If you think back just five years, the world was completely different. Thanks to factors like the global pandemic and the rise of AI, businesses are facing disruption and change on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, most companies don’t feel like they have the enterprise agility to meet new challenges and adapt successfully.
In today’s environment, your company must implement agile methodologies to leverage opportunities as they appear and keep up in a world that seems to change daily.
This begins with empowering your people.
What Does Giving Your Teams More Power Mean?
Your company’s ability to thrive and adapt rests heavily on workforce agility or the ability of the people on your team to recognize challenges and find new resources and creative approaches to overcoming them. Essentially, it’s the opposite of a rigid corporate structure or protocol-driven environment where people do things because “that’s the way we’ve always done them.”
Empowering your people for enterprise agility means giving them the skills and tools they need to respond to forces like new technologies or cultural expectations and support ongoing growth. Giving your employees what they need to do their best work and trusting them to do it can significantly improve efficiency, productivity, and creativity, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Effective Empowerment Strategies for Greater Enterprise Agility
If you have concerns about your company’s agility, consider these strategies to empower your people to do great things.
Challenge People To Reach New Heights
Getting people out of their comfort zones and giving them new tasks and projects that require embracing new ideas or technologies can prepare them to adapt to future disruptions. This doesn’t mean throwing people to the wolves without any training or support but rather identifying top performers and giving them the tools they need to take on new responsibilities. Doing so supports a workforce that’s ready to handle challenges head-on.
Support Learning and Development (L&D)
Creating a culture of continuous learning, reskilling, and upskilling supports a more agile organization. Empowering your people means allowing them to learn and keep their skills fresh within their normal workflow.
Practically, providing access to self-paced and independent learning resources makes incorporating education into their daily workflows easy. Whether they need to learn a new programming language or improve their data-driven decision-making skills, ongoing learning is the key to sustained growth.
Invest in Soft Skills Training
Emotional intelligence, critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, and other soft skills can significantly impact a company’s ability to meet challenges. Investing in soft skills development can help improve agility by making people more open to learning and change and better able to navigate uncertainty.
Improve Collaboration Across Teams
Transformational leadership begins by moving from siloed work environments to more collaborative and cross-functional ones. Enterprise agility improves when your teams combine their collective knowledge and experience to find innovative approaches to meeting ever-evolving challenges. This is one of the best methods for empowering your people.
