Build Back Better – Why building business resilience has never been so important

The past few years have presented enormous challenges to our SME community. From issues relating to Covid, to a war in Europe, and the disruption of supply chains. All set against a backdrop of rising inflation and increasing energy costs.

You might say we are living with a ‘new normal’ - one that requires businesses to shift their mindset from ‘survival’ to ‘growth’ and use their ingenuity and agility to respond to significant and varied changes within their markets.

Implicit to this is the ability to cultivate resilience - driven not only by crisis but also by opportunity. Our starting point is recognising that creating a culture of business resilience is not an end state of being, but rather a process of adaptation and growth within a risky landscape.

When challenges emerge, leaders of SMEs must be able to assess the situation, reorient themselves, double down on what’s working, and walk away from what’s not.

The following five steps are important in creating a resilient culture within your business:

1. Live in your reality – Adopting an accepting outlook ensures that you will have the mental and emotional energy to lead effectively. Resilient leaders learn how to face their fears. This broadens the range of possibilities and choices available - while failure to face fear is highly constricting. View change as a positive, and an opportunity to revaluate and reposition, challenge the status quo and continually ask, “how can we improve”?
2. Define your purpose - By creating a mission charter (or strategy) for the business and communicating the plans to others, leaders can encourage a strong attachment to that course of action. When the mission is strong and clear, employees view their work as significant, which will improve job satisfaction, reduce job turnover and allows the business to overcome adversity more readily.
3. Become comfortable with flexibility – View challenges or disruptions as opportunities rather than burdens. Resilient leaders need to be flexible in their approach to problem solving and coping with unexpected challenges. Flexible strategies might include active problem solving, accepting that which cannot be changed, knowing how to learn and adjust from failure, and searching for opportunity in adversity.
4. Process failures and celebrate achievements – Gain a strong understanding of self to successfully guide others through times of change and uncertainty. Through self-reflection and feedback from peers, leaders can identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their motivational drivers, and approach challenges with a keen sense of emotional intelligence.
5. Building a strong supportive team – Assemble teams with broad expertise and problem-solving capabilities and defer to others’ expertise when necessary. Build accountable and empowered self-sufficient teams. Incorporate pre-mortems, post-mortems and other feedback loops and mechanisms so that they have the information they need to continually change course or innovate.