You need a lot of “R” words in your world: Rest, recovery, recuperation, remuneration, reason, and resourcefulness – to name a few.
Above all the most important R you need for yourself and your business is resilience.
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty; toughness.
Resilience is your business’s ability to spring back into shape after an unexpected impact; elasticity.
Resilience means being able to spring forward and adapt to changing conditions without losing sight of your core mission and values.
Resilience is more important than any contingency plan – because you need to have thought of something to have a contingency plan for it.
When the unexpected happens your resilience is like the shock absorber that allows you to get through the pothole without damaging the car.
Here are the 4 things you can do to make your business more resilient so you are prepared for the next disruption:
1) Think Differently.
You won’t be able to solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s solutions. Take a hard look at what happened, why, and have the courage to treat the root cause – not the symptom.
Stay aware of what is going on around you – inside your business, with your people, your customers, suppliers, and in your local and regional markets.
Challenge your assumptions and question the information you’re getting. It is very easy to get locked into a set of ‘facts’ that support your worldview – especially with how we are consuming news these days.
2) Stay Pragmatically Positive
A negative mindset is contagious – and if you are negative you will be proven right. You will also be proven right if you choose to be positive that what you are facing is temporary, that you’ve overcome obstacles before and can do it again.
Face the brutal facts, focus on what you can learn and stay in positive action.
3) Get Up. Again. Again. Again, and Again.
Anthony Robbins asks a very powerful question: “How many chances did you give your child to learn to walk? When did you tell them to just give up?”
Falling down is not a failure. Failure is refusing to get up. You will get knocked down again over and over again. Get up. Keep going. Learn and adapt.
4) Create a Circle of Safety In Your Organization
Uncertainty leads to fear. It is a primal reaction. Fear makes people freeze up, fight with one another, or run away.
Your job as a leader is to create a circle of relative safety in your organization.
This will help you and your people think differently, stay positive, and try new things.
When they try new things they will fail.
Celebrate those failures as learning opportunities and keep going.