The importance of agility and being agile and flexible in a fast moving world is explored in this episode of Impactful the Podcast, especially with the threat of potential and UK-wide local lockdowns.

The Impactful duo look at the problems with a rigid working practices and what we can learn from the recent national lockdown. Julia and Andrew look at structure relating it to a pendulum swinging between structure and no structure and what that shows us in terms of fluidity, freedom and security. They bring in their personal experiences to highlight how we can adapt to build momentum.

Julia discusses a piece of research that Accenture did on leadership imperatives for an agile business and its three pillars here, of what is called demystifying leadership and what we can learn from high performance leaders. Now we’re all coming back to work and everyone’s got very different agendas about how they want to return it comes down to different levels of flexibility and agility to respond to what’s going on and which is very, very different.

Can businesses be agile and flexible? Andrew talks about the importance of communication especially internally and the two then chat about employee engagement with reference to Robert Dilts logical levels of change, looking at environment behaviours, capabilities, beliefs, identity, identity, and purpose.

Podcast Show Notes

01:54 Importance of transferable skills in the workplace

02:39 Are there barriers?

03:07 Structures operating like a pendulum

03:22 Structure gives freedom

03:40 Structure security

04:47 Proactive & Reactive – learning from the herd

09:15 Accenture Report  – The Three Pillars

09:58 Pulling in the same direction

10:55 Shared Consensus

11:18 Talent & Skills

13:05 Employee engagement and internal comms

14:28 The Comfort zone

16:12 Trust as a leader

16:56 Robert Dilts – Logical Levels of Change