Businesses shouldn’t wait for things to get back to normal

Business shouldn’t wait for things to get back to normal, but rather accept this new normal and implement strategies accordingly.

Most Companies would have started their year with an exciting business plan and stretch targets/ objectives geared to how 2020 was meant to go. The UAE had been working tirelessly to build the infrastructure required for the highly anticipated event of the decade, Expo 2020. Business in the UAE was planned to be booming with much needed growth.

However, when a global pandemic is announced, any business plan would have been placed in a drawer as businesses had to immediately react to lockdown, remote working and often placing the business into survival mode.

As the world starts to emerge from lockdown and Companies start opening their doors again to their Employees and customers, a mistake that managers could make is to assume the business plan and objectives they had set are still relevant and to try and carry on as business as usual, forgetting they have pivoted, that this way of life is the new normal and we have to learn to live and work with the restrictions that are here for many months to come.

With this in mind, now is the perfect time to regroup your senior management team and get focused on some creative strategic thinking underway. We have found that CEOs or MDs who sit down weekly, for a couple of hours, with their key 5 to 7 senior executives and look beyond the current year creates a very positive mindset amongst themselves and the rest of the company as the vision filters throughout the organisation.

This also allows the executive team to keep a close eye on emerging trends, something that will be vital as the world emerges from the worst loss of GDP in history. The speed of change is now showing itself to be vital for businesses to recognise that it is imperative to avoid procrastination as every day counts as we restart the economy locally and globally.

It is the local Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) that form a huge percentage of country’s economy, often more that 95%, that will be the foundation of our recovery. The leaders of these businesses must pivot, adapt and scale their operations now.

In addition to the operational management changes required to move business now from a survival period to a thriving one, the effective leadership

The definition of leadership that has served me well over the years, was the one gifted to me by Dr. Paul Hersey, the founder of the Situational Leadership model and is that leadership is “any attempt to influence”.

Note the word attempt as you will not always be successful in your endeavours to influence (lead) others. As the only way that you can influence any one is through your behaviours, it is those that must be developed to be able to become a more effective influencer or leader.

This becomes even more critical when we are leading remote teams where a high percentage of face to face interaction is lost through the computer screen, so being a master of using your influence behaviours will serve you very well in these challenging times.

We have witnessed, on many occasions, that those leaders that work at becoming more effective in the use of their influencing behaviours are not only more rounded and effective leaders, their team also follow the shadow of the leader and become more able to deal with the new way of working with such conditions that we find ourselves in right now.

Finally, you may have a great strategic plan developed through your senior executive team, you may also have a company full of rock star A-Players but if you haven’t got a solid execution roadmap to deliver your plan, all that great work will be to no avail as worse results and missed targets just drive moral and performance down the doom cycle.

To prevent that happening, we have found that companies that have a very clear execution plan in place, that is regularly measured, reviewed and altered when necessary consistently outperform other similar companies. Also, it is key that your execution of these priorities is in line with the core values of the company. In times of crisis, such we are in, it is very tempting to take a course that will steer you away from the true essence of the company in the quest for a quicker and easier win. Now is the time where many company’s core values are being tested to the limit and it is those that stick to these guiding principles that will survive and continue to thrive and scale.

The second key element in your execution plan should be to ensure that you are measuring the correct business indicators to build confidence that the plan is working and also to drive accountability through the organisation with celebrations and consequences depending on the state of each indicator. Ideally these indicators should be a mixture of forward looking, predictive numbers and historical results.

The final element to an effective execution plan is having a robust and motivating internal communication strategy in place to drive faster and more effective decision making throughout the organisation. The pandemic has driven us all to look at how we communicate and when we should do it.

Some have reported that communication has increased during lockdown, that may be true, my question is always why that is and how effective is it?

Quite often the answer has been “Well, I need to keep an eye on them as they’re working from home!”

Having a transparent, repeatable meeting rhythm in place has been proven time and time again to be the most effective way of keeping everyone informed and building trust, something that is key when your team members are remotely working.

To achieve this, there are three components that need to be in place. The first is to ensure that the whole organisation is focused on no more than 3 to 5 key priorities at any one time, this avoids the bright shiny object tendency of some leaders and ensures that the whole of the company’s resources is pulling in the same direction. It is also important that these priorities, So, don’t wait for normal to return, it’s not coming any time soon, if at all.

Instead take this opportunity to pivot, adapt, thrive and scale your business operations and leadership skills and build a new plan making sure to execute it well.