How Leaders Can Prepare for Business Disruption
Disruptions are everywhere, and occur when you least expect them. Whether it is the entry of new competitors, mergers, new technology, or policy changes, disruptions can have far-reaching implications on your business. As a leader, how you navigate your organization during times of change is what determines its success or not. Here are useful tips to help you prepare for business disruptions.
Go for Non-Linear Leadership Approach
Many businesses, managers and planers prefer the linear-approach to management, which assume that things will continue evolving forward smoothly. But this linear approach only works well when there are no disruptions. Disruptions are in most cases unexpected and often throw linear-based organizations and their operations off-balance.
Because you cannot control the disruptions, you need to be ready to advantage over it. As a leader, you need to be prepared to capitalize on disruptions and ride on it to take the enterprise to a higher level. This implies being flexible enough to pivot towards optimal company outcome. The moment a disruption hits the market, analyze it quickly and identify opportunities. Then, change promptly and race ahead of competitors.
Design a Reliable System for Making Quick Decisions
In many organizations, decision making is a process that takes some time. While this is crucial since it allows you to include all the factors necessary to drawing the best decision, disruptions require a change of strategy. In many cases, disruptions require you to make urgent decisions. To do this, you should have the following:
- Ensure that leaders in the organization have the right skills. This means they can easily identify the areas that need urgent changes to respond to the disruptions in the market.
- Instead of waiting to convene a meeting in the boardroom, you need to be able to use the latest technology for urgent meet-ups. For example, the CEO should be able to hold a video conference with different directors, even if they are far away, to authorize actions such as the release of funds for a prompt response.
Focus on Good Enough and Not Ideal
Disruptions, especially the complex ones, often leave leaders with limited options for action. Therefore, you must be ready to work with what is good enough and not target the ideal. Also you need to be ready to communicate to your community, especially clients, showing them how you are moving forward towards a new system. For example, if a mining system, as shown here, experiences disruptions from a competitor with new products, you can communicate to clients telling them about the changes you are installing for quality improvement.
When disruptions happen, the implications can be catastrophic. But you can use the tips we have highlighted above to prepare for disruptions in order to reduce their impact and emerge a better brand.
