What is the most vital move for businesses facing challenging times?
These are great times for business and real estate. Yet, there are many who could be facing fresh challenges. What’s the number one move to make when things come up?
Fresh & Emerging Challenges for Businesses
There are virtually endless opportunities out there right now. It has never been easier to start, grow, or launch a business comeback. However, between recent record setting natural disasters, changing markets, the epic Equifax hack, new technology, and new and expanding competition, many businesses are encountering new hurdles, or could be soon. Successfully navigating these times is all about knowing what to do.
The #1 Thing
According to recent Harvard and Stanford business school research, the leading differentiating factor in resilience, being able to bounce back, and even growing in difficult times is empowering your team.
Why It Helps
There are many ways in which this can help your business survive and thrive in all types of environments.
Including:
- Flexibility
- Being able to see and act on new opportunities
- Increasing staff retention rates
- Protecting profitability
- Staying relevant
How to Empower Your Team For Success
There are a variety of ways to put this into practice. The most obvious is empowering team members to come up with their own ideas. Give them the time, and opportunity to think, research, and present them too. Generally, your team members will be far closer to the problems and potential solutions than you as the business owner or CEO. Your tech team knows what new tech solutions are being developed you might not have heard of yet. Your SEO person might have spotted new keyword trends of Google changes that you haven’t tapped into yet. Your sales team might have the best knowledge of customer hang-ups and potential tweaks to make breakthroughs. Solicit their input, and listen to it.
Then empower them to test out the best ideas. Give them the time and resources to do it. Most things can be tested in viable sizes at a modest cost. Out of 3 or 5, one should pay off way more than enough to cover those that fail. For example; it doesn’t cost much to test out several new landing pages. Then track the data. Give it a fair chance. If you don’t the fear may leave you with nothing left to save.
Decentralized management is a big part of this too. That means stepping back, getting out of your own way, and letting qualified team members run things. There has to be checks and balances, and supervision. Yet, in most cases, if you have the right team, there is far more to be gained. Let your marketing manager directly organize and run your designers, writers, and data entry assistants. Let your tech manager deal with your payment gateways, support tickets, and work directly with the marketing team, so that you aren’t slowing down the process. If you are the bottleneck for Facebook posts making it online on time, emails going out, new ads being launched, and so on; you aren’t empowering your team to help you the best they can.
As long as you have good players in the right roles, they are very clear about what you expect, and what the mission is, and it ‘just works’, this can all work with remote teams and managers. These teams can also offer built in protection for business continuity by being in different locations, and providing the ability to scale up and down more quickly.
One word of warning here; to be really empowered, team members must be given enough access and info to work with. They need to know where the numbers are now, and where you want them to be, if they are to come up with viable solutions in the most effective way. Then, they need enough access and data to see what is working, what isn’t, and how close they are to the goal posts. Otherwise they can’t serve you to their fullest potential.
So whether you see some challenges on the horizon, are in the middle of it, or just want to stay ahead of the game for the future; give some thought to how to build these concepts into your operations now.
