Building business resilience to stay ahead of the curve
This is the 12th contribution to ‘Staying Ahead of the Curve’, The Change Maker Group’s series of articles on all aspects that will help to provide you with the competitive edge. This week Vanda North looks at building business resilience.
Individual resilience is a learned behaviour and is associated with inner strength, competence, optimism, flexibility, and to be ‘bounceable’ throughout difficult times.
Business resilience is the ability to absorb stress and uncertainty, recover critical functionality and rise above the chaos. Having systems in place to manage the constant change in now a mandatory feature.
Building business resilience requires attention to these six attributes:
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Collaboration:
This means across silos – if you still have them – and across any previously perceived boundaries. Sharing resources, preventing the waste of time and efforts on unnecessarily duplicating information, or procedures.
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Team formation:
Who is needed in this team to complete the task? Do you know the potential business impact of each team member so they may be used to their greatest effectiveness? At The Change Maker Group, we have a profiling tool that shows the strengths of each person to custom-build a change-ready resilient team and business.
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Communication:
One of the greatest eradicators of business resilience is a lack of clear, transparent, constructive, and respectful communication. This is not a natural skill for all people. The Change Maker Group (TCMG) has another profile we use to dramatically improve understanding and communication. This tool also improves even with those ‘difficult’ conversations. Engaging, influencing, and supporting fellow workers and stakeholders builds business resilience.
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Malleability:
Can your business ‘touch its toes’? When I ask people to try to perform this act, many find their toes are far away. However, that is because they think they have to bend at the waist. The ones who are flexible in thought, will bring the knee up, or squat down, or sit down, or… Check how adaptable your business is.You may achieve the same result by several methods.
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Culture:
Does your business have a culture that allows for mistakes and failure? If not, you have a greatly reduced business resilience. Building on good communications and malleability is to have a culture that understands ‘accidents will happen’. Quickly accepting them, learning from them, and adjusting swiftly are crucial. Because having responsibility rather than blame as a part of the culture is also imperative.
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Change model:
Simon Philips, the founder of The Change Maker Group, created an iterative model called D.E.L.T.A. for the management of the constant change process. This is an acronym for Diagnose; Engage; Lead; Transform and Accelerate. When all your employees know this process, they can positively contribute to the change occurring.
So, how resilient is your business?
Therefore performing an assessment based on these six attributes will quickly provide you with the awareness of if you need to build your business resilience. Why not conduct a brief survey of all your staff to see what they think? Further, when you asked them, it will heighten their attentiveness to what they could do for the business resilience, and also their own, may need to be shored up.
In conclusion, building your business’s resilience will allow you to:
– make the most of any unexpected changes
– be ready and empowered to not only survive but thrive
– decrease stress
– become sustainable and
– create a competitive advantage and
– therefore when all staff members know their contribution to the change process and have the mindset of being a Change Maker you can enjoy ‘change-proofing’ your business.
At The Change Maker Group, we have many professional change resilience experts, please call us to see how we might be able to assist you to build your business resilience.
Vanda North is a founder of The Change Maker Group and their in-house resilience leader. Please contact her at here.
And to set up a discussion with us please set up a call here.
Also, Vanda has recorded a 2 minute summary of her article. Watch it here..
