“Be agile leaders who can adapt to change”
Organisations need to be fast, focused and adaptable to remain competitive in our current climate. How a company structures itself can have a huge impact on its workflow and culture, says Henderson. Slack, a collaboration hub for the modern workplace, has grown rapidly since launching in 2013 and continues to do so.
“From my experience, organisational agility is about the better coordination of people and teams. It’s thinking about the performance of the business and how to align individuals to achieve common goals. If people don’t work together, no matter how much energy you expend, you end up pushing against each other – and not much happens.”
Strive for togetherness by ensuring the mindset of your people is aligned with the company’s strategy and vision. “Having the right infrastructure in place will allow your teams to knowledge-share between departments or organisations, which will increase a sense of connectedness and enable decisions to be made quickly,” he says.
Effective organisation comes from the top. Good leaders need to focus on balance, which means aligning teams and introducing new layers of management while encouraging staff to be productive, says Henderson.
“If what you’re trying to do is get a large group of people to cooperate on a very complex problem, there’s a higher degree of alignment that’s required. However, if you’re trying to drive an assembly line to greater efficiency, it’ll be very much command and control.”
The way in which teams communicate and collaborate is key. A team-first, organisation-first approach to work, as opposed to an individual approach, leads to greater productivity. “Slack enables this by boosting transparency: conversations move into channels, which are accessible by different people at the same time. Someone in the marketing team can see what the sales team is assessing and, weeks and months later, you can search and find this conversation and develop a deeper understanding.”
Business leaders need to be clear on what they want to achieve and have an eye on how the business model will have to shift in the next five to 10 years to achieve these aims. “Consider how tech will make the lives and jobs of knowledge workers easier. There will be a greater reliance on human intelligence in the coming years and decades as we automate mundane tasks and chores like remembering things or analysing data sets to detect patterns.
“The future will belong to humans who know how to operate software, what it’s capable of and how to handle analytics and data science around organisations.”