Adaptability is the key to an organization’s ability to react effectively to unexpected business conditions. Almost every organization plans on how to operate when business conditions are predictable, but the key to surviving the long term is to plan effectively how to respond to the unexpected.

Importance of Adaptability

Adaptability is key to long term success. During times like today in the middle of a global pandemic, it is the key to survival.

Giants of business industries like Myspace, Kodak, and RadioShack are mere memories today because they failed to adapt to the ever-changing business landscape.

According to McKinsey, 84% of business owners consider innovation important to their growth strategy, and 80% fear failure in the near future if they can’t adapt to changing economic environments.

As Walt Disney’s CEO Bob Iger puts it: “Innovate or die.”

Leaders set trends and excel in markets with their innovative minds and the ability to adapt to rapid changes. They have more trust from clients as compared to those who just follow trends and provide product or service copies of innovation.

“Adaptability is a trait that can induce further positive traits in individuals and organizations.”

An organization that can perform well in unexpected situations, can embrace entirely new ways of doing things. Such organizations have the technology, people power, and tools to beat competitors any time.

“Adaptive organizations are more capable of leading and setting the pace for an entire industry.”

An adaptable organization is always more capable of facing challenges and handle adversity. The people at such places are more resilient and have a renewed mindset to embrace difficult situations. As a result of their grit, they are more capable to drift through challenges swiftly.

Steve Jobs used to say: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

How to Make an Organization Adaptable

The first step to becoming more adaptable is to welcome failure. Accepting failure is different than giving up, or to quit.

Welcome Failure

To welcome failure is to acknowledge setbacks as a temporary state. A stepping stone towards learning. It’s about embracing opportunities to grow.

To ensure a culture that is welcoming of failure, includes the acceptance of different ideas from various people in the organization. It’s being able to have a pulse on weather change energizes people and introduce incentives for testing new products or services.

Welcome Learning

Another way to make an organization more adaptable is to ingrain learning. Adaptive organizations see the speed of change, and the impact of rapid globalization as a challenge.

They strive to get ahead of competitors in their respective industry. In addition to working faster and harder, it is crucial to act effectively and efficiently.

“The only way to act smart is to reflect on both failures and successes and share insights with all employees.”

This way front line employees have the context of senior leaders that can boost their ability to make decisions quickly when it’s most needed.

“To be adaptive is better than being process-focused in order to achieve business goals.”

Welcome Accountability

To achieve adaptability, it is essential to encourage accountability. It is always easier to attribute success to hard work, and failure to bad luck, but adaptable organizations are first and foremost focused on creating and empowering a culture of self-accountability.

The sense of accountability ensures the performance of tasks by every member with devotion. It promotes an environment of trust, and helps the organization avoid “cya” tactics or blame games.

Moreover, accountability is inculcated with system perspective because employees understand that their decisions not only impact the organization, but people and their families.

To make an organization adaptable, it is important for everyone to be clear about their role in contributing value. Every member of the team has the responsibility to ensure the success of the organization. Everyone needs to act as a leader and be proactive.

Welcome Innovation

Organizations have to embrace innovative ideas and make changes accordingly. To assure the inflow of ideas, it is good to hire fresh minds and gain the advantage of their recent learning. Additionally, training employees to think and execute effectively is key.

“Innovation is the basis of adaptiveness and encouraging people to think outside of the box is key to achieve it.“

It is inevitable to keep an eye on your competitor. You need to actively study to which extent they are adapting to change, and how much behind or ahead from them, you are.

“A culture of appreciation and gratitude is the best way to promote innovation.”

Inference

Adapting to change is what keeps us valuable, relevant, and at the forefront of the competitive edge. If an organization is adaptable, it embraces failure, learning, accountability and change.

Adaptive organizations seek to deliver proactive innovation, satisfy customers and other stakeholders, and lead in the business world with gratitude and intelligence.

Organizations are spending millions to setup feedback channels like email, social platforms, and follow-up programs, in order to create a better work environment. Still, the words “feedback” often make us cringe as we immediately adopt a defensive posture.

Progress-driven leaders value both positive and constructive feedback, always giving priority to constructive ones. While positive feedback is important to keep motivated, constructive feedback helps you grow.

This is the kind of leadership behavior that takes organizations to the horizons of success with millions of satisfied customers, content employees, and record level profits.

Importance of Feedback

There is no question about the advantages of feedback. They are innumerable, and why organizations spend a lot of money in order to make the feedback process as smooth as possible.

Feedback helps you make better decisions. There are multiple stakeholders associated with your organization that are impacted by your decisions.

Imagine making a decision about the launch of an innovative product without getting feedback about the previous version. Doing dividends dispersion without discussing it with shareholders.

“Getting feedback is how we make informed decisions.”

Feedback helps individuals understand what they did well and what can be improved. When they know both, they are able to adapt their attitude and actions to improve. Feedback proves to be the key tool for improving both individual and collective performance in any organization.

“Active open and bilateral feedback paves the way to change and innovation.”

For instance, the feedback forms in hotels filled by guests give owners worthy suggestions about the menu, the environment, and staff. This helps them make improvements and provide better service the next visit.

Positive feedback in the form of praise lets staff know their worth and capacities. It recognizes their efforts and improves job satisfaction.

Motivated employees work harder to improve their performance. As they receive gratitude, they feel more connected with the organization and thus, work in the best interest of it.

A 2013 study by Forbes reflects that leaders who give effective feedback are more trusted by their teams. Employees of such leaders are more engaged than employees of organization with leaders who are more critical than constructive.

“When we don’t pay due attention to feedback, we miss an opportunity for improvement and positive growth.”

Feedback is an effective tool to indicate and highlight improvement areas and provides the basis for problem-solving. Even when we don’t agree with the suggestions provided, we can still work on what has been highlighted for the organization’s well-being.

An effective communication system involving smooth transmission of feedback within an organization improves workplace relationships between employers and employees.

Feedback for Leadership Enhancement

Feedback is crucial for leadership enhancement. Here is how you can use feedback constructively and convert courage-breaking words into an opportunity to enhance performance.

Listen

There should be proper channels for stakeholders to communicate with you. If you want feedback to work positively, it is important to listen with equanimity and patience.

This is tougher than it sound, because naturally we all are inclined to be defensive against criticism.

“Responding defensively to feedback may turn an objective opportunity to learn and grow into a situation that provokes animosity.”

Show respect, give each person complete focus and don’t ask any question until they finish.

“Listening to feedback carefully will add something positive to your knowledge and attitude”

Accept

You need to accept and acknowledge what you have heard. Don’t correct anything. It is inevitable to first consider the feedback wrong or amendable.

Try to be receptive to the feedback. Pick up the points you can agreed to amend. By being receptive you will identify your weaknesses as well as strengths, and then you can work to enhance them.

Interpret

The next step is to interpret the feedback. Take some time alone to analyze whether it was constructive feedback or just criticism. Come up with the points that can help you and your organization to grow.

Reflect with your time and effort by turning inward. Contemplate if the feedback aligns with your objectives, values, intentions, and ethics.

Once you have learned the constructive points of the feedback, document it, and make a plan of action. If you don’t agree with the suggestions, plan a follow-up discussion with the associated stakeholders to gain alignment.

This follow-up meeting will highlight further constructive suggestions to improve your way of working and will help your team and organization to learn and grow.

Inference

Leaders who have the ability to absorb feedback have enormous power that enables them to practice self-improvement, stay motivated, and turn any kind of feedback into a constructive opportunity for all the stakeholders.

All a leader needs to do is listen to feedback with a receptive mind, take time to analyze every aspect of it objectively, stay focused on the opportunity and act in the greater interest of the individuals and collective progress.

Finally, remember that it’s not about you, it’s about the people you have chosen to serve and the organization you want to see succeed.

Organizations are shifting from the conventional authoritarian leadership model to more empowered workers. This transition requires a complete behavioral change from top to bottom of any organization.

Empowerment is not about taking your hands off to let employees sink or swim, it is an active process that involves teaching and coaching team members to be adaptive, to self-serve, to make decisions and to make them right without needing instructions or rubber stamp approvals.

To achieve this kind of empowerment, it is essential for leaders to lean-in and engage actively and effectively across teams, in addition to arranging coaching sessions.

Importance of Leaning in

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that workers’ empowerment associates with better job performance, job satisfaction, dedication, and commitment to the organization.

The importance of team’s empowerment was realized much before Covid-19, but the pandemic has reinforced the concept. The expansion of remote work demands much more empowered and learned team members today.

Empowering teams is crucial but more so is the engagement of leaders in the process. The absence of active engagement by leaders in the process of team empowerment may result in slow learning and performance issues.

It takes a lot of time to figure out problems at work and to come up with feasible solutions. Leaders should observe the process to validate, and when appropriate guide it in the right direction and at the right pace.

The approach of giving workers a free environment to work on their own terms, often translates as a feedback loop. Teams need a consistent communication system to work properly. They need to get the answers to certain changing situations. If they are not getting the right data to make educated decisions, they simply resort to past behaviors.

“Lack of open communication reflects a fear-based work environment, which is definitely not about empowerment.”

When leaders are actively engaged with teams, they feel well-accepted by the organization, and contribute with all their capabilities. This gives them a sense of gratification and higher self-worth. In turn workers feel more inclined towards mastering their responsibilities.

Most of all, with an involved leader, the team feels more connected to the organization and it also builds employees’ trust in the leader. They know that they have a guide, a mentor, an ambassador in a person who can sail through problems with them.

How to Actively Engage

Every person in any organization has a personalized set of skills and capabilities. Some are super polished, and some need some work. To get the best out of everyone’s skills, it is required to arrange coaching sessions for employees, to make them aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Such coaching sessions are based on individual training needs.

“True leaders get engaged with their teams to help them become more competent.”

Helping teams become more competent involves asking good questions that urge them to think through problems.

For instance, rather than asking for the boosted sales figures, it is better to ask, “How do you think we can help raise sales by 3% in the next quarter?”

This reflects a really different role by leaders in the empowerment process. Such active involvement helps to define and shape the problem together, resulting in a compatible situation to develop a solution.

It’s easier to get to an agreed and well-defined destination and achieve tangible goals, when there is a sense of “we are in this together”.

Team members should be given tasks that are a good match for their capabilities. If the problem faced by the members exceeds their abilities, anxiety prevails and learning stops. Most leaders end up assigning the project to the other members, but this is a mistake because it stagnates the learning process for the worker.

Similarly, allocating an easier project can have no empowering impact on team members. So, a leader should consider the capacities and abilities of everyone.

Additionally, to empower team members, it is crucial to provide them with tools and resources to resolve issues. For example, if you assign your team a task to research current market trends, they must be given access to the paid surveys, credible reports, and the organization’s data.

While giving feedback or debriefing on a project, try to be as constructive as possible. Telling a team member that they did a “good job” doesn’t disseminate any direction for what to continue in the future and what to avoid in upcoming projects.

“Leaders need to be specific about the actions, processes, and attitudes they need repeated or eliminated.”

Inference

To ensure the empowerment of teams in any organization, it is not enough to just give them free reign. Empowerment is a process in which a true leader works hand in hand with teams, but unnoticed. They are the ones who should motivate teams to figure out the solution to a problem that they may have given up on.

A leader’s job is to be actively involved in the process of empowering employees to find solutions on their own and seek to learn the skills needed to be effective in their roles. 

“Empowerment is about the encouragement a leader provides teams to learn and grow to meet the needs of the organization, and as individuals.”