How does resilience help a company grow?

How does resilience help a company grow?

Uncertainty, energy crises, accelerating inflation and increased ESG compliance requirements not only were of no help, but shook the business world still reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

These disruptions cannot be dealt with in isolation from one another, as they emerge and reverberate through the fragile economic ecosystem, but one aspect is already essential to achieving sustainable growth: resilience.

Resilience is the key to long-term growth

Companies must continue to build resilience to enable long-term growth. At the organizational level, resilience is understood as the company’s ability to cope with adversity, withstand shocks and continuously adapt when disruptions and crises occur.

From the point of view of employee management, in order to cope with the increasingly intense economic changes, companies will have to have a decentralized approach to decision-making and a leadership model that cultivates individual talent and autonomous teams.

At the same time, the economy of the future imposes the need to learn new skills and forces companies to invest in training to compensate for the gap between the current skills in the labor market and those required by companies undergoing change.

Speed and agility support the ability to change

Both speed and agility are now required for businesses, as emerging disruptions require rapid changes in strategic direction and resource allocation, while organizations with their cumbersome processes and structures are often too rigid to respond effectively.

To overcome these challenges, business leaders must decide to invest in organizational resilience, matching the talent in the company with the agile strategy. This is a proven way to create value. Resilient organizations absorb shocks and turn them into opportunities, “moving forward” in times of crisis.

Important directions for building organizational resilience

To build resilience organizations must act in a number of directions, as follows:

1) Promoting agility

Agile organizations rely on decentralized decision-making and autonomous teams. They can quickly respond to disruptions by testing, learning and adjusting a solution. They may follow slower processes of planning and control, but the initial work can be done in rapid cycles of exploration, execution and learning.

That is why a more flexible structure is needed to allocate the company’s employees. This can be developed through skills mapping to identify needs and reallocate the right people as priorities change.

2) Training adaptable leaders

Organizations need to develop leaders who can easily overcome their one-dimensional reactions when faced with crises. Leaders have the role of inspiring, supporting and unlocking the potential of other people in the team.

It takes leaders who can embrace paradox and ambiguity while taking the time to listen and coach team members. That’s why companies need to have long-term collaborations with training and coaching firms to implement complex programs to transform leadership skills.

3) Supporting diversity

Inclusive and diverse workforce and leadership teams foster creative ideas and encourage the ability to question, change and think differently. These are valuable capabilities that help organizations adapt and emerge from crises or unstable times.

The most diverse organizations perform significantly better than the least diverse. The complementarity of competences, the variety of points of view, the ability to work together across the differences of perspectives are strengths that must be supported, appreciated and trained.

4) Continuous development of skills

Taking a long-term view of team management, companies should invest in hiring, developing and retaining employees more effectively.

Organizations should also invest in upgrading and reskilling their existing workforce, decisions that allow for flexibility to augment the capabilities and capital needed in a volatile environment.

It is important that the company’s Learning & Development function benefits from both specialized people and relevant technologies for long-term sustainable results.

In conclusion

As the needs of companies evolve with technological and business changes, resilience becomes essential for sustainable growth. Teams that focus on building resilience based on leaders’ decisions can create a virtuous circle of improvement: an adaptive organizational environment will attract the talent they need, and they will be better positioned to successfully deal with disruptions and turn them into opportunities for growth. growth.