Nowadays, agility is often seen as a key concept for successful corporate management. But responding flexibly and quickly to market demands takes more than a theoretical concept.
Netstream AG’s journey towards becoming an agile learning organisation began back in 2018. True to the motto «The best way to predict the future is to shape it», Netstream’s Board of Directors set a new direction with a newly developed vision, mission and aspiration.
But what does «agility» mean in this context?
When we talk about «agility», we mean a mindset – a certain attitude and way of thinking on the part of employees – rather than well-known methodologies or process approaches (such as Scrum). The agility mindset requires letting go of the usual striving for perfection from the outset and puts the benefit and goal of our actions at the centre. We tackle the path there in small steps. In this way, dependencies are gradually resolved, and along the way we allow ourselves to make mistakes and learn from them. Together, we can thus achieve perfection on a path that is probably not perfect. Agility enables us to respond to new market demands within a short time and therefore to work in a responsive, flexible and adaptable way.
Adapting the leadership structure
To achieve agility in a company, individual leadership is replaced by shared leadership. The Board of Directors put this into practice at the beginning of 2019 with the decision to form the operational management, internally referred to as the «leadership group», as an independent leadership circle. This circle consists of seven members who can make decisions on an equal footing. Since then, we have been accompanied by Me&Me, the coaching duo specialising in agile organisational development.
In the first phase, the body established a new way of working together and making decisions in so-called decision meetings. Decisions are now made jointly by integrating objections instead of seeking a majority, documented using a tool and moderated by the external coaches. Depending on the context, the circle either decides directly on the content (what?) or empowers one or more people (who?) to make the decision on the content. This approach also promotes the skills development of individual employees. More than 200 decisions have since been made and, by transferring responsibility to the relevant experts / specialists, implemented quickly and successfully. «Making decisions is important, but implementing them is what really decides the match. By switching from consensus to consent and deliberately reducing power gaps within operational management, we have created a tool that allows us to actively shape our future», confirms Alexis Caceda, CEO of Netstream AG, enthusiastic about the concept.
Extending the concept to the entire organisation
But agility takes more than just one body. Now that the leadership group has successfully established the new way of working, the next step is to extend this mindset and the associated ways of working and thinking to the entire organisation. We are achieving this in many individual steps, in which employees are introduced to the methods and leadership is gradually handed over to the organisation. With intensive coaching from many different sides and the principle of “learning by doing”, we are thus moving step by step towards an agile learning organisation based on the principle of collegial leadership.
