Why Resilience Matters to You & Your Business
Resilience. It’s important for you as a business leader. It’s just as important for your business. But why? And if you’re not feeling especially resilient, how do you find it?
What is resilience?
Resilience matters. But what exactly is it?
In a personal, professional and organisational sense, resilience is often described as ‘bounce back-ability’. The ability to roll with the punches and not feel beaten by circumstances is certainly part of it, but we’d suggest that several ingredients lead to that position.
In a personal sense, resilience is about the mindset you adopt, your approach to setbacks and the way you handle stress. A resilient leader takes the unexpected in their stride and often has strategies in place to help them work around challenges. As a result, they generally feel in control. They don’t second guess themselves or change tactics every five minutes. And the rest of their team sees them as a rock — someone who, whatever the issue and whatever other challenges they’re facing at that moment, offers a consistent and reliable presence.
In an organisational sense, resilience is about a business’ ability to withstand and even capitalise from change, unpredictability and disruption. It’s not the same as business continuity, which is your plan for recovering from a single event such as a fire, pandemic or IT failure. Resilience is a constant requirement because change and unpredictability are also constants.
Why does resilience matter?
We’d argue business resilience always mattered, but there’s little doubt the global business climate is more uncertain, more fractious and more open to disruption than it has been for years.
Resilience, therefore, matters more than ever too. As this US study noted, and as reported by Redcentric[1], “resilient businesses outperform their industry average by 30% during unfavourable periods”.
What’s more, resilience protects businesses not only during the initial shock by limiting its impact, but also in the speed of recovery and the longer-term extent of that recovery.
Interestingly, other studies (such as this one[2]) suggest sustainability can also play an important ‘insurance’ role in a business’ resilience.
In a personal sense, resilience matters because running a business is hard. Without resilience, you could find it takes a toll on your physical and/or mental health, or simply leaves you less capable of leading your business as effectively as you would like.
Build personal and business resilience with Blackpool Unlimited’s business academies
If you don’t feel especially resilient — or if you fear that your business isn’t — Blackpool Unlimited can help.
The Blackpool Growth Business Academy is designed to support local, scaling businesses, and resilience is baked into much of the support it can offer.
If you’re concerned that growing pains are leaving your business vulnerable, that you’re expanding too quickly or that you’re underprepared as you look to exploit new markets, the Blackpool Growth Business Academy’s scale up coaches can help with tools, strategies and training to help build your organisational resilience.
And if you’re concerned that as a leader you’re being stretched too thin, or that you don’t feel equipped to lead your business as it shifts from small enterprise to something larger, they can help you develop the personal resilience (and other traits) to help you better cope with stress, responsibility and an increased workload.
The Blackpool Net Zero Business Academy, on the other hand, can help you build resilience of a very different kind. If you’re concerned that the way you operate leaves you worryingly open to shocks in energy markets. Or if you need to create a more robust offering to new members of the team and want to ensure your values better match those of the talent you want to attract, the sustainability specialsts at the Blackpool Net Zero Business Academy can help you develop the resilience you need.
For you. For your business. Discover greater resilience with additional support. For more information or to find out how resilience can be used to grow or decarbonise your business, book your personalised support today.
