Make Your Team More Agile with Career Coaching

Agility refers to a team’s ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances, typically through an iterative approach to project management. This approach involves regularly assessing and reassessing practices, protocols, priorities, and deadlines to continuously and consistently meet customers’ changing needs and expectations. 

This, at least, is the objective. But building and maintaining an agile workforce isn’t always self-evident. An experienced career coach can help make your team more agile while benefiting businesses, leaders, and employees alike.

Benefits of an agile team

According to a recent Gallup poll, businesses with more engaged employees are up to 23% more profitable, have 10% greater customer loyalty, experience 18% less turn-over, and 80% less absenteeism. Investing in an agile, engaged workforce is one of the best ways to improve nearly all measures of business success. 

Agile teams can work more efficiently and more consistently by prioritizing people and connections over processes, sustainability over output and burnout, and simplicity over perfection. 

Agility also involves taking an iterative, self-reflective approach to project management that is significantly more adaptable and flexible than other project management styles. As a result, agile teams are able to respond more quickly to change.

Finally, being agile means being collaborative and communicative above all. Agile teams are self-directed and largely autonomous. This style of work reinforces employee engagement, which can have a tremendous impact on the company’s success.

Barriers and challenges to creating company agility

Making the change to agile methodology is no small feat. There are a number of challenges companies may face when doing so. Resistance to that change is an important one. 

Leaders will need to explain the benefits of workplace agility to upper, middle, and lower management and underscore the benefits for employees, like greater flexibility, greater autonomy, and a stronger sense of teamwork and collaboration. 

It’s important that employees be made an integral part of any agile transformation. Encourage ownership at every level and involve employees in the discussion. Ask them to voice their concerns and elicit suggestions on shifting from current practices to more agile ones. This is essential for fostering the kind of self-organization required by agile teams. 

Other challenges will be less significant when everybody is on board and shares a common goal and vision.

Career coaching shapes agility

The requirements for an agile team and the goals of career coaching overlap significantly. Gallup highlights three steps on the “path to agility”: Speed and efficiency, freedom to experiment, and communication and collaboration. 

These tie in well with many of the value drivers emphasized by career coaching from businesses like CareerPoint. Employees who feel more empowered, who demonstrate leadership skills, and are more capable of independent decision-making can operate much faster and with more consistent quality. 

Empowered talent will also have the skills necessary to benefit most from freedom to experiment by driving innovation from start to finish. A strong work ethic, accountability, and responsibility—all teachable attributes—make this experimentation more likely to succeed. 

Lastly, communication and collaboration skills are at the heart of any successful career coaching strategy. A good career coach can teach employees and their leaders how to work together more effectively and efficiently and support and empower one another.

Benefits of career coaching

External career coaching can ease your agile transformation in several ways. First, you’ll save time and resources by hiring industry experts with the experience and expertise necessary to teach the skills mentioned above effectively and quickly. A session of career coaching costs less than a sick day. 

It’s also designed to complement current learning and development programs. Individuals with access to career coaching often make much better use of these programs and have more favorable outcomes, which means your investments go even further. Career coaching can provide 7X the ROI of the investment. 

Third, career coaching helps employees feel more supported by teaching them networking and communication skills and fostering collaborative practices like knowledge-sharing with peers. 

Finally, career coaching boosts employee engagement and investment in their team’s outcomes and, by extension, the company’s success. You’ll see a more focused, more productive workforce that can better excel in a new agile environment. 

Are you ready to create an agile team?

Career coaching teaches invaluable skills for teams looking to become more agile. Coaches like those at CareerPoint understand the importance of collaboration, communication, innovation, and accountability. 

More importantly, career coaches are able to convey the importance of these skills and help talent master them. More agile teams have better business outcomes in multiple metrics and are key to managing a responsive, adaptive workforce. 

Let’s talk about how CareerPoint can help support your team. Contact us today.

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