Agility is defined by the ability to cooperate to create together in changing and uncertain environments. In your managerial missions, what talents should you encourage to facilitate agile behaviors? What are the essential skills to develop in your teams? Here are 3 courses of action to reveal agility skills.
Encourage mutual aid
The first thing you notice when observing an agile team is the strong collaboration between team members. In more “classic” functioning teams, the work is more individual. Agile teams primarily use cooperation to solve problems or deal with new situations.
In general, it is not easy for an employee to ask for help, it could be perceived as a lack of skills… Employees able to work in agile mode are those able to recognize their limits and ask for support and assistance to their manager or peers.
Why is the ability to ask for help so important?
Everyone knows part of a subject, but none of the team members fully masters everything. It is for this reason that the ability to ask for help is an asset and an essential quality for working in an agile team. The team takes precedence over individual recognition.
Set realistic milestones
Agility is above all listening to others. At each stage of a project, a feedback on experience is carried out so that the contributors decide together on the improvements to be made.
One of the challenges of working in agile mode is to accept imperfection. Teams focus on what’s best done when it’s done and move forward by trial and error.
In agile projects, as in all types of projects, working conditions are not always ideal. The qualities of adaptation, relational flexibility and constant questioning are the most favorable to working in agile teams.
Value curiosity and creative approaches
A sign of a person’s ability to adapt is his ability to work in a field he does not master. In agile teams, employees who are willing to work outside their field of expertise and who agree to leave a “business technicality” comfort zone are those who succeed the best.
Here are some non-exhaustive examples of behaviors favorable to the development of work in agile mode in hierarchical or cross-functional teams. Surely you have others to share?
Teaching your team to work in agility is a vector of growth and development of potential that cannot be improvised. The Becoming an Agile Manager training will help you develop agile behaviors in line with the needs of your organization.