Everything flows. Everything changes. Time never stands still. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued as much over two millennia ago, and we see proof of the validity of the statement every day. The world feels particularly fluid today, but if you look back over the past 20, 30 years, you’ll find plenty of economic, technological, and political disruptions that forced businesses to adapt or die, from the rise of ecommerce and the decline of brick and mortar stores to the economic crisis of 2008 to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The business world is rarely in a state of equilibrium, and what works today might not work tomorrow. Reacting to change is an uphill climb; change is so much easier to deal with if you’re ready for it before it happens. You can’t predict the future, but you can be ready for it. You don’t know when a car accident is going to happen, for example, so you prepare yourself by buying insurance, following the rules of the road, wearing a seatbelt, and driving a car with modern safety features so you can avoid spending months in the hospital recovering from an accident.
We talk a lot about resilience these days. It’s a characteristic that seems to be lacking in a lot of people. It seems that too many of us break down at the first sign of stress, too caught up in the present painful moment to believe that there is a way out and to gather the strength to find it. But what we see as a personal failure is actually systemic: the support systems that allow for resilience just aren’t there. To build a resilient business, you have to develop resilient processes. When the processes are there to support them, people will rise to the occasion, not collapse under stress.
Develop a Growth Mindset
People with a growth mindset understand that we can learn and grow, that intelligence and competence is not fixed, that we’re not stuck with the knowledge we have right now. A mistake doesn’t mean you’re incompetent. It just means that you haven’t learned something yet. Every year we have to learn new skills and adapt to new situations. It would be great if we could learn some stuff in college, and then apply that same knowledge in the same way and coast through work day after day for the next 40 years. (Actually, that sounds kind of boring!) But we can’t do things that way. Every year brings new challenges, but with a growth mindset, we’re ready to face them and learn from them.
A growth mindset means seeing change as an opportunity, not a threat. It means being opportunistic. That word has a negative connotation, and it is certainly a bad thing if you take a hurricane as an opportunity to double the prices on generators. But what we mean by being opportunistic is reframing existential threats to your business as opportunities to grow in unforeseen ways, to do something no one else is doing.
Build Resilience Into Your Operations
As with so many cultural changes, simply wanting employees to have a growth mindset does not make it so. Build that mindset into your business by offering opportunities for training and professional development and make learning something new a performance metric. When learning is an expectation, you’re on your way to building a culture of continuous improvement. A culture of continuous improvement is one that is always looking to make processes more efficient and effective even when they’re already working, with built-in mechanisms for testing new ideas, evaluating their effectiveness, and implementing the best ones.
Avoid a Single Point of Failure
What happens when the only employee who understands your accounting spreadsheets or knows how to maintain a certain machine suddenly quits? Resilient businesses don’t depend on just one person to always be there to handle something. To avoid this trap, identify the skills or knowledge that only one person in the company has. Can you distribute that knowledge to other employees? This question extends to the owner of the business, too. Can the business run without you? What will it take for the business to be able to carry on in your absence? This is a vital question to answer if you intend for your business to keep going even after you retire, and it’s one you should be able to answer today, not thirty years down the line. It’s never too early to start succession planning. (To learn more about succession planning, check out this article.)
Together, We Can Build Resilient Systems and Processes
Resilience isn’t just an individual character trait. Even the most resilient individual needs a support system that can help them keep going through the toughest times. To build a resilient workforce, develop strategy with resilience in mind. The right strategy, goals, metrics, and processes will help you develop a culture of continuous improvement and instill a growth mindset in your employees. When resilience is part of your business DNA, you’ll be ready for whatever the future will bring.
