Accelerating agility and leadership in a rapidly changing business

environment
-HRhythm, IIM Kashipur
If you challenge people to work hard, they achieve more than they think they can J.V.
STRAUBEI
We live in an era of risk, volatility, and instability. With globalization, new technologies coupled
with greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment offering HR new
challenges but at the same time greater opportunity as well. The precariousness of market
leadership is even more. The percentage of companies falling out of the top 3 ranking in an
industry increased from 2 percent in the 1960s to 14 % in 2009. Market leaderships is proving to
be an increasingly dubious prize. Earlier strong correlation between profitability and industry
share is now almost non-existent in some sectors. It has become virtually impossible for some to
identify to what industry and with which companies they are competing. All these possess huge
challenges and opportunities for the strategy makers.
The rapidly changing Business environment and the growing interdependence had made agility a
global imperative. Business has entered the era of fast-paced change, but what worries is the
pace at which the change is accelerating. In these changing world dynamics, the outcomes are
totally unpredictable but one thing which we can predict is that the pace of change will be faster
next year and even faster the year after.
The modern communication technology, the global economic market everything is becoming
more interconnected. Customers and supplier relationship play an important role in todays world
than which it used to be. As a result, the organizations are facing difficulties in overcoming the
silos and increasing effective communication within and between the organization.
Agility is not about speeding up response to the rapid change, but it is the art when applied to
organization or individuals should effect in quality changes and should increase the ability to
take sustained effective actions keeping pace with the accelerating change and the mounting
complexity.

The world knows the benefits of the increasing agility, but the economist found that the
managers and the leaders of the organization are less enthusiastic about the agility levels of the
own company. The speed of change and the degree of complexity has reached to another level
and thus all organizations are scrambling to catch up.
Every organization is aware of the benefits of the agility, but still finds it difficult to implement it
and the study has revealed that the barrier in it is the organizational structure and the
Organizational culture. It is a role played by the leadership culture as a part of the corporate
culture which sets norms and expectations for effective leadership. Organizations whose leaders
operate at higher level of agility are agiler as organizations. So can Increase in organizational
agility increase the organization performances is a big question?
Agility has become the need and thus it should be the leaders top capacity so that the business
could become successful. The main agenda here is that how the leaders will put agility in
practice and could get the maximum outcomes. Leadership agility is to take the reflective
actions, to gain broader deeper perspective about the organization. As the leader becomes agiler
their capacity of stepping back deepens and broadens and the frequency with which they move
through cycles of reflection and action increases.
The structurally agile companies usually operate in an entirely different way to those companies
who lack this organizational intelligence. They seek the middle ground between the global and
local and find a balance between a centralized and decentralized structure. An agile organization
will also empower local units and geographies to be more responsive and adaptive to local
markets, customers and trends. These will create the right mix of bureaucracy with nimbleness
and innovation.