This year has already thrown more curveballs than we could ever have imagined just six months ago. We’re not just managing change — we’re dealing with a lot of what feels like complete upheaval. It’s a tricky landscape to navigate easily (and support our teams to do that too), but the ability to do this well is increasingly becoming a key competency we need to develop and hone.
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It's not just me saying this. Recent research from the World Economic Forum identifies resilience, flexibility and agility as some of the most sought-after core skills. The gap between what’s needed and where we are now, has never been more significant - not just for organisational performance but for people’s wellbeing too.
Building ‘Transitional Intelligence’
To fill these gaps, some organisations are moving beyond just coping with change to actively building their ‘Transition Intelligence’— the mindset and ability to help teams stay productive and engaged whatever the status of change in their organisation.
This focus on some of the key fundamentals of human change can help to build - and embed - the adaptability essential in organisational cultures, for higher performance.
If you want to explore how these fundamentals could support your organisation in becoming more agile and help employees embrace change, let me know.
This approach isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. Recognising flexibility and adaptability as strengths can impact organisational speed which is a real differentiator for organisations. McKinsey research has shown that compared with peers in slow-moving companies, leaders in fast-moving organisations report 2.1 times higher operational resilience, 2.5 times higher financial performance, 3.0 times higher growth, and 4.8 times higher levels of innovation.
Change fatigue – a key indicator of Transitional Intelligence
When we consider this from the perspective of your people, if you’re noticing any of the following behaviours in your team right now, then you have work to do. These are all common signals of people feeling overloaded by change:
Greater variability in team focus and productivity
Meeting fatigue as Q2 initiatives stack on top of existing work
Resistance to new ideas, even when the current ways of doing things clearly aren't working
People looking for impossible levels of certainty before they make decisions or move forward.
Although these might just be temporary blips given the levels of upheavals we’ve been experiencing recently, they could also be indicators of more significant challenges around resilience.
We all know that change is inevitable, but how we help ourselves and others to approach transitions can be the difference between struggling and thriving at the individual and organisation levels.
If you’d like to explore how you can equip your teams with the skills to navigate constant uncertainty and help your leaders and managers to drive change when everything’s shifting, please get in touch.