We are living in a time when business leaders need to expect the unexpected. During the pandemic, many small businesses had to innovate quickly to survive—going digital, expanding their services, tapping into new customer bases. At ZenBusiness, for example, one of our clients manages an automobile exporting business and needed to build a digital platform to better manage inventory across resellers.
Fast forward to 2022, we are now on to the next crisis with Europe’s first ground war since World War II unfolding between the Russian government and Ukraine, with many U.S. businesses taking a hit in revenue to make the ethical decision to withdraw their operations from Russia.
While we don’t know what the next challenge will be yet, we do know that there will be many more to come, and it has become clear that the most important quality to being a leader today is agility.
As an entrepreneur and small business owner with a growth mindset, you must be open minded and resilient enough to make changes to your business that weren’t part of your original vision, and you have to cultivate foresight so that there’s time to prepare for whatever may be coming next. As you do, there are best practices for how to bring your people along. Change is hard for everyone, but these strategies will make it easier and inspire trust and loyalty along the way.
Be transparent about the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Your employees must understand the value of a change before they can accept it and so it’s important that you clearly explain why you are pivoting and your goal in doing so. Be open about the state of the business and explain any risks involved in making this change and why you’ve determined the risk is necessary or outweighed by the future benefit you’re anticipating. Being candid about your decision-making will allow people to make their own assessment and securely align themselves with your goal. If you leave out key factors, people will fill in the blanks using their imagination or faulty information, and that can lead to misalignment.
Communicate too much
There’s a marketing adage that says people need to hear a message seven times before they take action. While repetition can be helpful, what I really take from this is that there’s a difference between hearing and understanding, and the connection between the two can be complex. As a result, it’s important that as a people leader you establish a frequent and regular cadence of your employee communications as you seek to build understanding and buy-in around your vision. In other words, sending an email is not enough—you have to arrange for ongoing conversations and engage key members of your teams to share and reiterate your message. During uncertainty, this reliability is especially crucial as your vision rapidly evolves in response to the environment.
Use empathy to address people’s fears
Changes to your business will have implications for the people who work on certain functions, and that will naturally give rise to fear or anxiety. Sometimes those fears are founded and other times they are not. During the pandemic, for example, many businesses had to automate certain functions and some people did lose their jobs, while others found that it led to other opportunities within the company. As a leader, one of your jobs is to anticipate those fears and to address them head on with empathy. The best way to do this is by being clear about how people fit within the changes as you communicate how you are adapting and provide training if new skills are needed.
Shifting your business can be difficult but it can reshape your business in a way that ultimately leads to greater success, winning the hearts and loyalty of your best talent along the way.
WRITTEN BY
Shanaz Hemmati