Agility and Curiosity are the two traits most associated with successful organisations in the coronavirus crisis.
Curiosity helps you uncover new solutions, explore them, and ensure that they’re the best course of action. Agility allows you to take bold, decisive action. It gives you the freedom and flexibility to pursue outside-the-box solutions, no matter how extreme they might be.
The organisations that build cultures and teams that foster both of these traits are the ones with the best shot at adapting to radical change, such as found in a pandemic, and the ones whose employees are most bullish about their organisation’s future, as this research shows.
If curiosity and agility are proven to be so important to success during this crisis, and those in the future, how do you foster an environment at your organisation where these traits can take root and grow among your employees?
- Build a culture where creativity is celebrated.
Encouraging creativity and innovation ultimately starts at the grassroots level. Every manager, director, and VP should try to build an environment where people aren’t afraid to speak up and offer new ideas. The results of building a culture where creative thinking is not only encouraged, but rewarded, speak for themselves.
- Constantly collect feedback from all available sources.
Gathering feedback, constantly and across multiple areas of focus, is critical to ensure we’re taking the best courses of action as we navigate this new territory. Sending surveys and establishing customer advisory boards are two relatively simple strategies that can go a long way in understanding how people are coping in this moment. Collecting feedback keeps you in tune with your customers, and in turn keeps them happy.
- Take action on the feedback you gather.
Once you’ve gathered the intelligence you need to formulate—or validate—your strategy for moving forward, the next step is to execute. It may seem obvious, but it’s actually the step where many organisations falter.
For more detail on the aspects covered here, please email me for a full copy of the excellent SurveyMonkey report from which this extract was taken.