Resilience is the ability to adapt and bounce back when things don’t go as planned. Today, small businesses have no choice but to move quickly—whether to enable remote working, rewrite procedures and policies, mitigate new risks, develop new lines of communication, or find new ways to serve customers who are going through the same adjustments and emotions.
To effectively pivot, business owners and CEOs have been required to make decisions and take actions they never anticipated and for which they had little-to-no training. New safety protocols had to be established. Workspaces had to be redesigned. Inventory, supply chains, and distribution channels had to be reassessed and often reconfigured. And yet, as often happens, a pressurized environment has produced unexpected side benefits. As leaders pushed through uncertainty, they let go of old assumptions that hindered change, sought innovative ideas, accelerated problem-solving, and thus paved the way for a whole new approach to leading and managing their businesses.
Barriers that once inhibited change have been smashed, opening the door to improved productivity, greater agility, more meaningful collaboration, and a renewed sense of pride and purpose.
Whatever the future holds, effective leaders recognize that resilience, flexibility, and adaptation are critical to building a sustainable business. While they know they face new business challenges ahead, the lessons they’ve learned will help them manage through that uncertainty, including:
- Barriers to boldness and speed are more about mindsets than about technical difficulties or talent.
- It’s possible to set and achieve bold aspirations.
- Problem-solving is accelerated by inclusion and building on one another’s ideas.
- Businesses are both interconnected and interdependent on employees, customers, suppliers, the community, and society as a whole.
- The more human leaders are with employees, the more trust and empathy they lend to you, giving you the ability to accomplish even more.
- There’s advantage in adversity if you accept and adjust to new realities.
