Along with the managerial skills, leaders need to have a strong vision to align the teams. It sets a tone for driving business agility in the organisation by shaping the minds and changing the behaviours of the leaders and directing the team. A clear vision ensures the team's everyday work makes a significant contribution to organisational goals. It makes the employees understand their work and helps them stay committed to the organisational goal. A strongly aligned team can drive business agility. It is all about bridging the gap between vision and execution. The article talks about effective ways of driving business agility through vision-aligned teams.
There is a strong connection between business agility and organisational vision. Both of them work towards achieving organisational success. A business vision sets a clear direction for organisations to reach their goals. Business agility determines the organisational ability to respond to changes to reach the goals. Business vision empowers teams to take autonomous decisions to reach goals, whereas agility allows them to experiment and evolve as changes happen. Both are important for helping organisations move fast in the right direction.
The leaders who are looking to drive business agility should align the team's goals with the organisational vision. Make every team member understand how their individual goals are connected with business objectives. Knowing the value of their contributions in the organisation develops a sense of ownership and gets them engaged more in the work, driving their performance and innovation. By maintaining regular and consistent communication with the team, the leaders can ensure organisational visions stay aligned with the goal.
In dynamic organisations, teams are under constant pressure to drive business agility while staying aligned with organisational goals. To help the teams strike a balance between the two, organisations are using a framework like OKRs to align the efforts of the team members to achieve goals. These frameworks have established structures and metrics that help the organisations stay agile while allowing teams to stay united in achieving the vision. The leaders should tell the teams about the outcomes to deliver and not just the features to build. It allows experimentation to drive results while staying aligned with business goals.
Cross-functional collaboration in the organisation is a strategic necessity. Expertise across diverse functionalities is needed to solve complex problems. A successful collaboration driven by business agility reduces misalignment of organisational priorities and conflicting workflows. As the teams stay aligned towards the organisational vision, cross-functional collaboration can break down silos and bring faster, more diverse perspectives, enabling faster innovation and quicker decisions to adopt market changes, ultimately driving business agility. It facilitates informed decision-making by considering multiple angles, leading to faster execution and better results.
Empowering vision-aligned teams fosters operational agility in the organisation, enabling them to respond to emerging opportunities and changing customer expectations. Business agility in the organisation enhances customer engagement. When the teams are given autonomy to make decisions, they will be able to resolve the issues of the customer quickly, creating a smoother experience. The leaders should streamline the process to remove bottlenecks and empower teams to deliver faster service to the customers as per their changing needs, promoting business agility. When the teams have clear goals and are empowered with the right skills and resources, they can deliver customer value at speed. The leaders should empower teams to take accountability for their tasks to help them advance the vision rather than just completing assignments.
The vision-aligned teams are not dependent on the top management to make decisions. They distribute decision-making authority across the teams, making the decisions more effective, faster, and quicker. The leaders drive agility through vision-aligned teams by setting direction and letting the teams determine the execution process to derive successful outcomes. The leaders can join Leading SAFe certification training to drive agility through aligned teams.
Business agility promotes innovation in the organisation. When the innovation is constrained by organisational vision, teams will be allowed to experiment with new things by taking calculated risks and aligning them with the organisational vision. Innovation in the organisation will excel when driven by the purpose. The organisations will be able to deliver better outcomes rather than disconnected experiments.
Many organisations fail to drive agility in the organisation when the teams fail to understand the need for change. When the teams are aligned to the vision, they will see change as a part of the business journey rather than a factor that disrupts their current style of working.
Driving business agility is not just about moving faster but also about an organisational ability to change quickly and respond more quickly to customer requirements. When the leaders drive business agility through an aligned team, they can take ownership of the work and innovate effectively, aligning with organisational vision and delivering better outcomes
