Agility in management means adjusting your operations based on live data, as need be. It could be very difficult for you to gain a competitive advantage in business today without following the agile business model.
Your strategies are likely to fall short of achieving the set outcomes if you don’t leave room for adjustments to unpredictable changes.
Although agility is vital in all departments of the company, it is especially important for senior management and strategic leadership because:
Leadership style sets the tone for how the entire organisation operates.
It allows you to act swiftly and modify directions while saving your business from losses.
You can be the first to leverage untapped customer needs through speedy and targeted innovations.
Agile strategic managers can capitalise on opportunities even in complex situations. Hence, this approach is essential for enterprises.
Strategic Management and Agility go Hand in Hand
The entire focus of a strategic business approach is to increase profitable outcomes for the company and agility serves the same purpose; it improves your operations by making you more flexible and adaptive in your planning.
There is a lot of unpredictability in the business world. If the top management follows an agile approach, it becomes much easier to train the employees to do the same.
Strategic Management and Leadership should be agile to take advantage of the following benefits:
Create a flexible yet strategic response to market changes
Easily meet unusual spikes in customer demand
Reconfigure strategy without losing sight of the main objectives
Stay competitive even during instability
Increase operational resiliency
On one end, to create a strategy you need long-term data and consistently predictable outcomes. But sometimes the past data fails to give you an accurate picture of the market conditions at the moment. That is where agility comes in.
Developing a strategy based solely on past information can be troublesome because then you are no longer adaptable. You might have to redo your entire strategy to accommodate a change. And that is not only costly but also time-consuming and counter-productive.
Agile systems are focused on the customers. So by creating a highly functional and agile strategy you are likely to be in the best position to service your clientele and stay a step ahead of the competitors.
The level of agility your Strategic Management and Leadership should adopt varies from business to business, as this is highly context-dependent. So you need to examine the volatility of your industry and incorporate agility with strategy accordingly.
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