Why Business Agility Is The Number One Soft Skill Every Team Needs

From leadership to growth potential, there are a handful of soft skills every organisation should look out for when recruiting new talent. But the number one has to be business agility. Such flexibility has been the key to survival for many businesses throughout the pandemic. It has kept companies resilient and ready to adapt to whatever is thrown at them – an ability that has value far beyond the crisis. Here, we outline the reasons why business agility is the top soft skill to have in the workplace.

Productivity

When faced with an unexpected situation, a team can often come to a standstill. But having business agility means they can quickly adapt and respond to existing challenges and fresh opportunities. To see how this works in practice, you only need to look at how companies quickly adopted task management and collaboration tools in 2020, as their businesses had to resort to dramatically different ways of working overnight. An agile workforce constantly looks for ways to maximise the effectiveness of the whole organisation, identifying different methods of carrying out processes to improve productivity and delivery turnaround times.

Added value

Responding to adversity with innovation is the sign of an agile team. Over the past 12 months, many organisations have come up with new ideas for the benefit of their business – helping them keep up with the times, stand out from the crowd, and ultimately survive and thrive. Take Kings Place, for example – a live performance venue that launched a new product, KPLAYER, by creating a virtual content hub. By being agile, you can embrace and capitalise on change, rather than fearing it -  a growth mindset that's typical of market leaders that customers turn to.

Collaboration

Business agility is a team effort. By collaborating, your workforce will not only produce better results, they’ll be brought closer together too. As a result, you’ll see a boost in employee morale (which is especially important if you’re working remotely), leading to a happier team and a stronger virtual environment. To get it right, you’ll need to seek input from the whole team, not just those in leadership roles. While it’s important that business agility starts at the top so it can trickle down into the culture, having a say helps staff feel like they’re making an impact. Plus, they’re more likely to offer ideas than those who aren’t as close to the detail, and in turn can deliver a higher performance with greater outcomes.

We recently hosted a webinar centred around business agility. Mert Salur (Co-Founder of Getir), Pete Lowe (Leadership Consultant and Author of ‘The Language of Winning’), and Simon Perks (Managing Director of Squarcle), gave their two cents on how to build agile, high-performing leadership teams, as well as the importance of a flexible mindset and recruitment strategy. If you missed it, don’t worry. We recorded the session so there’s still time to gain the insights. Watch the webinar here.