Stacey Ackerman is a Partner at NavigateAgile, helping companies navigate their way to better marketing through agility.
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As the world continues to change faster than we can commute from our bedrooms to our home offices, we need now more than ever to be adaptive leaders.
We have an uncertain global economy, raging wars, evolving cultural norms and disruptive technology. If there’s one thing that can be said with certainty, it’s that we’re in uncertain times and what we know today will be different tomorrow.
As leaders, we need to be agile enough to quickly pivot as new information is learned. We need to constantly re-evaluate how we market and sell our products to customers, because what worked in 2023 will no longer work in 2024.
If you don’t adapt your leadership style, you’ll quickly be replaced by someone who can. Here are five actionable things you can do today to be an adaptive leader:
1. Plan with agility.
These days, planning anything too far ahead is a waste of time because, as fast as you can put together an annual plan, it can become irrelevant. However, there’s a more agile way to plan that allows you to create plans that embrace change.
Agile planning involves looking at a shorter horizon. Instead of a year out, think about a quarter out. Even with a three-month horizon, a lot can change. Plan for the outcomes you hope to achieve rather than the specific tactics that will get you there. For the quarterly plan, focus on one or two KPIs and a few high-level initiatives, but don’t go into enormous detail.
By setting quarterly goals, you create a flexible backlog of work that allows you to prioritize deliverables as new information is learned. Those items may or may not be worked on, depending on how relevant the work is at the time your team is ready to get started.
This flexible operating system has worked for software development teams for more than 20 years, but I’ve found that all parts of the company can benefit from flexible planning.
2. Budget for a team, not a project.
In traditional corporate financing, leaders must give project details months, even years, ahead of time to get the budget approved. However, this approach no longer works in an environment where the project may no longer be needed by the time the start date arrives.
While it requires a radical shift from how we’ve always done things, budgeting according to the people on a team without requiring details of a project is what’s needed now and in the future. This works if you put together a team that’s focused on specific business goals or KPIs. For example, you may have a Q1 KPI for a fast food chain that reads, "Get a 10 percent increase in average guest checks with the addition of a mini 'lunch dessert' option." The idea is to keep this team together by focusing on outcomes, rather than a project that starts and stops.
With this shift, budgeting actually gets really easy! If you estimate that each team member makes an average of $100,000 a year, it costs around $2,000 a week for each person on the team. Now, if you have seven full-time team members, your run rate per week is $14,000.
It may take a bit of negotiating with Finance, but this approach can greatly reduce wasteful project spending. If you have the team report in real time what value they’re delivering each week and the impacts they're making to the business and customers, you can easily show ROI.
3. Focus on customer-centricity.
As an adaptive leader, you need to be able to quickly respond to customers’ ever-changing expectations from your product or service.
Until recently, it was the corporate norm to focus on internal company sales goals with little consideration for the impact on customers. But leaders today need to put customers at the forefront of all decision-making. We all think we have great ideas, but until customers demonstrably resonate with our products, the ideas themselves are meaningless. If you're marketing products to Gen-Z, for example, they’re looking for authenticity and transparency—and they won't hesitate to cancel you if you get it wrong.
The good news is that we have loads of customer data that can be used to make real-time decisions; but as leaders, we need to empower our people with quick access to this data so they can pivot strategies without a lot of red tape.
4. Nurture your team.
In 2024, people are our greatest asset. While we may need fewer people as technology automates more mundane tasks, as leaders we must empower the people we have to think critically, innovate and not fear failure.
We need to abolish the "command and control" culture of previous decades and treat every team member as a contributor to the company’s success.
People, like plants, need to be nourished to grow and develop. As leaders, it’s no longer about managing someone, but growing their skills and making each team member more and more valuable to the company. By providing opportunities for contributing ideas, continuous learning and transparent conversations, you can succeed at developing great people.
5. Embrace innovation.
When ChatGPT launched last year, it disrupted just about every business function. Where AI goes next is unknown to all of us, so rather than fighting or avoiding it, adaptive leaders need to embrace this new way of working with both humans and automation.
We need to think about structuring our departments differently, determining which skills we’re willing to automate and which ones only humans can perform.
Conclusion
If you’re not one already, it’s time to take the right steps to becoming an adaptive leader in 2024. In a world that’s changing at a faster rate than we can plan for, adaptability is becoming the most important trait of modern leaders.
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