Adaptability: A New Competitive Advantage

We must understand that companies don’t fail because of changes in the environment, they fail because their leaders are either unwilling or incapable of dealing with the wind of change. The leadership gets stuck in the glorious past and they are not ready to move on. To be more precise, companies don’t change, people do. Which means that need to stay competitive in today’s environment warrants not only the skill and will to adapt to change, but also the foresight to anticipate it.

However, there’s a misconception about adaptability is that to adapt, you must alter who you are at your core, which simply isn’t true. Adapting to change is what keeps us relevant, valuable and at the forefront of the competitive edge. It’s a leadership choice to remain current, but doing so doesn’t change who you are at your core. Just think of a chameleon. To survive in the lizard world, chameleons must change colors but doing so doesn’t change the fact that they’re still little green lizards.

To sustain a competitive advantage is to constantly adapt to change. Here are five ways to do so:

1. Keep Evolving

One must remember that the course of acquiring education and seeking knowledge don’t stop at the school, college or university. It’s a life-long experience. One can still learn at being work. That’s why good organisations urge their leaders and employees to participate in their continuous learning programs and don’t take that as an expense but as an investment made in their human resources.

Besides that, our internal hunger to learn every day can take us to places. Reading is one of such habits that broadens our horizon. It allows us to keep us relevant and in contact with the global developments that are taking place in our own fields or otherwise.

2. Stay Curious

Curiosity arises when there’s a gap between what you know and what you need to know to thrive, and to fuel curiosity is to keep people engaged. In the book Curious, the author Ian Leslie shares one study where subjects were seated in front of computer screens each divided into a grid of roughly fifty blank squares. When subjects clicked on a new square, a hidden image was revealed. In one group, each square revealed a different animal while in the other group only a fraction of the same animal was revealed such that once all squares were clicked, one whole animal filled the entire screen. Participants in the first group became complacent after realizing that behind each square would reveal yet another boring animal, while those in the second group continued clicking because they wanted to see the bigger picture. The bottom line is this: knowledge feeds knowledge. When you know more, you want to learn more; you want to learn how the information at hand supports your endeavour.

3. Get technophile

Imagine what could have happened to our businesses during the COVID 19 WFH regime if our employees didn’t have access to technology and information? And let’s admit the fact that gone are the days when organisations used to spend a lot of their time and energies in hiding information from the employees in the name of privacy and confidentiality. Organisational survival today heavily depends in the quick decision making as what their employees should know so that they can serve their customers in a shorter time frame.

With global dispersion and the internet of things rounding out the norms of business today, if you want to arm employees with the right information you can begin by leveraging technology. Needless to say that every new generation of employees are more technophile than the previous one.

4. Focus on the Big Picture

When people are aware of what the end state is and in what direction they need to row, they can act on their own decisions about how to win the race, thereby freeing up their leader’s time and mindshare to focus on what they can affect and effect (influence and control). To feed people’s need to know is to fuel their understanding so they can decide and act with autonomy. Here’s a quick test. Ask yourself if, in the past 24 hours, you made a decision that a direct report one or two levels below you could’ve made. If the answer is yes, then the next question is, “why?” Then, ask yourself what would that person would need to know that would provide him with the bandwidth to make more informed decisions. Clayton Christenson, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, sums it up this way: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.”

5. Working Relationships

To create a high degree of adaptability, one should develop more meaningful business relationships within and outside the organisations i.e. with internal and external stakeholders. If you’re mindful of being respectful to others or having empathy, your relationships are only bound to deepen.

In other words, when people see that you care about them and their businesses and not just what they can do to help you, you may gain more success. When you help someone without expecting anything in return, something good happens. You get goodwill returned to you. When someone has a need or sees an opportunity for you, they will think of you, so it pays to keep your professional relationships adaptable.

Ready for a Change?

Precisely, adapting to change requires flexibility. Build flexible leaders on your team with the capacity to adapt to change effectively. Now more than ever before, leaders all over the world are facing change and complexity — the ongoing pandemic has presented us all with new challenges, new circumstances, and new uncertainties. Jobs have been morphing, expanding, shrinking, and disappearing; co-workers, teammates, and technology are changing rapidly. So, lets learn to go along and get along with the changes and adapt them as these come our way.

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Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder, Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan. At Evolve HR, him and his team thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.