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↗ DR DANE POBOKA is a talent solutions director at Morgan Philips Talent Consulting and works with clients to make data-driven talent decisions and understand the potential of their people
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Agility amidst Covid-19: build resilience and come back stronger BY DR DANE POBOKA
WE CURRENTLY FACE a global crisis on three fronts: health, economic and financial, the scale of which we have never seen before. We are in uncharted waters. With government measures, not experienced in generations, there has been a rapid – almost overnight – move to remote working for the majority of businesses across the globe. It is the ability to be agile – at all levels – that will enable organisations to navigate and adapt to these uncertain times. The simple fact is, those that can’t or won’t are unlikely to survive. Agility enables the ability to respond rapidly to organisational changes. As an example, many organisations have had to move to remote on-boarding of new staff to ensure their business activities continue as normally as possible. It also provides us with the ability to respond as individuals and teams – for example, the rapid move to working from home will have been a considerable challenge for many. Importantly, in what are extremely challenging and worrying times, it is agility that also provides the ability to respond quickly and effectively to our people’s needs. Whatever the realities of your current business situation, the best interests of your people should be at the forefront of your mind. At Morgan Philips, we define agility as the ability to work with insight, flexibility and confidence in response to challenging and changing circumstances. Our agility model describes an inner perspective – how we think about business – and an outer perspective – how we behave in response to our thinking. Within these perspectives, we focus on three key agility components: • People agility: understanding yourself and others, acting with empathy and leveraging interpersonal insight to achieve results
• Performance agility: being resilient, dealing with pressure, flexing and adapting plans to meet objectives • Growth agility: openness to learn from experience and drive improvements. In this context, agility is an overarching attribute that shapes your approach and ultimate success across a broad scope of activities, indicating the pace at which potential can be unlocked.
Opportunities within agility Build resilience. The importance of resilience within agility cannot be understated, certainly during trying times. Once all available cost and process efficiencies within your business are identified, what is the next performance ‘currency’ with which to invest? Your and your people’s resilience. Business efficiencies can only be realised when there are the necessary levels of staff resilience to execute them. Resilience is the ‘engine room’ of adaptability and agility. Why? Because, they are one and the same thing. Resilience is less about being tough, impervious to stress and fully in control. In fact, and our current situation dramatically bears this out, resilience is being able to tolerate uncertainty, to generate options in the face of such ambiguity and a willingness to respond and pivot quickly. While you may observe colleagues’ actions that demonstrate courage and resolve, the enabler of this is an ability to think fluidly – to re-frame and re-shape challenges; to zoom into
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