Imagine taking the helm as CEO just weeks before the pandemic. Carol B. Tomé’s plans of getting to know her leadership team and connecting with her employees were quickly put aside. Instead, she recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review, she immediately took action to “decide which aspects of the company we should carry forward and which we need to change.” The leadership team reviewed all current projects and determined which to stop, which to continue and where to shift focus, resources and speed. Employees rallied around the shared vision. These actions resulted in record profits, a double-digit operating margin, and an increase in employee and customer Net Promoter Scores.
Tomé’s organization isn’t an agile startup. UPS is a steadfast 114-year-old company with more than 543,000 employees.
Built on a foundation of shared values, Tomé saw the opportunity to envision what else was possible, birthing a revived purpose and increasing company-wide commitment to diversity and inclusion, social responsibility and new pathways for innovation. Crucially, while Tomé recognized her company’s need for a new sense of clarity around their mission, she came to it without preconceived notions. Instead, Tomé prioritized listening to her team and then acting decisively on their shared insights.
Certainly, Tomé demonstrated resilience as a leader and nurtured it within UPS company culture. But there’s more to this success story than resilience alone. Resilience is about bouncing back. Adaptability is about leaping forward. If resilience is the car, adaptability is the highway. Adaptability is your next competitive advantage.
Top Skill for the Future of Work
Experts from the World Economic Forum to CEOs agree: Adaptability is the most in-demand job skill for the rest of this decade and beyond.
• The 2021 LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report revealed adaptability is the most sought-after skill, clearly on the rise from being a top-five skill in earlier years.
• Consequently, 54% of chief experience officers (CXOs) in a recent Deloitte global survey selected adaptability as one of the top three most critical workforce traits, more than technological savvy and alignment of values, and more than double the importance of critical thinking, creativity, empathy and curiosity.
• Unfortunately, 70% of these CXOs don’t have complete confidence in their organization’s ability to pivot and adapt, identifying adaptability as their number one most sought-after workforce capability, according to Deloitte.
This focus on adaptability has risen only in part due to the wake of recent societal upheavals including the pandemic, environmental catastrophes and other factors. Indeed, the growing recognition of the need for more adaptability in the business sector arose long before the onset of COVID-19.
Today, we see signs of adaptability even in local breweries. From Shilling Beer Company in Littleton making hand sanitizer to the magnitude of efforts around the COVID response and organizations reporting unprecedented growth despite the pandemic. In addition, we are seeing the results of lack of adaptability, which include turnover, reduced flexibility, an increase in depression and anxiety, and a growing concern over the inability to attract the talent needed while wondering if in-house talent will carry the company into the future.
More Than Mental Attitude
Adaptability consists of many components, including emotional well-being, motivational and thinking styles, team support, organizational culture and the ability to unlearn what is known in order to learn what is needed.
Adaptability at its core is the abilities, characteristics and environmental factors that affect the successful behaviors and actions of people and organizations to effectively respond to uncertainty, new information or changed circumstances. With adaptability, organizations empower people by unlocking human potential and guiding the way employees navigate the future of work. Thanks to research and the deployment of artificial intelligence and other tools, we are now able to measure adaptability based on key components. These include:
Ability: How and to what degree do individuals adapt? These abilities include grit, mental flexibility, mindset, resilience and unlearning. Not to be confused with personality traits, these are skills that can be learned and practiced. We can learn how to discard irrelevant data, view tensions as potentials, experiment, explore, prepare to fail and even unlearn.
How can you bring out these abilities in your workplace? Promote well-being by giving employees opportunities to have flexible work schedules in a hybrid environment. Allow them to disconnect and recharge to build their resilience. Introduce new learning opportunities for personal and professional growth. Spur innovative thinking by questioning and encouraging others on the team to ask, “what else is possible?”
Character: Who adapts and why? Certain factors may enhance the adaptable character, including emotional range, extraversion, hope, motivational style and thinking style. While these too may seem to be personality traits, these are not fixed and can be developed and enhanced to augment teams to maximum efficiency and change readiness.
Ignite visionary thinking by involving employees in the big picture. Give opportunities for them to be creative, listen to their ideas and stretch their thinking. Ask thought-provoking questions such as “what would our competitor do?” or “what ideas can we use from a different industry?” Truly playing with the possibilities behind these questions helps to shift thinking styles, increase engagement, build optimism and motivate teams. Employees become part of building a vision for the future.
Environment: When someone does adapt, to what degree do they adapt? An environment can either nurture or stifle even the most adaptable individuals. Environmental factors include company support, emotional health support, team support, work environment and relative work stress. These factors point to systems and processes in place that can create favorable conditions for adaptable teams to thrive.
Recognize when your teams are tired. Do they appear to feel disconnected or stressed? Instead of asking “how are you doing?” ask “what resources do you need?” or “what can we do better to listen to new ideas?” Create pathways for innovation by spurring opportunities to share diverse thoughts. Create new teams from different parts of the company to work together on a goal for improvement, then recycle them back to their roles. Being flexible and cross-functional across projects can be just what’s needed to innovate new solutions and reinvigorate disengaged employees.
90-Day Transformation
Deloitte describes the traditional skills people draw on in the workplace as “becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate.” However, their 2021 Global Human Capital Trends Report found that 72% of executives worldwide pinpointed their employees’ ability to adapt and learn new skills as a priority for navigating future disruption.
Banking is a highly regulated industry. When a national financial institution wanted to increase customer satisfaction by building collaboration within cross-functional teams, a more adaptable environment needed to be created.
Understanding the rigors of compliance and adhering to processes and policies is pivotal to how performance is perceived at a bank. The organization’s strict compliance culture set a high bar for success, yet discouraged highly adaptable characteristics. In addition, the organization was on the cusp of implementing system-wide technological changes. In preparing for digital disruption, leadership dug deep into their own potential for adaptability, recognizing a need to build a culture agile to change, to inspire a growth mindset, increase risk appetite and shift the focus from tactical functions to that of strategic partnership to increase customer satisfaction.
The challenge was that the culture reinforced and rewarded employees who focused on the tactical, routine aspects of their roles, resulting in siloed proficiencies and reduced opportunities for connecting to the organization’s needs. Supportive teams became disconnected from the very customers they supported. And while the organization collected data from both employees and customers, none provided predictive indicators of what to focus on to produce results. Like most teams this past year, employees were tired, feeling overworked and overwhelmed. Not only that; employees accustomed to hallway conversations were now working from home in their kitchens and bedrooms, further disconnected from their teammates and customers.
To succeed, the organization needed to identify with precision the factors that would build a more adaptable, change-ready, resilient and innovative team to ultimately deliver a measurable increase in customer satisfaction. The goal was to build cohesion within the team, bolstering confidence, competency and capacity to create engagement within teams and with customers.
Following a strategic asset review and scientifically based employee and customer assessment, the organization assembled an action focus team representing all departments. Creating a newly formed team nourished the opportunity for innovation.
Individuals become motivated when given the freedom to birth new ideas within a safe space. Curating team members from different departments also allowed for diversity of thought, differing perspectives, and as a team, the ability to problem-solve from many facets. Teaming strengthened support and built resilience—core factors of adaptability.
Next, the organization set a bigger goal. Customer service improvements of the past focused on quicker response times and reactive responses. Instead, the organization imagined a proactive relationship with the customer. Imagining what was possible, it painted a picture of a new relationship with the customer, shifting to a strategic consultative partnership that focused not only on meeting but anticipating customer needs. This visionary thinking about what was possible in customer relationships would lead to increased customer satisfaction.
It now had the ability to adapt. The team made a commitment to connecting to the customer in ways they had never experienced, by reaching out directly as a strategic partner to their success. Doing so was uncomfortable for some, others were not sure what to say or do and some were anxious about stepping away from their usual processes. It was time to unlearn and to provide the skills needed. Through training and coaching, the team came to embrace new strategies for change leadership, communication and conflict management. Empathy emerged, and they began seeing the customer in a new way. Instead of following standard processes, the team created new ways of communicating with the customer and scheduled meetings where they showed up, not as a tactical support team, but as strategic partners.
Adding to the vision, the teammates noted that being a part of this visionary customer success solution would help raise their visibility, show their value in the organization and maximize their contribution. They would be seen differently, elevating their career potential. Soon, their sense of self seemed to flourish, as did their enthusiasm.
The results? Within a short 90 days, the team improved in every adaptability skill competency measured, including a 33% increase in a growth mindset in three areas as rated by themselves, their management and their customers. Yes, customers perceived the transformation and saw the banking institution in a new light. Technology changes were also adopted with ease, giving the organization the efficiency returns it was hoping to gain. Net Promoter Scores increased, and a 162% ROI of the engagement resulted.
The organization decided to continue the process, spurring innovation teams in other departments and creating a sustainable shift in their culture.
The message? Adaptability can be learned and enhanced. People just need the tools and insights to get there.
Your Adaptable Workplace
As the financial institution story highlights, adaptability is a skill that is innate, learnable, can be enhanced and, for the first time, measurable. It doesn’t matter if the business is a startup, a 114-year-old company or the most regulated organization. It doesn’t take a year-long leadership program to make the shift and connect adaptability to a business result, either. Demonstrable results in 90 days or less, as in the case of the banking institution, are realistically achievable.
Adaptability is also a skill that is scalable: when companies begin to nurture adaptability in individual leaders, the advantage doesn’t stop there. Teams become more flexible, supportive and resilient, and the entire organizational culture benefits.
Over time, companies see more effective, innovative work taking place.
Debora McLaughlin is CEO of The Renegade Leader Coaching and Consulting Group in Nashua. She can be reached at 603-324-7171, debora@therenegadeleader.com and therenegadeleader.com.
Current Issue - May 2024