A version of this article was originally published in the blog section of myagilehr.com. 

If 2020 taught us anything is that we, our teams, and organizations need to be ready and empowered to shift quickly and shift smart. In a matter of days, life and work shifted, and like so many of us, you and your business may have struggled to find your footing.

This dizzying experience has brought to the forefront of our HR practice the imperative need to develop agile leaders and teams.

Why Agile? 

-    Because unprecedented change, unforeseen challenges, and unexpected opportunities are a “given” in life and work.

-    Because agility will make you, your leaders, and teams better prepared to face those changes, embrace the challenges, and always be looking out for new opportunities.

Whether you are already intentionally implementing an agile framework or aligning your team in some degree to the basic elements of agile principles, and practices, if you are encouraging your team leaders and team to be in a constant state of assessment, discovery, implementation, and transformation, you are agile.

We want to recognize and celebrate the spark of agility that’s already in you. From the moment you embrace the agile mindset, you are already shifting, adapting, transforming, and so are the people that interact with you, as employees, clients, customers, collaborators.

Embracing Agile is The Way Forward

Agile people, teams, leaders, and organizations are the way forward, and they always have been. In times of change, challenges, and even chaos, those who are able and willing to shift quickly and shift smart are the ones who not only survive but thrive.

It does not serve you, your team, or your organization to linger in the past. Mistakes will be made. Uncertainty will always peek its head from behind a false sense of security, unforeseeable events will come to disrupt your work and your life.

Implementing an agile mindset and collective-team rituals like the stand-up, review, and retrospective will allow time to reflect with a purpose, and then, offer the mechanisms to ask for help, offer solutions, move forward.

Agile teams and their leaders know this. They use their fear of the unknown to fire up their creativity, their problem-solving skills, their optimism. They feel the fear and the panic, and they overcome both with consistent, productive, and proactive action.

We say hello to all the agile teams out there, shifting and changing, and building up the resilient spirit that will see them through all the near, and not-so-near, workplace and life transformations that are yet to come.

We say hello and thank you for reminding us of the very human qualities of adaptability and willingness to survive and thrive, which we all have. These qualities have seen us through some tough times before, they will now and will again. Being aware of our agile potential, and that of the people around us is what makes all the difference.

Agile & Co. is an HR & Comms. Consulting Firm, with a focus on People & Culture that embraces an agile mindset and management style. It serves small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs, offering coaching, mentoring, or consultation, to assist in the co-creation, development, and transformation of their organizational flow and people experience, in a humanized, collaborative and agile way. Follow @myagilehr #agileforbiz #agileforlife