Leading business out of the Covid economy
Written by Martin Nicholson, MD of Proaction HR, who has 15+ years of experience working with senior management teams and commercial clients, in the UK and internationally. A Prince 2 practitioner, change facilitator, and qualified performance coach, he specialises in values/vision, senior-level objectives, and strategic goal alignment and has a strong desire to place people at the forefront of a business’s success and realize opportunities for efficiency and better practice.
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You have overcome the Covid challenges of the last 18+ months, your business has survived and your staff are still loyal.
You may have taken on further debt, seen some of your customers depart to your competition, or indeed not have survived themselves. Perhaps you are one of the lucky businesses in the right place when Covid struck and perhaps you made your own luck by changing direction in the middle of the pandemic.
As a business leader, you know you need a fresh injection, a new direction, or, put simply, to deliver greater results with less proportional cost…MORE FOR LESS.
How do you achieve business change, whether that is upsizing, rightsizing, or diversifying your business effectively and efficiently and ensure the whole team continue to pull in the right direction?
There has been a lot said in the past about Vision and Mission statements but the more recent ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek does immediately strike me as a way to energise an entire business to its purpose.
The same is true of any change process. To understand how to lead people through change you need to understand the influences affecting your staff. The Influence model by McKinsey is a great tool to repeatedly review how we manage teams and determine what obstacles (at an individual level) are in their personal path.
First, we need to understand where the resistance to change is greatest;
A lack of a role model
Environmental reasons
Skills or confidence,
or
Personal Value
With that clarity we can then better help each and every individual within a team to progress through that vicious change curve.
Most importantly let’s not forget that while you are a leader in your business you may also have had a pretty challenging last 18 months and perhaps for you too some of the future changes are a little tough to manage or accept.
I was approached by an MD of a 200-staff business who was faced with a need to make some significant changes. They didn't know where to start but knew they had to. We were able to plan the steps to best manage the required change, took some of the work off them, and managed the process by Acting not Reacting.
ProAction HR is an HR transformation company that actions people change. We work with CEOs, MDs, FDs, HRD’s, and COOs of mid-sized businesses and advise, manage and resource the strategies that will change how people work for your organisation.
Whatever the reason for the change, be it M&A, scaling the business, diversifying into new markets, or reacting to adverse trading conditions, our expertise can devise and implement a change programme for the most favourable outcome.
This enables you as a business leader to maximise new products, marketing opportunities, or ways of working – whether that’s driven by legislation, new market opportunities, or simply a new business strategy.