With a new political dispensation in the United States and upcoming elections in Canada, business leaders need to navigate their organization through changing political and socio-economic realities.  

Is your business change resilience?

Change resilience refers to an organization’s ability to adapt, recover and thrive during periods of disruption. In general, change resilience involves the ability to build a proactive mindset, fostering agility in operations while embedding flexibility to allow your business to pivot based on new market realities.

How do you build a change resilient business?

Let’s look at some practical steps you can take as a leader to build change resilience in your business:

Build strong visionary leadership

Uncertain times require strong and ethical leaders that can guide key stakeholders such as employees, customers, vendors and shareholders through changing market conditions. Strong leadership doesn’t refer to charismatic autocratic leaders but leaders that can be trusted and followed even when times get tough.

Action:

  • Measure the current leadership effectiveness across your business
  • Identify areas for improvement to build better leadership capabilities
  • Implement improvements and continuously engage the business on progress

Share a clear vision and strategic roadmap

By clearly articulating your company’s vision and strategy, leaders create more clarity around the future of the business. When strategies are aligned across business functions, delivery can more easily be adjusted when market conditions change.

Action:

  • Cascade your overall strategy across business functions to ensure alignment between priorities
  • At business function level, unpack business strategies into clear plans with deliverables and accountabilities
  • Communicate and engage your employees continuously on the company vision, strategies and delivery progress

Implement robust risk management

Scenario planning can help businesses prepare for a range of potential outcomes while reducing the impact and response time to changing market events. Risk management includes active monitoring of external factors such as regulatory changes, market responses, technology and other operational disruptions.

Action:

  • Introduce scenario planning as part of your business planning cycles
  • Define risk management plans with key flags and criteria that will trigger a business response or change in direction
  • Allocate business risk management responsibilities to executive team and ensure frequent updates and feedback as part of standing meetings

Drive operational effectiveness

There is nothing like looming market turmoil to drive business optimization. Review core and supporting business functions for opportunities to improve and innovate. Understand what competitors and other industries are doing to drive business optimization. Monetize opportunities and rank based on business value to ensure critical areas are addressed first.

Action:

  • Engage employees and other key stakeholders such as vendors and customers on bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement and innovation
  • Monetize identified opportunities and rank based on business value
  • Drive delivery of short-, medium- and longer-term improvements against targets with frequent feedback to key stakeholders

Apply technological for adaptability

By exploring the application of technologies, the digital transformation of your business can ensure it becomes more adaptable in the face of changing market conditions. Leveraging technology to automate processes, enhance decision-making and enable operations strengthens resilience.

Action:

  • Assess and align your current IT landscape against its ability to deliver against immediate and future business strategies
  • Identify opportunities to reduce the IT landscape complexity, costs and dependencies
  • Review and reallocate IT budget between maintenance vs operations vs innovation

Create an agile organization

Organizational effectiveness refers to the ability of your business to deliver against defined goals while achieving targets. A big part of business delivery is determined by the effectiveness of organisational structures and employee performance. Change resilient businesses have more flexible structures, lower hierarchies and high focus on performance.

Action:

  • Assess effectiveness of the organization to deliver current and future strategies
  • Review resource allocation to functions in terms of funding, innovation and head count
  • Engage employees to identify areas for improvement in their functions, teams and jobs, including work handovers between functions
  • Monetize proposed opportunities and rank based on business value

Develop highly engaged employees

Engaged employees are more likely to embrace change, become change resilient and contribute to innovative solutions. Employee engagement is planned and structured approach to managing staff. It requires open communication, recognition, career and personal growth opportunities.

Action:

  • Measure your employee engagement levels frequently
  • Identify and drive opportunities to increase employee engagement across your business
  • Embed employee engagement as part of business culture and operations

In conclusion, developing a change resilient organization requires action and commitment from the management team. It asks leadership to look at itself and develop change resilient capabilities themselves and the organization. As these capabilities are built, they become part of the way of working and culture of an organization.

Written by Phil Lotter, Piilo Consulting

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