Enhance your Team’s Adaptability with a Consistent Communication Strategy
“It is more important than ever for business leaders to be adaptable in order to be able to navigate an ever-changing market environment,” ~ Forbes, Leading with Adaptability
In the dynamic world of business leadership, two key elements have become recognized as crucial: adaptability and effective team communication. Leaders are increasingly required to be agile and responsive to change while also ensuring that their teams are nimble, well-aligned and informed. As affirmed in a recent Forbes article, Leading with Adaptability, cultivating individual and team adaptability are more important than ever to sustained success.
Leaders must reach beyond their personal resilience skills to mold and maintain an adaptable team, it is not simply a matter of leading by example. For a team to be a nimble and responsive unit, it is imperative to build patterns of consistent communications that set clear objectives and encourage the identification of bumps and hiccups before they grow into roadblocks and detours.
The Ability to Pivot is Crucial – Assessing your Team’s Motivators and Adaptability
Adaptability in the business arena has never been more necessary, nor more beneficial. Forbes points to Amazon as an example, “…Amazon’s success can be attributed to its ability to adapt and innovate in response to market changes and customer needs.” It is clear that Amazon has redefined entire industries through their capacity to adapt. A commitment to adaptability not only enables businesses to navigate market fluctuations but also opens doors to new opportunities and innovations.
Building an adaptable team begins with assessing your team’s current baseline of adaptability while also offering a flexible environment to allow members to learn and grow. Assessment tools can help an organization discover their team’s strengths, motivations, and critically, their openness to change.
DISC and Motivators assessments can help you align tasks with behavioral styles while illuminating what motivates and drives employees so that they aren’t just coming to work physically, but they are actually truly showing up as engaged and productive members of the team.
The AQme assessment is another valuable tool designed specifically to unearth the roots of how and why we adapt. Its data provides guidance on how individuals can learn to grow their adaptation skills while learning to let go of past patterns and procedures that can inhibit change.
The Impact of Communication on Business Goals
Team communication is the foundation for the success of your overall goals. As you adapt, it’s essential to revisit and enhance your communication strategies to maintain team cohesion and clarity.
Consistent, ongoing and intentional team communication provides many benefits, here are some tips to improve your communications while encouraging adaptability:
- Level Set – Ensure that all team members are on the same page and understand the current state of the business in regard to its goals.
- Seek Out Concerns – Allow individuals’ frustrations and disconnected feelings to be aired so that they can be addressed and mitigated, and thus strengthen the cohesiveness of the team.
- Nurture Open Team Communication – To move fast when things change, build a culture that gives all team members the knowledge and comfort level they require to freely exchange ideas, challenges and solutions.
- Don’t Hide the Bumps or ‘Kill the Messenger‘ – To uncover challenges before they become major problems that can weigh the business down your team needs to know that they are safe to expose problems and offer ground-level insights.
- Communicate Regularly – It is helpful to employ a disciplined approach to team communication – whether through weekly meetings, a regular memo, or an up-to-date Slack channel – it will help keep your team on track if they always know a primary place to look for current information.
- Communicate Irregularly – If there is a fire on Thursday, don’t wait for the Monday morning meeting to put it out. Use the regular communication channels to keep consensus and common ground, but use one-on-ones, impromptu meetings, and other spontaneous communication to provide guidance in the moments when changes are occurring. By helping your team through the stressful moments, you establish greater trust and improve overall team adaptability.
“As the world continues to change and evolve,” concludes the Forbes article, “it’s important for you to be open to new ideas and ways of doing things. Setting clear goals and objectives can help ensure adaptability and that everyone is working towards the same target.”
By recognizing the vital interplay of goal-setting, adaptability and communications, leaders can position themselves and their teams to thrive in the ever-changing business landscape. We would love to hear from you – What are some of your best strategies for keeping team members ‘in the know‘?