a company seeks to achieve its objectives in a conventional way, the more it reduces the factors that enable agility.
Proactive collaboration, more precise objective orientation and a review of the managerial culture are at the heart of the practices recommended by the Lecko study in order to develop the organizational agility of a company, a department or a team. She identifies six of them:
1/ Focus and alignment: define a common objective that makes sense in order to make everyone's work part of the organization's work.
2/ Networking: to encourage employees to create links outside their main mission in order to nurture cooperation, stimulate innovation and promote expertise.
3/ Transparency by default: strengthen the visibility of everyone's activity, the dissemination of information and the sharing of decisions in order to maintain and enhance cohesion.
4/ Autonomy and responsibility: create a set of teams that decide on their own operation in order to develop commitment and trust between employees.
5/ Experimentation and learning: dealing with complex subjects through continuous learning and experimentation in order to better understand the unknown and reduce the distance between teams and customers.
6/ Do: favor action in short cycles (practice as well as the mobilization of existing resources) in order to develop mutual support and clarify the meaning of the value delivered to the customer.
Parameters to take into account for a successful agile transition
The Lecko study highlights that most companies are now in transition to more agility but that this transformation would benefit from being the subject of a co-construction between teams, managers and the organization to be more efficient and lead to a better understanding of the way out of the crisis.
However, the search for managerial agility should not make us forget that the massification of teleworking, if it is the new norm, must be optimally arranged towards a hybrid model combining the use of existing offices, distance learning and the search for congruence. Agility, in fact, can only be achieved through a series of steps (hypotheses of change, testing, evaluation, consolidation of the progress observed) that encompass the problems inherent to modern organizations.
The articulation of life times, diversity and inclusion, creativity, and the search for meaning are all avenues to be taken into account in order to promote the emergence of responsible organizational agility capable of seeing the emergence of change makers in the service of sustainable transformations.
