Resilience as a competitive advantage

07 / Jul / 2020

Is your leadership team providing the resilience that will give your business a competitive advantage?

By: Craig Elvin

Over the last three months we have stretched, broken, fixed and tested our people, processes, and systems.

As we move into a new age, the new normal, our clients are demanding that our businesses can prove their resilience. Resilience to meet future challenges, resilience to ensure we can deliver, resilience to prove that we will be there every step of the way with them.

So how do we ensure our leadership teams build their resilience to provide the competitive advantage you need?

You have three options.

Firstly, there is hope. However, we all know hope is not a strategy that your clients and shareholders will appreciate.

Secondly, you can develop resilience in the business through training. There are several coaches that are achieving great results teaching resilience in the workplace who could help your business.

Thirdly, and unsurprising my favourite, you can hire it. By utilising established behavioural profiling tools like McQuaig or Insights, you can understand who is more likely to be resilient in the face of adversity.

Who will be able to work effectively under pressure?

Who can persevere and still hit targets?

Who will be agile enough to steer the ship through troubled waters?

If this is the approach you choose to take, you need to create a blueprint for what you need and measure against it. By bringing your stakeholders together you can understand what good resilience looks like and in what areas, and how potential employees need to demonstrate that resilience.

When you are interviewing you need to assess people against the criteria. When it comes hiring for behaviours you need to add a test to the process. Gut feeling is important as a leader but now is the time to back it up with science.

Being open and candid with your current staff and potential new hires about the challenges for the business and your expectations of the behaviour’s they display is paramount. Whilst you are interviewing you need to be honest with people about the amount of resilience that potential employees will need and how that fits with the plans.

You might also want to consider providing support. We all have days when we feel the pressure and need someone to turn to. Its not always easy to ‘open up’ to your boss so what can you offer your teams in terms of mentoring for others outside their direct line management or even external coaching?

So next time your customers are scrutinising the reliance of your supply chain, your ability to last the course or how robust your business is, ask yourself if your team has enough resilience to give you a competitive advantage.

If you’d like a conversation about implementing behavioural profiling as part of your recruiting process call 020 7870 8259 or email craig.elvin@executiveheads.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ex-military engineer, Craig Elvin has more than 15 years’ experience working with clients and placing leaders in a range of sectors across the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Craig works with growing and ambitious businesses to attract, assess and nurture the best talent for critical leadership and senior managerial positions.

Click here to connect with Craig on LinkedIn.

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Resilience as a competitive advantage

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