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Forbes Panel - Barry Marshall

While adaptability is vital for business success, the business can only be adaptable as a function of the people within it.

It is the people who drive processes, policies, choices, trade-offs, value creation and, ultimately, an overall environment for the organization to thrive through adaptation. So, if you haven’t built a culture of adaptability from a people-minded leadership perspective, I believe your business, by definition, cannot be adaptable.

I had the privilege of contributing to a recent Forbes Expert Panel on this topic recently and have had several individuals reach out to me for more details, so I wanted to share a bit more about my perspective here in an article format from my experience supporting and working with organizations.

There are three key steps you can take to weave adaptability into the fabric of your business through a people-minded approach.

1. Define adaptability.

Whether you have actually defined it, your organization has a unique culture, and how adaptability fits within it and what it means from a day-to-day perspective is different for everyone. The first and vital step is for the leader (ideally the CEO as the owner and nexus of the culture) to very clearly define what adaptability means for them in the context of success for the organization. This sounds like a simple step but actually requires some introspection, feedback and wordsmithing to get right.

Getting this definition process right includes the following work:

1. Write a definition of adaptability that fits the context of your company culture and your own personal work ethic. This should be no longer than a couple of sentences to cover the core meaning, which will be further explained through the following steps.

2. Define what exceptional adaptability looks like. Draw upon your personal experiences or inspiration from others and write down the specific behaviors that define exceptional adaptability. This should be a bullet point list of five to seven items that clarify why these behaviors are exceptional and go above and beyond what would be expected. These are the behaviors that get exceptionally rewarded through role expansions, promotions, recognition and compensation, such as consistently looking at the business or processes with an eye toward what is no longer working or listening with intention to the customer story to ensure products and services continue to be best-in-class and exceed expectations.

3. Define what good adaptability looks like. The work here mirrors the definition of “exceptional,” but the bar of expectations is lowered to what you expect day-to-day. Think of these behaviors as what you are paying people for, what you will be satisfied with and what you can reasonably expect everyone to do. Some examples might include embracing and owning changes to policies and processes or contributing ideas, input and feedback throughout the process.

4. Define what missing the mark looks like. Again, this mirrors the work above, but these are the behaviors that oppose and hinder adaptability. These are the behaviors that give you pause or even concern regarding performance and an individual’s ability to contribute to the organization. This can include things such as pushing adaptation for the sake of adaptation, introducing changes that are superficial at best but distract the organization from creating impact, resisting change and not adopting new processes, and creating a toxic environment by cascading negativity, rather than thoughtfully engaging in feedback and contributing to forward momentum.

These carefully crafted definitions now exist for two vital purposes within your organization: First, they will inform your approach to hiring (which I’ve explained in step No. 3 below); second, they can be leveraged throughout the year as a framework for formal and informal feedback across the organization. The key point to this work is that we can never expect people and, therefore, our organization, to demonstrate adaptability if we haven’t defined it in the first place, and that definition, to have impact, must have teeth and be an active part of daily life within the organization.

2. Lead by example.

You have taken the time to define adaptability for the people of the organization, so now you need to live it, hold yourself accountable to it and demonstrate it through your own actions. Are you intentionally listening and identifying things that aren’t working well for you people or customers? When change is thrust upon you unexpectedly, how do you respond? Your people need to see that you adhere to what you have defined, and when/if you don’t, you own up to it, address it.

3. Hire for adaptability.

While the hiring process is impossible to get perfect, you can improve your success rate. If adaptability is a core behavior you need or want in your business, then be intentional about hiring for it. Using the definitions above, build specific interview questions that probe for adaptability behaviors, and train your interviewers to listen well and probe when needed to assess their adaptability.

Some example prompts you might use during an interview include:

• “Give me an example of a time when something at work was no longer working as intended.” Let them describe the situation, and listen for key elements of your definitions above. Did they discover the issue and champion the change, or did someone else? What role, if any, did they play in adapting and improving the outcomes?

• “Give me an example of when you were frustrated by a change that was implemented in your work.” If they didn’t initiate the change (exceptional), did they at least accept and embrace it (good)? Listen for any hint of “missing the mark” here.

While the pandemic has been an epic example of the need to adapt, the steps above can improve your ability to thrive in changes of all shapes and sizes.