30-07-2025
Three Steps To Empower Organizational Agility
Elaine Pulakos, Ph.D., is CEO of PDRI by Pearson, and an internationally recognized contributor to the field of I/O psychology.
In today's volatile business landscape, organizational agility has become essential. In the first part of this series, I outlined the six critical traits an employee needs for agility: resilience, creative problem-solving, adaptability, continuous learning, interpersonal savvy and cultural versatility. However, even when an organization hires the nimblest employees, this alone is insufficient to develop agility within teams and organizations.
Contrary to popular belief, agility doesn't emerge from chaos. Rather, agility thrives only when certain organizational conditions exist to support it. This was the key finding from the Agility Project, which my colleagues and I published in Consulting Psychology Journal in 2019. We studied 300 companies globally, large and small, in the public and private sectors, across a broad spectrum of industries. The Agility Project found that agile organizations do things differently from others, and the benefits are substantial. For instance, we found that agile organizations achieved a 150% higher return on invested capital and a 500% higher return on equity.
Three conditions rise above the rest as essential for building agility: creating stability, rightsizing teamwork and empowering self-correcting teams.
1. Creating Stability
The most important—and paradoxical—condition for agility is stability. Teams and organizations simply cannot be agile if they are not stable first. Leaders build stability by doing five essential things:
When priorities shift weekly or remain ambiguous, employees waste valuable time working to determine what matters most. Effective leaders articulate business priorities clearly and reinforce them consistently, which enables teams to make rapid, aligned decisions when responding to change.
Leaders must systematically identify and eliminate obstacles that prevent employees from getting things done. Examples include outdated tools that force employees to devote mental energy to navigating systems rather than accomplishing work and overly complex processes that create friction and slow response times.
How organizations handle failure dramatically affects agility. When employees fear punishment for unsuccessful initiatives, innovation stagnates because everyone is afraid to take even reasonable risks. Forward-thinking leaders look for opportunities in failure and treat these as essential components of agility.
This doesn't mean denying reality. In fact, dishonest positivity breeds cynicism that undermines trust. The best approach is to transparently acknowledge difficulties while focusing on pathways forward. This helps maintain morale while harnessing the organization's problem-solving energy.
Amid economic headwinds, organizations often cut staff without fully considering the impacts on those remaining and how destabilizing this can be. It is important to balance the resources with the work requirements. Otherwise, people get burned out and mistakes occur, which undermines agility.
2. Rightsizing Teamwork
The second important condition for agility is rightsizing teamwork. Instead of assuming that teamwork is always good, the most agile organizations approach teamwork more judiciously by following three principles:
This means carefully considering how much and what type of collaboration is optimal for the team's work. Some tasks require nothing more than doing a piece of work independently and handing it off to the next person. Other tasks require people with different skills, such as a critical care team, to coordinate extensively with each other and adjust together to provide optimal care. Defining what teamwork means in each situation helps avoid overdoing it.
This starts with valuing people's time and is accomplished by keeping meetings small and purpose-driven, cutting unnecessary rules and tasks and streamlining decision-making by letting individuals or majorities decide when appropriate. Teams should regularly review how they work to ensure it's efficient and adjust as needed.
In times of rapid change, team members must be empowered to manage collaboration wisely. This is accomplished by giving people permission to say no to unnecessary teamwork, prioritize enough individual focus time and be intentional about whether meetings are truly needed.
Leaders model this kind of efficient collaboration by setting clear meeting goals, encouraging opt-outs when contributions aren't needed and ending meetings early when possible.
3. Empowering Self-Correcting Teams
The most agile organizations have cultures in which people feel encouraged and secure enough to raise performance issues when they occur and to work together with team members to quickly resolve them, without finger-pointing or blame. These self-correcting teams are built by doing three things:
Teams thrive when they're empowered to openly address what's not working, supported by leaders who foster trust and psychological safety. This requires understanding people's natural defensive reactions when things go wrong and encouraging problem-solving rather than unproductive blame.
Leaders enable this by modeling constructive responses to issues, listening openly to concerns and creating a culture where raising issues is valued and rewarded.
Tracking clear, objective metrics helps teams spot issues early, reduce emotional reactions and focus on problem-solving. The right metrics—simple, shared and tied to both processes and outcomes—enable real-time insight and keep teams aligned and proactive about what is working and what isn't.
The complexity of work today often leads to misdiagnosing issues by jumping to quick, surface-level conclusions and missing root causes. Slowing down and using structured methods like the "Five Whys" helps teams identify root causes of issues.
Leaders can support this by encouraging deeper analysis and leveraging tools that support continuous improvement.
The Leadership Imperative
Agility is vital for organizational survival in uncertain times like these. And while it's critical to hire employees with the traits that confer agility, ultimately, it's management practices that determine whether this potential is realized to create agile, high-performing teams and organizations.
Companies need to train their leaders to build the conditions for agility: creating stability, rightsizing teamwork and empowering self-correcting teams. Leaders who focus on these things will create environments where agility can flourish, transforming uncertainty from a threat into a competitive advantage.
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