BUSINESS RESILIENCE

How leaders can build business resilience

Across all sectors and regions, resilience has become a desirable trait — for leaders, their businesses, and employees. This was the case even before the recent COVID-19 outbreak and is now critical for all organisations.

The term resilience is used colloquially to refer to the ability to take a knock, but its broader business meaning is having the capacity to withstand a knock, quick to learn, and agile enough to recover quickly.

Leaders need to work on rapidly building business resilience in the short term in response to COVID-19 and use this emergency as an opportunity to create resilience in the long term. 

Most organisations will have some form of business continuity plans in place, but these plans may be insufficient for the scale and duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

Building resilience in the short term

In the short term, businesses can take several measures to build resilience ,These include:

• Reviewing and upgrading continuity and crisis management plans in the light of new risk scenarios created by the COVID-19 outbreak. 
  
• Thinking about designing and practising COVID-19 simulations for a range of scenarios, including further regional or country lockdowns, education closures, and large numbers of employees testing positive for the virus or in self-isolation or quarantine.
• Companies should consider how to mitigate the potential impact of reduced sales, lowered forecasts, and reduced revenues through rapid redeployment of teams to alternative temporary sites, home working arrangements, and technology workarounds where possible.

Resilience for the long term

Building on learning from this crisis and other disruptions, businesses should design resilience into their organization, Systems approaches lend themselves to long-term resilience.”

A systems approach is a holistic one — it considers a problem in its context, as part of the business’s wider system, which in turn is within an ecosystem.

Advice for businesses to build long-term resilience is:

• To consider what “adaptations and redundancy” they need to design into global supply chains, production, facilities, human resource arrangements, and communications.
• Consider diversification. This is an important feature of long-term resilience, in terms of spreading risk across products, markets, services, and investments.
• Develop industry alliances and business networks. This creates capacities and capabilities beyond organisations that provide greater resilience to future disruption.

Leadership’s role

“In crisis situations, leaders need to balance their focus between the immediate challenges of a dynamic situation and the need to anticipate midterm disruptions,” leaders need to “anticipate, adapt, and act” to maintain resilience. 

Advise  for business leaders includes:

• Stay curious. Leaders need to maintain curiosity about issues that are emerging, in addition to those that have emerged. This might involve running simulations to identify how their business can anticipate potential challenges ahead.
  
• Operate flexibly. They need to operate flexibly and focus on adapting operational arrangements to respond to a rapidly changing situation. This might involve relocating facilities, introducing home working arrangements and strengthening the use of digital communications. Leaders also need an ability to identify, using available data, the areas or countries where production could be moved to.
• Act decisively. Leaders need to act decisively and rapidly to institute revised arrangements to prevent business disruption and potentially business failure.
• Be aware of local measures. They need to be aware of local and regional approaches being taken to the outbreak, especially if they lead a global business.
• Maintain employee performance.Business leaders need to consider how they maintain employee performance and how they manage people when they are more remote.

Leaders’ health

When a crisis such as a global health emergency hits businesses, the psychological health and physical wellbeing of leaders can also be adversely affected with a knock-on effect on their performance. Resilient  organizations often demonstrated “low power-distance ratios — enabling junior employees to engage with or challenge people who are senior to them, as well as enabling senior staff members to engage with, consult, or listen to people in their teams”.

Other practical considerations

One large practical consideration arising from the COVID-19 outbreak, is the impact on employees trying to manage childcare alongside working, if schools or colleges continue to close, “[It] might be [possible to put] in place temporary childcare arrangements to enable employees to continue working,” she said, although “that might be tricky depending on regulatory setups around childcare in different countries.”

The global health emergency offers opportunities for businesses to examine how they use communication technology in terms of virtual meetings and virtual events, particularly for global businesses that rely on travel. They should look at “whether there are technology-based alternatives they could invest in now to help manage the situation as it unfolds”.

However,  “[Consider] what skills different people have … and who else could potentially step into their roles — a sort of cross-cover arrangement.” Businesses, she said, should consider how key individuals’ knowledge and skills can be contained elsewhere in the short term.

By Rachael Nyanchama  

DECENT WORK

Decent work is employment that "respects the fundamental rights of the human person as well as the rights of workers in terms of conditions of work safety and remuneration. ... respect for the physical and mental integrity of the worker in the exercise of his/her employment."

Decent work involves opportunities for work that are productive and deliver a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.

ELEMENTS OF DECENT WORK 

The elements of decent work are;

• Job Creation - no one should be barred from their desired work due to lack of employment opportunites
• Rights at Work, including minimum wage - Workers rights include the right to just and favourable conditions, days off, 8 hour days, non-discrimination and living wages for them and their families, amongst others
• Social Protection - all workers should have safe working conditions, adequate free time and rest, access to benefits like healthcare, pension, and parental leave, among many others
• Social Dialogue - workers should be able to exercise workplace democracy through their unions and negotiate their workplace conditions as well as national and international labour and development policies

Sustainable Development Decent Work Targets

The Sustainable Development Goals also proclaims decent work for sustainable economic growth. The Goal aims to increase labor productivity, reduce the unemployment rate, and improve access to financial services and benefits. Encouraging entrepreneurship and job creation are key to this, as are effective measures to eradicate forced labour, slavery and human trafficking. With these targets in mind, the goal is to achieve full and productive employment, and decent work, for all women and men.

Challenges in Implementation;

Decent Work poses challenges and controversies. 

In Africa, for example, informal employment is the norm, while well-paying jobs that offer social-protection benefits are the exception. This has been attributed to difficulties in obtaining formal sector jobs due to the creasing pressure of globalization. 

In order to achieve The Decent Work Agenda, national and international entities have to commit to the objective of the creation of quality jobs and tackle its challenges.   

Various actors can affect the provision of Decent Work, although existing conditions and incentives do not always lend themselves to advancing the Decent Work Agenda. To illustrate:

• National governments create Decent Work through economic and industrial policies. However, the forces of globalization – such as downward pressures on wages and reduced macroeconomic policy flexibility – have diminished the ability of national governments to achieve this goal on their own.
• Businesses create jobs from the local to international levels, and those operating across borders can affect international wages and working conditions. Multinational enterprises typically locate operations in countries where wages are at their lowest and so called "worker's rights" are less prominent. This is antithetical to the Decent Work Agenda, although it does contribute to economic development.
• Trade unions assist employees in advocating for elements of Decent Work, from a so-called "living wage" to health insurance to workplace safety standards. Trade unions face the challenge of meeting their members’ immediate needs at home while supporting job creation and "workers’ rights" around the globe.
• International financial institutions provide loans or other assistance to national governments, and require loan recipients to implement certain policy measures. Existing programs generally exclude employment targets and have even been known to reduce job creation in the short term, as jobs which exist only through government market distortions are replaced with economically viable employment.
• Trade negotiators can forward the Decent Work Agenda globally by including labor standards in trade agreements, while legislators (among others) can support their implementation. However, many countries view the campaign for labor standards as an effort by other countries to make their own industries more competitive.

By Rachael Nyanchama 

LEADERSHIP

What Is Leadership?

The word "leadership" can bring to mind a variety of images. For example:

• A political leader, pursuing a passionate, personal cause.
• An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his group to follow.
• An executive, developing her company's strategy to beat the competition.

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to "win" as a team or an organization; and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring.

Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

Note:

Leadership means different things to different people around the world, and different things in different situations. For example, it could relate to community leadership, religious leadership, political leadership, and leadership of campaigning groups.

This article focuses on the Western model of individual leadership, and discusses leadership in the workplace rather than in other areas.

Leadership: a Definition

An effective leader is a person who does the following:

1. Creates an inspiring vision of the future.
2. Motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision.
3. Manages delivery of the vision.
4. Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision.

Leadership brings together the skills needed to do these things. We'll look at each element in more detail.

1. Creating an Inspiring Vision of the Future

In business, a vision is a realistic, convincing and attractive depiction of where you want to be in the future. Vision provides direction, sets priorities, and provides a marker, so that you can tell that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve.

Therefore, leadership is proactive – problem solving, looking ahead, and not being satisfied with things as they are.

Once they have developed their visions, leaders must make them compelling and convincing. 

Here, leadership combines the analytical side of vision creation with the passion of shared values, creating something that's really meaningful to the people being led.

2. Motivating and Inspiring People

A compelling vision provides the foundation for leadership. But it's leaders' ability to motivate and inspire people that helps them deliver that vision.

For example, when you start a new project, you will probably have lots of enthusiasm for it, so it's often easy to win support for it at the beginning. However, it can be difficult to find ways to keep your vision inspiring after the initial enthusiasm fades, especially if the team or organization needs to make significant changes in the way that it does things. Leaders recognize this, and they work hard throughout the project to connect their vision with people's individual needs, goals and aspirations.

One of the key ways they do this is through Expectancy Theory. Effective leaders link together two different expectations:

1. The expectation that hard work leads to good results.
2. The expectation that good results lead to attractive rewards or incentives.

This motivates people to work hard to achieve success, because they expect to enjoy rewards – both intrinsic and extrinsic – as a result.

Other approaches include restating the vision in terms of the benefits it will bring to the team's customers, and taking frequent opportunities to communicate the vision in an attractive and engaging way.

What's particularly helpful here is when leaders have expert power. People admire and believe in these leaders because they are expert in what they do. They have credibility, and they've earned the right to ask people to listen to them and follow them. This makes it much easier for these leaders to motivate and inspire the people they lead.

Leaders can also motivate and influence people through their natural charisma and appeal, and through other sources of power, such as the power to pay bonuses or assign tasks to people. However, good leaders don't rely too much on these types of power to motivate and inspire others.

3. Managing Delivery of the Vision

This is the area of leadership that relates to management. 

Leaders must ensure that the work needed to deliver the vision is properly managed – either by themselves, or by a dedicated manager or team of managers to whom the leader delegates this responsibility – and they need to ensure that their vision is delivered successfully.

Leaders also need to make sure they manage change effectively. This helps to ensure that the changes needed to deliver the vision are implemented smoothly and thoroughly, with the support and backing of the people affected.

4. Coaching and Building a Team to Achieve the Vision

Individual and team development are important activities carried out by transformational leaders. To develop a team, leaders must first understand team dynamics. 

A leader will then ensure that team members have the necessary skills and abilities to do their job and achieve the vision. They do this by giving and receiving feedback regularly, and by training and coaching people to improve individual and team performance.

Leadership also includes looking for leadership potential in others. By developing leadership skills within your team, you create an environment where you can continue success in the long term. And that's a true measure of great leadership.

Note:

The words "leader" and "leadership" are often used incorrectly to describe people who are actually managing. These individuals may be highly skilled, good at their jobs, and valuable to their organizations – but that just makes them excellent managers, not leaders.

So, be careful how you use the terms, and don't assume that people with "leader" in their job titles, people who describe themselves as "leaders," or even groups called "leadership teams" are actually creating and delivering transformational change.

A particular danger in these situations is that people or organizations that are being managed by such an individual or group think they're being led; but they're not. There may actually be no leadership at all, with no one setting a vision and no one being inspired. This can cause serious problems in the long term.

Key Points

Leadership can be hard to define and it means different things to different people.

In the transformational leadership model, leaders set direction and help themselves and others to do the right thing to move forward. To do this they create an inspiring vision, and then motivate and inspire others to reach that vision. They also manage delivery of the vision, either directly or indirectly, and build and coach their teams to make them ever stronger.

Effective leadership is about all of this – and it's exciting to be part of this journey!

“ Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.”

By:Rachael Nyanchama