The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses across all industries around the world has made resilience more relevant and necessary today. A resilient leader knows how to make tough decisions for the organization and also to reach out to the team to address their changing needs. Resilience involves developing critical skills entrepreneurs need so that they can get back on their feet despite the crisis and make the necessary changes to overcome the challenges faced by their businesses.
Read on to learn the critical skills entrepreneurs need must have to stay resilient in the new normal.
7 Critical Skills Entrepreneurs Need to Become Resilient
Remote Team Management
Many workplaces abruptly adapted to a remote work arrangement, and it looks like remote work will be here for the long run. But remote work doesn’t just involve giving company laptops and internet connections to employees.
Remote work also involves recreating necessary workplace interactions and practices to encourage productivity. Why conduct an entire video conference when you could just send an email? Talk to your team about appropriate work hours to set a healthy work-life boundary even if everyone is working from home. No one should be made to respond to a work-related call when they’re about to have dinner.
Likewise, 60% of employees really value flexibility about when they work. For example, parents who are working from home may need more time to care for their children. So you can consider offering flexible remote work hours but still setting core hours if your team needs to meet up online for collaboration.
Cultural Intelligence
The companies that can quickly recover from any crisis are often the ones that have leaders who value resilience. A resilient organization designs its business structures and operations to ensure that it can accomplish its needs and meet its goals despite a crisis.
But such a perspective requires a cultural shift that starts at the top of management. Key decision-makers need to start the cultural shift and craft policies that align with the new needs brought about by COVID-19.
Entrepreneurs with business leadership degrees have an advantage. A business school teaches critical skills entrepreneurs need such as crisis management and resilience which you can hone once you start your own business.
If you’re a team leader, it’s your duty to foster a work culture of open communication among your employees. Encourage your team to speak up, ask questions, bring up potential problems, and offer suggestions in order to become resilient in the organization.
Effective Communication
Communication is a two-way street. A good business leader knows how to listen to the needs of their employees and clients and to explain any new company processes and policies.
When you know how to listen, you get to notice details that others may have missed. You may even use this information to your advantage in order to communicate the needs of employees to upper management and even to your customers. Learn to communicate clearly, coherently, and concisely.
Good communication skills allow you to express yourself in order to ask for what you want from all major stakeholders in the company. No one wants to add to the confusion of the pandemic by offering unclear requests or instructions. Lack of communication may result in wasted resources, and waste is something businesses are avoiding during a crisis.
Shippo shares informative posts for small businesses coping with COVID-19.
Project Management
Remote work raises issues of productivity loss among employees. But that doesn’t have to be the case. You need to communicate with your team and come up with clear definitions of organizational productivity.
As you provide your team with the tools and work hours they need to accomplish their goals, you should also determine the targets you need to achieve for a specific timeline. Workplace productivity tools like Trello, Slack, or the office suites from Google or Microsoft help you keep track of and monitor your team’s productivity.
Make the most of tools that let you save templates and processes, such as survey templates when onboarding new customers or clients or automation processes from apps like Zapier. This saves you the precious time you could be using to grow your business and do work that really moves the needle.
Risk Assessment
Business leaders are all too familiar with risk, since starting your own business is a risk in itself. How you view a difficult situation can worsen the crisis worse or minimize it.
That’s why risk assessment is another one of the critical skills entrepreneurs need to stay resilient in the new normal. You should conduct a business risk assessment to determine the core functions and key players in your business. This way, you will have a better understanding of the state of your business during the crisis.
Which parts are most affected? What opportunities can you seize to meet the changing demands of customers? How can you adjust work to benefit your staff and your customers?
A resilient business leader doesn’t panic during a crisis. Identify the things that you can control and take decisive action toward addressing these problems.
Trend and Data Analysis
Customer needs are changing during the crisis. It’s natural that people who are stuck at home may need things to keep them occupied and entertained at home.
Searches for sanitation products, news sources, and food recipes increased but travel and tourism searches dropped.By keeping track of industry trends during the pandemic, you can stay on top of growing SEO trends for 2021 as well and use this data to your advantage. You should plan out your marketing strategy and target trending terms to drive traffic to your website.
Time Management
Another one of the critical skills entrepreneurs need to build resilience is knowing how to respond quickly and to adapt rapidly to a disruption in your business. Plus, you must also know what decisions to make in order to restore your business to a stable functioning state. It’s not resilience if it takes you too long to adjust and make decisions, much to the loss of the organization and employees.
Key Takeaways
The good news is, every business leader can learn how to be resilient when their organization faces a crisis. Even if you lead a small team, you need to step into the role of the adaptive and forward-facing CEO. Follow the tips above to polish up your entrepreneurial skills and keep your business surviving and also thriving.