How to create business resilience and buoyancy

Brett Ashley shares four key actions to help business owners and leaders create greater resilience and buoyancy in business teams.

Owning or managing a business will provide many challenges but once you have made that decision, the biggest challenge will be understanding your role as a leader. The first question you need to ask yourself is what type of leader do you want to become?

I believe that we all have the ability to become effective leaders of people, and that leaders are created, not born. But to be both an effective and successful leader you have to be prepared to commit to a number of personal and organisational beliefs.

Firstly, effective leaders need to understand the difference between leading and managing. The secret to being successful is all about creating the right beliefs for yourself and others and not just about providing specific tasks and managing KPI’s to achieve high performance. You need to create the right environment that enables people to believe in how to behave.

But it is not just words that create the right environment. As you cannot just look to develop a business purpose and aspiration statement, then look to roll out a set of predetermined values to a team of people and expect them to believe in it. You have to create real “Belief” as beliefs create behaviours, which enable an environment to establish a culture, to ultimately deliver on your purpose. To create belief you have to develop an ongoing list of specific actions to ensure your team believes and to help them create greater resilience and buoyancy in their lives.

Here are some key actions that will help you to create greater resilience and buoyancy in business teams   

1. Quality Conversations
   Leaders need to get to really know their team by planning to have better conversations with them individually. They need to find out what really matters to them, not just presume they know. Therefore, it is vital that leaders have regular individual conversations (ideally weekly one-on-ones) to identify any individual beliefs that may be in conflict with the current business strategic path. If you do not attempt to establish true individual alignment, you will find that those individuals will never fully commit to the actions required, or, even worse, they will actively and purposely derail them.
    
2. Personal Planning & Goal Setting
   The facts are that most business leaders spend countless hours developing strategies, goals, objectives and action plans for the business. But many fail to spend any real quality time on creating a life plan for not only themselves but for any of their team.
   Having a life plan will help provide you with a greater sense of purpose and provide you with the tools to be able to meet your expectations and handle whatever life may throw at you. You will definitely be able to gain more self-confidence and have greater resilience and buoyancy in your life. Simply put, if you want your team to believe in a business purpose you have to help them understand what their own purpose is and then help them to develop their own strategic plan to achieve it.
    
3. Fun
   Creating a successful continuous improvement environment can be relentless, as it comes with the constant pressure to perform, so it is vitally important for leaders to make it fun too. Leaders can easily find ways to have fun, such as simply allowing the team to dress up on special occasions. You will find that this simple event will have a resounding effect on the team’s wellness. They relax, have lots of fun, and naturally become more actively engaged with their customers. Their energy and vibe will create an excellent business environment, proving that happy teams make happy customers.
    
4. Recognition and Reward
   Most people are motivated by more material things, like wealth and lifestyle, and others are motivated by more emotional factors, like fame, fear and love. Many leaders will tell you it is more important to provide recognition than rewards, but in my view, it is simply more important to understand “how you make them feel”. First of all, you need to find a way to pay people more and you need to find a way to pay them above their expectations if you want them to believe they are valued. You also need to find a way to ‘celebrate with cake every day’. The goal here is not to eat cake everyday but to symbolise that you are working every day to recognise and reward them.
    

Brett Ashley is a former business owner and executive with Woolworths NZ, with more than 47 years in the retail industry in both New Zealand and Australia. He is also the founder and managing director of My Purpose Ltd. His new book ‘The Key to Unlocking Your Potential’ is available at www.mypurpose.co.nz.