As businesses work not only to survive this global pandemic, but also to thrive in a rapidly changing world, speed and agility are paramount. To be successful, businesses have had to respond quickly to this year’s major disruption, adapting their operations to provide what their customers need. 

How Businesses Are Adapting in the Pandemic

Through my experience working with Vistage leaders (Vistage International is the world’s largest network of CEOs), as well as the thousands of other businesses I interact with, I’ve seen countless examples of companies that adapted to the demands imposed by COVID-19. They made transformational changes in weeks—changes that in the past would have taken months or years. Some examples: 

• A restaurant supply company leveraged it’s connections to rapidly deploy personal protective equipment in its community.
• A body products manufacturer swiftly transformed it’s operations from lotions and creams to hand sanitizer.
• A fine-dining restaurant chain mobilized it’s waitstaff and leveraged it’s communities to shift to curbside pick-up and local delivery.
• My speaker/trainer colleagues and I who transitioned our businesses from constant-travel and in-person delivery to high-tech home studios for virtual workshops with an “in-person” feel.  

Attention Management is Essential for Agile Leadership

My work with leaders and teams centers around the idea that attention management is the most relevant and effective path to productivity. 

Leaders often tell me that they can’t manage their attention because their teams need them to be perpetually available for help, questions, and decisions. But for their businesses to be adaptable, these leaders require the ability, and the opportunity, to apply deep, sustained attention to their work for extended periods of time. 

The Problem with Perpetual Availability

Leadership roles often require insight and creativity, but leaders who prioritize availability are constantly interrupted. These interruptions make it much harder for leaders to focus attention on their most important tasks. 

Without the ability to control one’s attention, it’s impossible—for leaders especially—to dedicate sufficient mental resources to generate innovative ideas, or to solve the problems that inevitably arise throughout any change process. So perpetual availability is a major impediment to a company’s ability to adapt, especially in this time when speed and agility are crucial.

Now, more than ever, micromanagement is the enemy of your entire team’s productivity. It’s time to step back and empower your team.

Key Steps That Foster Adaptability

Are you a manager or leader who feels you can’t get important work done because your team always needs you? If so, here are three steps you can take to ensure that you aren’t the bottleneck in your organization. Taking these steps will help your teams feel empowered to be innovative and make decisions, free from the organizational bureaucracy that you can’t afford to let slow them down.

1. Demonstrate trust. 

Before the pandemic, my leader and manager clients complained of constant “drop-in, got-a-minutes'' throughout their days. During this time of remote work, these interruptions take a new form: excessive phone calls, meeting requests, texts, and time-sensitive emails asking for decision approval or guidance on situations the team members feel are challenging.

Everyone likes to feel important and needed, and being available to your team can seem like a primary role of a manager. So it can be hard to recognize this as a problem. But in order to be agile and adaptable, companies need team members who are empowered to creatively and independently solve problems. If your team is used to running things by you and collaborating on decisions, you may be inadvertently reinforcing the idea that this is necessary or required—unintentionally disempowering your team. This dynamic pushes too many decisions to the top and creates speed-bumps and bottlenecks that are obstacles to innovation. 

Change this habit by using the phrase, “I trust your judgement.” Respond to emails with it. If your team members catch you by phone, tell them, “Actually, I can’t talk right now, but I trust your judgement.” Say the same when they request meetings with you that are outside of the regularly scheduled times you connect with your direct reports. 

Develop a cadence of weekly or twice-per-week meetings with your direct reports if you don’t already have this. But these meetings aren’t the times to collectively make decisions, solve problems, or for you to grant permission for things. Shorten meetings and make them much more efficient by using the time for your team to update you, and for you to offer constructive feedback to help them learn and grow. To do that well, consider the next step. 

2. Mentor in hindsight. 

Mentoring your team is one of your most important roles as a leader. It provides a model for good leadership that will disseminate throughout the organization. Mentoring helps you attract and keep good talent, and it helps to groom employees to advance within the organization. 

However, people learn by doing, so mentoring is less effective when advice is given on the front end than when your team members have the opportunity to experience their own successes and failures and discuss them with you later. 

Try opening scheduled one-on-one meetings with direct reports by using questions like, “What problems or challenges did you face this week? How did you deal with them? How did that work out for you?” 

This will give you an opportunity to reinforce good decisions, celebrate wins, and offer constructive, experience-based guidance when employees are stuck or make a mistake. By sharing your own lessons learned, you will inspire your team to generate new ideas, see things in different ways, and be willing to take risks.

3. Be tolerant of mistakes. 

Remember, great employees more often “quit their boss” than their organization. Neither of the ideas above will work if you don’t actually trust your team members’ judgment or if mistakes land them “in the dog house.” Create a safe environment to make mistakes by ensuring that your team understands the parameters of their responsibilities. For example, empower customer service teams to make customers happy by giving them a budget to “delight the customer.” Anything within this budget doesn’t require approval. 

Ensure employees understand the ultimate objectives of their positions, and the consequences of their actions. Then they can consider both as part of their decision-making process. If a decision falls within their responsibilities, and won’t cause irreversible damage, accept that the speed and agility that result from independent decisions is worth some potential mis-steps along the way. Mistakes are great teachers and companies that don’t take risks can’t be adaptable.

Follow the adage to “praise in public, correct in private” when a team member makes a decision in the moment that didn’t work out, provided the decision was ethical and made in good faith. Note the term “correct,” not “criticize.” Your goal is to help your direct reports learn and maintain their motivation to try new things. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt unless and until they prove they don’t deserve it. 

Speed and agility are the keys to maintaining business productivity during disruptive times. To help your organization succeed, focus your attention on your most important work, and empower your team to do the same. The suggestions above will make your organization more adaptable, help your employees grow, and allow you to unleash your own genius, creating success for you, your team, and your organization.

Forbes