Workforce Agility – What It Means Today?
Workforce agility plays a critical role in any company’s success. It helps teams adapt to difficult situations and respond to changing scenarios in an optimal manner. Far from being an abstract concept, agility has become a necessity in today’s work place.
We live in an era of sweeping globalization, digital transformation, and unexpected economic game-changers. In a volatile and complex environment, companies must tackle changing market dynamics head-on and be ready for things they never faced before.
Many companies meet these challenges by flattening hierarchy and introducing agile concepts to their workflow. However, without training your staff to become emotionally intelligent, it’s difficult to cope with all these problems successfully.
Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily. Emotional intelligence is the ability to assess the emotional and interpersonal needs of an individual or situation and respond in an appropriate way.
Where Does Emotional Intelligence Come in?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to assess the emotional and interpersonal requirements of a situation, then being able to apply that information and make a choice to respond in a manner that the situation demands. On the other hand, agility is having the flexibility to make that appropriate response choice even when it’s hard.
Almost everyone can adapt to some situations, but many scenarios are outside our comfort zones. People who are calm during normal changes in plans may fail to respond appropriately when they don’t understand those changes or the emotions associated with them.
Learning to gain a strong command of our emotional state while stretching and rising to challenges beyond our comfort zones helps us grow both individually and professionally. We become more skilled at what we do, making us more valuable to the organization.
Agile Emotional Intelligence
Agility and emotional intelligence are often the two reinforcing cogs that drive innovation, efficiency, and change. They teach us to cope with difficult scenarios without acting strictly from our emotions. If implemented in a workplace, agile emotional intelligence sets us on a path to growth that only leads to greater success, individually, professionally, and collectively as an organization.
So why are these different skill sets so important in the work environment? Agility allows us to make things happen and get things done, to make quick decisions and pivot without hesitation. Without emotional intelligence, the agile person can become a steamroller, pushing things and people out of the way to accomplish their goals. The emotionally intelligent person taps into agility as one of many skills they bring to relationships, being able to navigate quickly while keeping people in the forefront of the process.
Emotional Intelligence includes other skills that compliment agility like empathic listening, open dialogue, problem solving, decision making, and productive conflict. For more information about building emotional intelligence skills, check out our upcoming workshops.
