Everything You Need To Know About Developmental Agility.
Siân Jones
Joe had recently moved to Melbourne and landed a senior operations role with a telecommunications company*. He was tasked with leading an already high-performing team to new heights.
At first, Joe felt he had it easy as far as the team went. They liked each other and they worked hard, often beyond their expected hours. However, as the weeks passed, he realised the team was insular and reinforcing silos. Similarly, while the team worked hard, it wasn’t necessarily on the right things or in the right ways.
When he tried to get them to think creatively or with foresight, he was met with short-term thinking like “I haven’t got time for that”, or dismissive suggestions such as “we could do a creative session at the next team day.” Joe knew that this kind of thinking was limiting their potential and that continuing with this business-as-usual approach would eventually result in the group’s performance lagging.
Joe had experienced the value of building developmental agility in teams before, so he decided to introduce it to this team. They were hesitant at first, but as they saw the improvements to their performance, they became more engaged. The most noticeable shift was in how the group interacted with each other. They’d always had a good time together, but they’d also avoided conflict. Now Joe noticed people having open, sometimes difficult conversations, and seeing growth as a result.
There was also a much greater willingness to experiment and try new things, and the subsequent learning was paying off. Many of the team members were elevating their thinking beyond the team to the whole organisation, and cross-collaborating with other units. The shift away from focusing only on the here and now to future opportunities, saw the team’s performance soar. Suddenly, other leaders began focusing on developmental agility in their teams too.
What is Developmental Agility?
Developmental agility supports individuals and teams to understand, adapt to and work through challenges, uncertainty, and complexity to deliver superior services to their customers. It involves transforming the way people work, relate and think through a mixture of individual and team coaching and focussed introspection. It is a relatively new approach to increasing performance, however leaders like Joe are part of a growing movement. It was born from the deliberately developmental model of organisational transformation penned by Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey in their book ‘An Everyone Culture’. In the book they describe the long-term commercial and interpersonal benefits when organisations take a people first approach and development is “woven into the daily fabric of working life and visible in the company's regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.”
Ways of working is how people come together to get the work done. When you see growth in the way people work, you observe greater agility individually, more effective teaming, and a rhythm of work that extends beyond BAU into continuous improvement and innovation. Shifting the way people work is a good first step to nudge people’s behaviours to create positive, lasting change.
Secondly, ways of relating is about how you communicate, provide feedback, collaborate and navigate the politics within an organisation. Observationally, you will see team members fostering deeper and more open relationships, supported by greater competence and confidence to engage others in difficult conversations. You will also notice increased interest and willingness to cross-collaborate, share stories (such as the organisational values in action) and proactive behaviours where team members make connections that contribute to other teams and strategic priorities, therefore bringing the organisational vision to life. Instead of viewing work relationships as transactional, when team members show vulnerability and trust each other, another level of growth has been achieved.
Finally, ways of thinking is about how people think about how they think. Most people view their work from a perspective of ticking boxes, but where we see the most success is when people can think broadly about the whole system (all the systems, structures, processes and people that help the organisation to work effectively) as well as how their own thinking is helping or hindering progress. When people have acute self-awareness, can catch themselves in the moment and reflect on their own thinking, they’re better prepared to deal with ambiguity and have higher levels of trust in themselves and others. When you witness this level of growth you notice greater acceptance of ambiguity, deeper levels of trust of self and each other, and a focus on continuous self-directed development.
How to Achieve Developmental Agility
There isn’t one fixed way to achieve developmental agility. The approach you take will depend on many factors such as the appetite of your team to change and their existing levels of agility. Some teams choose to focus purely on ways of working, such as improving how they prioritise and visualise their work, how they come together to talk about the work and their processes for delivery and continuous improvement. Often the improvements they make in these work practises have incidental wins to how they relate and think as well.
In our experience, being intentional about all three levels is where teams reap the most rewards. To begin this process it’s valuable to identify the current levels of agility in the team’s culture through qualitative research (a combination of interviews, workshops and surveys). From this data you might discover there is significant blame, control, judgement and avoidance of conflict, or conversely that decision making is well distributed, values are shared and collaboration is the status quo. The results will determine where on the agility scale your team or organisation is and what changes need to be made, in order to grow collectively (to learn more about this scale read our blog A Model for Cultural Agility ). No two teams are the same, so programs should be bespoke but typically include values alignment, adaptive leadership training and 1:1 coaching.
Coaching and training are not the only ways to achieve developmental agility. After all, up-levelling the way people think takes self-reflection and self-awareness and no-one else but the individual can do that. While leaders can coach their teams by asking questions like “What do you think about that?” and “What would be an alternate way of thinking about It?”, the real work lies with the person. To improve ones’ ways of thinking takes introspection, curiosity around motivations and a willingness to challenge long-held stories about whom one is and how to think and behave. Practical tools to help people in this space include dedicating time each month for the team to share and explore their thinking on matters that are important to them, and creating a buddy system where team members can talk freely about their personal challenges, blindspots and celebrate the discoveries they make.
Mapping Progress towards Developmental Agility
Although most organisations focus on developing and mapping horizontal growth across technical skills such as IQ, knowledge, capability and professional credibility, an adaptive organisation is not achieved through technical efficiency and expertise. Investing in developmental agility supports vertical growth in areas like EQ, interpersonal and self-awareness, values and beliefs, thinking levels and personal credibility. These growth areas are typically more difficult to metricise and put targets around. In fact, one of the most common questions about Developmental Agility is how to measure growth, especially when it comes to improving the ways of thinking (Figure 3).
One way to track the progress of a person’s capacity to think differently, is to have each team member share what they are working on developmentally, ask other team members to periodically rank them on a scale of 1-10 and seek feedback for ways to improve. For example, a team member sharing that they are working on micro-management and control would have a scale where 1 represents ‘full blown control and micro-management’ and 10 represents ‘embracing autonomy and letting go.’ Asking for feedback regularly on this spectrum enables the team member to gather context and examples of where and how they can improve and to see their growth.
The results of Developmental Agility can also be tracked as people start experiencing and observing the breaking down of siloes, increased transparency and trust, improved communication and enhanced collaboration that inevitably ensues. These macro level changes, also positively impact micro targets like performance targets but in a more sustainable way than short-term extrinsic motivators like bonuses.
As Joe’s experience at the telecommunications company demonstrates, the benefits of Developmental Agility are infectious. As teams achieve vertical growth, others in the organisation notice the positive impact and seek to emulate it in their own teams. The collective benefit is that as more and more people ignite their potential, the organisation also increases its ability to respond to change and uncertainty in a more adaptive way. As a result, the holy grail of full organisational agility, begins to shift from a desired vision into reality.
*Joe’s name and industry has been changed.
