“The art of life is a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”
Kakuzo Okakura
Last week we explored personal adaptability. This week we expand the focus from individual adaptability to team adaptability, and how to build an adaptable team.
Why team adaptability matters
Business leaders have explored this topic for decades. Having a team that can adapt to new opportunities, streamline, or improve remains essential. Even with broad agreement on its importance, helping a group of people shift gears at a reasonable pace can still feel grey.
Understand the hurdles towards change
The thought of change can trigger fight or flight. The promise of learning organizations, which foster learning, growth, and exploration, is real, yet we often defend familiar assumptions and biases. When confronted with a new idea or a new way of doing things, the reflex is to defend the old idea, sell the familiar concept, or preach against change. In Think Again, Adam Grant calls these responses the prosecutor, the politician, and the preacher.
How to build an adaptable team
Author Daniel Dworkin recommends three actions that help teams engage wholeheartedly in being adaptable.
Inspire through words and actions
Create a compelling big picture the team can visualize and feel excited to realize. It clears apathy and reluctance. In Mindset, Carol Dweck shows how a growth mindset and clear vision help individuals and teams become clear about a future state and the pathway there.
Notice and recognize actions that move towards a new state. Model them and turn them into learning opportunities.
Get into the feelings
The discomfort of change is often emotional. Create a safe space where people can talk about the feelings associated with change, during and after. It helps to soften the emotional discomfort.
The ability to recognize and communicate how change makes us feel, and to regulate our emotions while doing so, helps us navigate through it. As the team becomes more adept at talking about feelings, attach emotion to a desired future state to strengthen the drive to adapt.
Create experimentation norms
To become more adaptive, build a culture of experimentation. It reduces the anxiety of permanent change and fosters curiosity. As with all science, develop a clear hypothesis and measures for success, failure, and something in between. How will you normalize all three outcomes as valid and valuable? When and how will the team check in to assess progress and explore potential next steps?
Sustain adaptability in a changing world
As we move into a post Covid world where the pace of change remains, an adaptable team is a superpower.
“Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.”
Max McKeown
If you want support to build an adaptable team, Sage and Summit offers leadership training, team coaching, and executive coaching to help you put these practices in place.
Sources
- Thriving Teams: How To Encourage Adaptability, Forbes
- Think Again, Adam Grant
- Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck
