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Forbes
30-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
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 Examples include outdated tools that force employees to devote mental energy to navigating systems rather than accomplishing work and overly complex processes that create friction and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. Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
Forbes
02-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Workplace Agility Is Vital During Disruption—So What Is It, Exactly?
Elaine Pulakos, Ph.D., is CEO of PDRI by Pearson, and an internationally recognized contributor to the field of I/O psychology. The workplace has undergone an extraordinary transformation in just the last four years. Pandemic-driven economic shocks threw entire industries into chaos, and remote work shifted from a rare exception to an expectation. Then generative AI took the world by storm, reshaping workflows and powering new, previously unthinkable capabilities. Now, political and economic changes at the global scale have led to sudden shifts that are disrupting individuals and organizations. But even before the pandemic touched off this current period of upheaval, businesses' technical skill requirements were already rapidly evolving. A 2021 Gartner study revealed that one-third of the technical skills listed in job postings for sales, finance and IT roles in 2017 had become obsolete by 2021. This trend has likely accelerated, creating a fundamental challenge: How can professionals remain valuable when technical competencies have increasingly shorter shelf lives? In this environment, employees need more than traditional skills to succeed. They need agility. In particular, they need a constellation of six specific power skills that enable them to thrive and perform effectively amid disruption, volatility and dramatic change. What Are Power Skills? Commonly referred to as soft skills, power skills are employees' durable, often innate capabilities that form the foundation for performing effectively across different roles and situations. They include skills like empathy, initiative, attention to detail and critical thinking. I prefer the term "power skills" because it emphasizes how important they are to employees' success. As disruptive change has increasingly characterized work settings, many of the power skills that matter have evolved. Consider interpersonal effectiveness. While the ability to collaborate and get along with colleagues remains important, today's workplace demands more sophisticated interpersonal intelligence. Modern professionals must quickly identify others' needs, accurately read situational cues and rapidly adjust their communication approaches and actions to achieve important outcomes. 6 Essential Characteristics Of Workplace Agility Multiple studies have noted the characteristics that collectively enable workplace agility. To perform successfully today, focusing on these key six will be vital. 1. Resilience: Employees need the ability to maintain composure under pressure and direct their energy toward constructive solutions, rather than becoming paralyzed by uncertainty. Resiliency allows them to absorb setbacks without becoming demoralized and maintain perspective during difficult circumstances. 2. Creative Problem-Solving: As the pace of change accelerates, established solutions often become obsolete quickly. Professionals with strong creative problem-solving capabilities can generate novel ideas and think beyond conventional parameters to develop innovative approaches. 3. Adaptability: Highly adaptable employees effectively adjust plans, goals and priorities in response to dynamic situations. They recognize when circumstances warrant course corrections and implement these adjustments, rather than sticking to an approach that's no longer working. 4. Continuous Learning: One of the most critical power skills today is the ability and willingness to engage in perpetual learning. This encompasses more than taking the time to learn additional skills. Today, employees must create their own insurance policy against obsolescence by proactively identifying emerging skills and taking steps to acquire them. 5. Interpersonal Savvy: Modern professional environments require interpersonal intelligence that goes beyond basic collegiality. Team members should be able to demonstrate keen insight into others' motivations and tailor their approach to effectively influence diverse stakeholders. In matrix organizations where formal authority is limited, interpersonal savvy often determines who can mobilize resources that will enable initiatives' success. 6. Cultural Versatility: As organizations become increasingly global, cultural versatility has emerged as a critical capability. But it's more than the ability to work with people from different backgrounds. Culturally versatile and intelligent employees take conscious, deliberate action to understand other cultures' needs, customs and values. They also recognize how their own cultural conditioning influences their assumptions and actively work to expand their cultural intelligence. In a world where the only certainty is change, agility isn't just an advantage. It's essential for survival and success. By prioritizing the identification and development of workplace agility, forward-thinking companies will be able to evolve with the pace of change. In fact, the organizations that thrive will be able to actively shape any change to their advantage. Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
Express Tribune
09-05-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
Pearson hit by cyberattack: Source code, customer info, cloud data stolen
UK-based education giant Pearson has confirmed a significant cyberattack that exposed sensitive customer data, internal corporate information, and cloud infrastructure, BleepingComputer reported on Thursday. In a statement, Pearson acknowledged the breach, stating that an unauthorized actor had accessed part of their systems and downloaded what the company described as "largely legacy data." While employee data was not affected, customer and partner data may have been compromised. The company is still investigating the scope of the breach. The breach reportedly stems from an exposed GitLab Personal Access Token (PAT) found in a public .git/config file, which granted attackers access to Pearson's internal source code and hard-coded credentials for AWS, Google Cloud, and Salesforce CRM. According to sources, the attackers used the access to extract terabytes of data, including customer records, financial documents, support tickets, and internal cloud data — potentially impacting millions of users worldwide. Pearson stated they have involved law enforcement and deployed new security measures, including improved monitoring and authentication protocols. However, the company declined to comment on whether a ransom was paid or how many customers were affected. The incident is reportedly linked to a January breach of Pearson's subsidiary PDRI, suggesting the attack may have unfolded over several months. Security researchers warn that exposed Git configuration files and embedded access tokens remain a growing vulnerability for companies using cloud services.
