The 3 Dimensions Of Business Longevity
I took up a new hobby recently – rock climbing. It’s a movement sport, and one that requires you to be training your body up as you practice the sport. What this means is that on top of your climbing practices, you work in training to keep your performance on the walls optimal. Over time, I began to break down my workouts into these three areas:
Strength These are workouts that builds muscles. They tend to be repetitive and needs persistency to see results.
Flexibility These are your stretches, yoga practices. Essentially anything that keeps your joints and muscles supple and malleable.
Agility Not to be mistaken with flexibility. Agility workouts keep you light on your feet and helps you utilize all of your training from strength and flexibility to perform moves and hop on from one challenge to the next.
Those leading businesses or teams will quickly recognize the analogy to management. To thrive, organisations must demonstrate all 3 dimensions in their operations.
How do we build up the strength of a business?
Through rigour. The habit of doing something over and over again makes you strong. It’s the practice, it’s establishing a habit of thought, behaviour and actions. What should you be rigorous about? Processes. Accountability. Optimisation.
These need to be worked into almost a second nature as part of your business operations.
How can you develop flexibility?
Through opening up spaces. Leaders need to make a point to help open up thinking – the proverbial thinking out of the box. This can be facilitated by opening physical spaces – pantry areas, open team discussions, or even a screen or posters on the wall that provokes conversations. It can also be clearing up mental spaces. I read once that a CEO mandated a certain number of hours just for experiments and research. It needn’t be that way for all of us, sometimes it can be tasking the team to do something different together. The crux is to facilitate an ability to ask “how about” or “what if”.
Thereafter, it is the task of a leader to empower their teammates to act on these muses, test it out, learn, rinse, and repeat.
As Lao Tzu said “Whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”
What about agility? How will you practice agility with your team?
An agile organization is able to move and mobile quickly. They are able to respond to changes and are able to organize themselves in response to different challenges and task, and yet keeping to the core of their specialisms. To be like this, each of your team needs to be very clear about how they contribute to your collective team’s success. They need to be confident in their skills and they need to have a view on how that skillset can bring your team’s goal to fruition. On top of that, each of your team member needs to be an expert in their own discipline so that they can move from strategic to operational and back up again if you need them to. A team like that has their feet rooted on the ground and with their sights and reach high up above them – a team constructed to win.