Leadership People Skills: 5 Essentials to Spark Team Agility
by Kate Nasser | 2 Comments »
Leadership People Skills Spark Team Agility!
Leaders engage me to help them develop team agility. After all, agile organizations soar by easily adapting to changing business conditions. So how do you spark and kindle team agility?
Image licensed from Istock.com
Resistance to change can be high. It is often one of the greatest challenges leaders face. The good news is leaders’ daily interaction with the team — leadership people skills — can spark agility.
Leadership People Skills: 5 Essentials to Spark Team Agility!
What does agility include? Foresight, willingness to change, ability to adapt, and actually moving forward. Leadership people skills can spark and kindle it!
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Interact through creativity.
Creativity develops a culture of change and sparks agility. A culture that focuses primarily on facts and data suppresses agility by grounding everyone in today.
When team members use foresight to create new ideas, some leaders immediately respond with “where’s the data showing we need to do that?” This stifles agility. First show interest and appreciation for the foresight. Then ask them how to test out the ideas. That sparks and kindles agility!
Tapping creativity every day gives team members frequent practice in envisioning and creating something new and different. Thinking of change becomes the norm not the dreaded surprise! Do your leadership people skills get the team exploring tomorrow — today?
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Applaud initiative instead of rebuking it.
Initiative is agility in action! Leaders in large organizations with many silos unknowingly stifle this. If spirited team initiative breaches organizational lines, leaders often say “don’t do that again”.
Instead, applaud initiative. Then discuss how to work better with other teams and their leaders. It engages employees in cross teamwork for success. It keeps agility alive!
Do your leadership people skills applaud initiative and kindle team agility?
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Empower decision making.
Decision making is also agility in action. When the team weighs different factors and takes a step forward, they move the team into tomorrow. Leaders often talk about agility yet hold the reins too tight to allow it.
Do your leadership people skills empower others to practice agility through decision making?
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Untie the “nots”.
Fewer rules spark agility. Beyond mandated rules (i.e. legal, safety, and so forth), untie the team from needless don’ts, can’ts, and not’s. They keep agility tied up in knots.
The easiest way to find the needless “nots”, is to consider all the don’ts that exist because of organizational politics. When leaders work together to eliminate the needless “nots”, they spark and kindle agility.
Do your leadership people skills untie the “nots” and release the team from knots that bind?
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Focus on greatness not the best!
Agility means accepting some risk to keep moving forward. When leaders focus and talk about growing to greatness, they spark and kindle agility. When they talk mostly about proven “best” practices, they stifle agility.
What message are you sending your teams? “Be careful. Do only what’s safe and proven.” Or “let’s learn, make informed decisions, and keep growing to greatness!”
Do your leadership people skills kindle fear of mistakes, fear of failure, and fear of change? Or do they spark agility?
Leadership People Skills to Spark Team Agility. Image by BijouBaby.
Leadership People Skills to Sustain Agility. Image by aneye4wonder.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™
Grateful for image of caterpillar by bijoubaby and for image of monarch butterfly by aneye4wonder via Flickr Creative Commons Licenses.
Related Posts:
Leadership People Skills: Adaptability is Genius & Generosity
Change Leaders, Is the Beloved Bully of Habit Stopping You?
©2013 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.