Flexability | What does Flexability really do?

Building a great business team is not like building one for the Olympics.

With the Olympics – or any big sporting championship – there is a date, an end goal, in mind. You build up to a climax. In business, you have to keep going.

Also, with high-performance sports teams it’s obvious why each athlete is there, and how they fit in. In business each individual’s role within a sometimes massive whole might not be so plain to see. Leaders need to be careful to ensure that each team member knows why they are there and how they fit in.

We help teams dismantle barriers with comprehensive equity and inclusion roadmaps. Here’s how.

Flexability, in essence, does three things that start with two foundational pillars.

Two foundational pillars

Business is people. They find clients, make things, serve clients, and pay bills. They make business work. For a business to thrive, the team needs to operate as an interdependent ecosystem. Each member must fully understand how the business operates and makes money to stay in existence and grow. And, each member of this team should understand how they contribute.

This means that the leaders need to concentrate on getting the right messages to the right people at the right time. This is no mean feat.

That’s the first foundational principle that Flexability teaches business teams. The second is that the team needs a growth mindset – the belief that abilities and emotional intelligence can be developed through self-awareness, practice, and new experiences.

Having a growth mindset means you are adapting to changes in the workplace. This requires leaders who understand that being too focused on “how things should be” is stifling creativity and innovation. These leaders focus on making the “right” choices so that challenges become oportunities.. Growth mindset teams are encouraged to pilot new ideas, to see failure as a learning opportunity, and to have courage to speak up when it’s time to move in a different direction.

Once we have introduced these ideas and practices, we start the work that helps businesses build great teams.

Move towards a shared consciousness

One of the first things we work on with a company is moving each individual’s thought patterns from “I” to “we”. What we want is a shared consciousness, with each member of the business seeing themselves as part of the greater whole.

To do this, we use team exercises that focus on building trust, dealing with conflict, and developing commitment and accountability. These elements are essential if you want to build a high-performance team.

We also focus on ensuring that everyone within the business learns that particular organization’s system so that they each thoroughly understand how they fit in. Great performance is achieved by strengthening all parts of the system.

We have found that what most leaders miss is that leadership is not a top-down function; it is a bottom-up exercise. Those who do the work know what tools they need to effectively play their role in the business’s overall success. That means the leaders need to ask good questions and listen to the responses.

Decentralize decision-making

When an organization operates as an ecosystem, decentralized decision-making makes sense. It is a very powerful way of streamlining operations and ensuring greater efficiency throughout the business.

But it requires that leaders let go. This can be tough to do, but the rewards are remarkable.

Research shows that demanding that staff wait for leaders to approve decisions doesn’t make for better decisions, it just delays the process, and that can have damaging effects on a business.

A great illustration of this principle comes from the hospitality sector: Ritz-Carlton employees can spend company money, without approval of a superior, to address or fulfill a customer's needs. It’s easy to imagine how effective this can be in quickly soothing frayed nerves and delivering delight.

Or, let’s take an example from the Olympics. A soccer team has its set plays, but it is in constant motion during a match – there’s simply no time for players to call timeout to check with the coach. Likewise, in business, it is more efficient and effective to delegate decision-making to the person closest to the action with clear communication on how the team defines success.

Learn to lead a team

So, if leaders aren’t making the decisions, what are their responsibilities? At Flexability we teach that leaders are there to create and maintain a well-organized business culture with processes in place to systemize the predictable.

Staying with our soccer analogy, coaches make sure players have finely tuned skills and are able to execute the set plays as scripted. Field leaders are patient and create space for a player to take action when the arises. It is thrilling to see a defensive player recognize open space and become an in-the-moment offensive player who makes a run toward the goal.

Communication is key. Meetings have three main purposes: to sees trends that allow for adjustments in real time, to make decisions that address specific challenges, and to hold an after-action analysis of a decision that was made with the intent to learn and improve.

That’s what we do – we teach leaders how to be lead and teams how to work together for the greater good.

The Equity Lens

We do all of this using an equity lens because the best leaders are self-aware of their own biases in the workplace, and these leaders work to recognize how a bias may affect the teams’ performance.

Let’s be clear: we all have biases. They keep us safe. They help us recognize our discomfort with the unfamiliar. Despite our best efforts, we cannot eliminate bias. What’s important is to understand how a bias affects our actions, our speech, and our decision making. Here’s where inclusion fits in. Diversity of experiences helps a leader and a team recognize that the best decision is made with input from every person in the room, especially when the most junior person goes first.

An equity lens ensures that each person “knows” they are a valued team member whose individual experience brings about a good decision making process. Understanding and acceptance of our differences in a shared network ensures better performance because everyone shares information and understands their role and the organization’s mission.

It’s a worthwhile journey we take businesses on, and each time we do it, we learn more about ourselves and the world we inhabit. Join us?