I was riding the 10 bus on the way to work this morning and saw this advertisement on a newsstand: “Agility moves you forward … when it comes to the twists and turns of enterprise recruiting.”
Working at a startup, I could relate to the twists and turns. And the word agility caught my attention because of what I’ve written before about sprinting. But the benefits gained from sprinting don’t count for much if you blow through your stop and cause more damage than the value you created from working fast during the sprint.
I think it comes down to the type of work you’re doing. In one of my previous sales roles, the sale and the client didn’t change much day-to-day. There was a seemingly endless list of leads and the only metric for success was how many of those leads you could contact and close.
In a more management-style role, like the one I’m in now, and especially a role at a startup where everything is more dynamic than a larger company, there is a high frequency of decision-making—whether that is establishing a new script for your sales team to adopt when onboarding, building a separate pipeline in your CRM for a new marketing channel, or training a new member of the team.
If you go into a day full of these decisions with the SPRINT mentality, then you’re likely to build up too much steam on one project and miss a pivot when returns on your time are greater in another part of your organization.
I’m not sure what exactly the creator of the recruiting advertisement had in mind, but this seems to be where AGILITY comes in — the ability to make those pivots at a ninety-degree angle (and sometimes one-eighty) like an NFL wide receiver turns on a dime on 10-yard out route.
In summary, there are generally two modes: execution and decision-making. When you’re executing, the key is to keep your head down and move as fast as possible without making mistakes and without getting distracted. When making decisions, you have to keep your head up so you can turn in the right direction and at the right time—and then it’s right back to sprinting.
It’s a little like calculus: you’re on the second order of things, rather than picking one rate and running along the linear line, you’re determining the rate of the rate of change, and hopefully you have a rockstar execution team to run along that line for you.
There is a certain frequency of decision-making where your ability to be agile becomes more important than your ability to sprint, because you’re making those turns and pivots often enough that there’s not a lot of time to pick up speed on any one task. Instead, your speed comes from how fast you make decisions (and how many of those decisions are the right decision).