Are people the key to an organization's success?

Software has become the key piece in today's business environment where it is essential for businesses to be empowered through the digital world. This is what Dean Leffingwell, Cofounder and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile, Inc highlights in “Every business is a software business now”, bearing in mind that we live in highly volatile times that are constantly changing and evolving.

 It is in this way that the first approaches to the agile methods are beginning to emerge, contained in the “Agile Manifesto”, which is not a methodology in itself, but a mentality and a behavior guided by common values and principles.

This means that this constantly changing current environment requires that we find ways to respond as quickly and with the most appropriate product possible, if we are to survive against other companies and competitors. That is what we can define as business agility, i.e. the ability and desire of an organization to adapt and evolve to be connected to the purpose of its customers.

We can define Business Agility as the ability to adapt to changes by responding quickly, in an innovative way and maintaining the quality of the results. And most importantly, focused from different perspectives: who we are, what we do and how we do it.

Therefore, the first questions that we must ask ourselves as an organization are:

• What do we want for the people who make up our company? What do we want for our company?
• Does it translate into better financial results?
• Do we want to attract the best talent?
• Do we want to reduce costs and optimize operations?
• Do we want to differentiate ourselves from the competition and add value?
• Or is our focus on position, legacy and being relevant in our sector?

The purpose of all this is to reflect on how an organization can achieve great things, and to use existing success models like in the case of Tesla.

But how do people know what needs to be done? The teams are made up of heterogeneous people, with different interests and knowledge. But it is leadership that guides and motivates people within an organization since they are the only ones that can make an organization stand out in the market; to that end they need clear motivation and direction.

So, where does the motivation come from? Is it the bonuses that motivate your workers? Is it the benefits? Is that what makes a person wake up in the morning and say to themselves: “Yes! I want to go and do the Big Data project”? Or is there perhaps an intrinsic motivation beyond external compensations?

It is through leadership. This is how we guide the transformation and agility of a business. This skill set makes it easier for people to align themselves, create the conditions to get the best out of each individual, each area, and encourage natural efficiency and collaboration.

Sounds easy, but is it really? How do we achieve all of this?

There are a series of leadership acts that determine all this, based on the decisions we make, which in turn are based on a series of principles and the influence we exercise as leaders, which defines the type of behavior we see as a result.

All this involves generating influence with the objective/purpose of indicating the right direction to go, which example to follow, which signals we choose to communicate and inspire the rest of the organization to imitate our behaviors and decisions.

In short, the influence of a leader determines the culture that moves the organization forward. But we have overlooked a key point. Leadership must emerge from within the organization, and it must not focus on a few people, but rather promote the autonomy of teams, based on a clear cultural purpose and principles.

The leader communicates the purpose and expected results, rather than saying how to do it, although they can sometimes act in a tactical way to achieve short-term goals at the expense of future strategic objectives.

No one knows what the future holds, so it can be more valuable to learn iteratively and approach objectives that are in line with our identity and purpose as an organization. We will have to take risks, yes, but always limiting the cost and impact to enable us to continue learning little by little.

So it is important to remember one thing and perhaps the most relevant: An organization’s potential will only be limited by the maturity of its leadership, of the people within it, beyond the methodologies, practices, agile frameworks that are practiced, or any other factor.

We will discuss this a bit more in the webinar “3 Leadership lessons we take from Game of Thrones” on Wednesday, October 26th at 12.00 p.m.