Beyond
As the Government looks to tighten and relax measures over the coming months, leaders will be looking to what happens in tandem with these rules and how they can start to plan for a new ‘business as usual’ and adapt to other socio-economic factors. Resilience has a key role to play here, in that businesses will need to be confident in their structure and operations to allow them to remain agile to shifting COVID-19 restrictions at a moment’s notice, while keeping an eye on the long-term.
Considering what the future holds is perhaps the key facet of leadership. However, COVID-19 has made doing so more challenging than ever before. Predicting the impact of emerging trends in societal behaviour post-COVID, technology’s disruption and entering new sectors will all increase in importance through 2021.
It is especially dangerous if businesses assume that life post-lockdown will return to what it once was. Leaders need to be asking themselves how their business can adapt to working in a ‘new normal’ whilst staying true to their company’s purpose. A further consideration is how to train staff in the skills needed in the future at a time when it’s harder to collaborate than ever. Or how they can establish strategic relationships with other businesses effectively, at a time when it’s difficult to build new relationships. It is important that every investment and business development opportunity must be meticulously balanced with considerations around current and future cash availability.
To truly think “Beyond” COVID, leaders must remain alert to the fact that crises of this scale can happen and will require a built-in resilience across their organisation. The difficulty many leaders are facing is the sheer fatigue they and their staff feel when managing this constant change. The good news is that many businesses feel more confident in making major changes now – they’ve proven to themselves that they can act quickly because COVID-19 forced them to.
Create a resiliency culture through learning
A great deal of economic pain has been felt in the UK, with more still to come. Amid this, a new cohort of resilient business leaders are rising to the challenge. These leaders will have developed a tenacity that equips them, and their businesses, with the ability to survive and even thrive in the “new normal”.
Embedding this resilient approach across organisations will be key. Just as we heard in Episode 2 of Real Insights, this requires a culture that is open to learning from past mistakes and events and it is vital that all employees appreciate the importance of their role because resilience is very much in their hands.