High performance athletes understand the significance of being agile in order to compete at their best. Through years of training and competing, they have mastered how to read a situation and adjust their actions accordingly.
For example, hockey players need to be physically agile enough to skate towards the puck, stop suddenly, make a turn and start skating with the puck in another direction. Great hockey players also possess great mental agility; Wayne Gretzky possessed the ability to read a play, then swiftly skate towards where he thought the puck would be, anticipating his opponents’ moves.
The pace of change in business is rapid and people and teams often find themselves struggling to keep up with this rate of change. Possessing mental agility ensures people and teams can thrive while performing at their best.
Here are a few strategies to consider when attempting to develop or improve agility within your organization:
Clear Definitive Gaols
Creating a culture that fosters agile performers requires clear definitive goals. Most organizations that start altering goals do so loftily. They end up creating a culture where people and teams are overwhelmed and don’t know what to deliver on. Establishing clear and definitive team goals, and sticking to them, gives teams the ability to be flexible in their approach towards achieving them. This allows managers to stay out of people’s way, freeing them to do what needs to done in order to realize these goals.
Learning on the Go
Agility requires people to constantly learn and adjust to situations that might impact the achievement of the goal. You need the capacity to develop several possible courses of action, choose an effective solution, and take action. Then observe the results, learn, adjust, and keep at it. Learning on-the-go will fuel a team’s motivation for working together and being agile towards achieving their organization’s goals.
Creative Thinking
Agility is about possessing the creative thinking skills for any given situation. That’s how great athletes know where to position themselves to make key plays. To the onlooker, it appears intuitive when they see this type of performance however, it is developed from years of thinking about performance creatively.
In the workplace, people and teams who appear to bounce back the fastest from setbacks, or develop multiple solutions to a problem, all possess the ability to creatively respond to and use agility in their approach to goal achievement.
If you are looking to develop or improve agility in your team’s performance, you may want to consider implementing one of these strategies.
All the best in achieving your highest performance,
Paul
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