5 Team Practices for Agility During Constant Change

As the uncertainties and complexities of our world continue to increase, team agility has emerged as an essential component for organizational success. Team agility is the ability of teams to take effective action toward their most important goals amid complex and rapidly changing conditions. Now more than ever, organizations need teams to make the necessary adjustments to evolve to address new opportunities and challenges. 

For a team to achieve outstanding results and build relationships, there must be a solid foundation of common purpose, clear and aligned roles, and effective processes for getting work done. Instilling a foundation for team effectiveness is the price of entry for team performance. However, team agility is the key differentiator that allows a team to exceed expectations while others struggle or fail during times of ongoing change and transition.

5 Practices Of Agile Teams

1) Ability To Quickly Reset Priorities

Clear alignment of team goals to the most strategic company goals enables the team to assess what current activities have a meaningful impact and what parts of their current workload are not as important. Too often, teams adopt the mindset that everything they do is a priority. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Teams must develop the capacity to continually assess and reset, when necessary, their priorities to meet new challenges and remain on track for success. The following questions can help teams reflect and adapt to a shifting environment.

• What has changed? / What is still the same?
• What have we learned?
• How do we need to update our goals, priorities, or processes?
• How do we need to work differently?
• What new knowledge and skills do we need to develop?

2) Focused On Problem-Solving

The best teams are great at solving problems. Resolving the issues that get in the way of accomplishing team goals should be the central component of the team's recurring meetings. Too often, a team will spend the majority of their time together providing general updates, many of which are not pertinent for everyone to know or could be shared electronically. 

A meeting agenda focusing on problem-solving enables the team to develop their collective muscle for successfully addressing ongoing issues and opportunities. Below are best practices for establishing an effective and equitable problem-solving process.

• An inclusive, simple, and replicable process for the team to work together to resolve issues and solve problems
• Communicate that the team is about to work through an issue and that all perspectives and input are valued
• Provide think time for team members to document their thoughts before asking people to share
• Ensure agreements for next steps and accountability are documented and revisited during subsequent meetings

3) Empowered To Say No

Teams must feel empowered to say "no" to projects, tasks, and requests that steal energy and focus away from accomplishing their most important priorities. For a team to have a laser-like focus on its most important goals, its leadership must agree that the team is focusing on the right priorities. Without leadership support, team members will never feel safe to say 'no' when the ongoing urgent work and emergencies get in the way of accomplishing the most strategically important activities.

Teams must be responsive to urgent requests, but not at the expense of advancing their most important goals. Team members must feel empowered to use their noes to protect their yesses. 

4) Invest In Relationship-Building

Teams need to be both social and results-focused for long-term success. Problems can occur when individuals continually face challenging project deadlines or unexpected setbacks. Focusing solely on tasks can work for short periods of time, but over the long haul, these behaviors deteriorate a team's social bonds.

The ability to build team relationships is now more difficult because so much of our work and meetings are virtual. This isolation is problematic, as a solid social support system is essential in creating resilient and productive teams.

Leaders must work to deliberately build their team's social networks, especially during setbacks, challenges, changes, and high demands. Below are some ideas for how leaders can support their team members in building strong relationships.

• Celebrate Wins - Too often, teams focus on the next mountain without acknowledging their successes. Take time out to celebrate wins.
• Gratitude - Take time in meetings to express appreciation for others or discuss what has gone well for team members during the last week.
• Emphasize Team Collaboration - Leaders must emphasize collaboration's importance and address collaboration issues immediately.
• Team Building - Effective team-building activities are excellent for cultivating a sense of unity and camaraderie among employees.

I like how Shawn Achor summed it up in his book The Happiness Advantage: "The greatest predictor of success and well-being is one's social support network. Countless studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress, both an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance."

5) Actively Learn From Experience

The highest-performing teams are skilled at learning from experience and dedicate time for team learning. This team learning process goes by many different names, including After-Action Review, Postmortem, Retrospective, Blameless Autopsy, or Team Debrief. The purpose of this exercise is to gather the team together to review and learn from work recently completed by answering the questions about what went well and what went wrong and then committing to any improvements identified.

An ongoing process of practice and reflection helps teams quickly assess previous experience, make meaning of the experience, and decide what the experience means for future action.

Team Agility Matters

The baseline for team effectiveness is having a group of capable and engaged individuals. But having talented individuals is not enough. Teams that are most advanced with agility and continuous learning outperform their peers in the long-term. Team agility allows team members to maintain a laser-like focus on accomplishing their most important results within a constantly changing environment and ongoing uncertainty.

Learn more about my bio, content, and services at www.clearviewleaders.com

Read more of my articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others at my Forbes Leadership Strategy Homepage

Learn more about my book on Self-Leadership at gettingitrightbook.net

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring practical skills to Self-Leadership and Leading Others. He is the author of, Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life.