Business today, is filled with countless threats and adversities; sudden government policy changes, terrorism, migration, extreme competition, irrational clients or customers, and even natural disasters.
All of these exist apart from the pandemic of COVID-19 that has come to disrupt the way business is being done!
Happenings and changes that have the potentials of putting organizations out of business are now more common than ever. Aside business, global warming is threating to wipe us all out from the face of earth. The complexities and adversities are now regular.
Despite all these devastating odds, some businesses are thriving and flourishing while many more are failing and dying.
Why are some organizations more successful in coping with and responding effectively to the complexity, volatility, and uncertainties of the current business climate? Why do some organizations, facing adversity, get engrossed in the negative, while others successfully seize the opportunity to adapt and progress?
The explanation for this lies in ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE!
What is Organizational Resilience?
Organizational resilience refers to the ability of organizations to foresee, prepare for, successfully combat, and then emerge stronger from adversity. It is the characteristic possessed by organizations that enables them to, not only pass the test of time, but also remain relevant in their industry and thrive.
The threats and adversities in the business world today are huge and often hard to tackle. Many organizations are thrown off balance once they are hit by these adversities; some organizations manage to survive; but only few organizations flourish after a major setback or adversity.
Organizational resilience is not only about bouncing back from a setback, it is about bouncing forward.
In the face of adversity, say a major economic crisis, organizations are tested strongly as to their ability to keep going after the challenge. The internet bubble saw to the creation of hundreds of tech startups in Silicon Valley. Every entrepreneur wanted to start an Internet company; every investor wanted to invest in the tech companies because of the perceived high income. However, when the bubble burst, hundreds of companies closed doors and investors lost big time. Only a few companies managed to scale through the crisis. One of these companies is PayPal. PayPal survived the dot com boom and even flourished afterwards, despite being a company that had had a lot of failures in its early years. This post-crisis success is due to the resilience instilled into the organizations by the founders and leaders. They could understand that despite the unfriendly nature of things, there were chances for them to succeed. With this mindset, they pushed through the crisis and emerged extremely successful. In just four months, PayPal’s subscribers shot up from 10000 to a million.
HOW TO BUILD A RESILIENT ORGANISATION
Resilience in organizations is demonstrated most when challenges arise. It is the organizations approach to these challenges that determines their level of resilience. Business leaders are increasingly aware that organizational resilience will help them build their businesses and protect their continuing performance. Companies recognize the need to be resilient but only few have a clearly defined strategy that is utilized whenever their resilience is tested.
Resilience can be built in organizations in the following ways:
- Change how you approach adversities.
When setbacks come, organizations can react in two ways.
a) Defensive reaction
b) Progressive reaction.
In most cases of adversity, organizations react defensively, by trying to stop bad things from happening. Organizations that make use of defensive reactions in responding to adversity take mindful on-the-spot actions by trying everything possible to solve the crisis from having devastating effects on the organization or take preventative control by taking actions to prevent the occurrences of adversity.
Progressive reaction, on the other hand, seeks, not only to stop bad things from happening, but to also make good things happen.
Organizations react progressively by optimizing their current performance – by improving their products, enhancing their services, etc. – or taking adaptive innovation – by investing in new market, pioneering new fields and way of doing things. Progressive reaction to adversity will improve the resilience of your organization.
2. Play the infinite game.
Simon Sinek, in his book ‘The Infinite Game’, emphasizes the need for organizations to play with an infinite mindset. For organizations to be resilient, they must have goals that are beyond just hitting a financial target, or increasing client base, or being the number 1 in the industry.
Every organization that will thrive in the face of setbacks and remain resilient should have a ‘just cause’ that they are pursuing. Something that is beyond the numbers and can serve as a catalyst to propel action, even when the odds are against success!
3. Value your employees.
The way you treat your employees is the way they treat your clients. When your employees have the feeling that they are valued and safe in the organization, they will be willing to put in their sweat, blood, and tears to keep pushing through the adversity. Every great company that survived a major adversity did so by the power of their employees, combined with other factors.
You should value your employees if you want to build an organization that will thrive during and after adversities.
- Celebrate small wins.
Define winning to include making progress and not only when the job gets finally done.
When everyone understands that as much as they must get their jobs done as an organisation, but that sometimes things do go wrong even after hard work and doing things right, they are more receptive to accepting failure as part of the learning process. They are also able to cope better during challenging times and this goes a long way in building individual and ultimately Organisational Resilience.
- Keep working on developing very resilient workers that will make up a resilient workforce!
The way to achieve this is to keep developing your workers’ Emotional Intelligence. Trainings, coaching, activities and engagements that will challenge their Emotional Intelligence will help grow their resilience.
