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BUSINESS CLINIC RISK MANAGEMENT
DEALING WITH RISKS BEYOND YOUR CONTROL
by Hamish Hamilton Group chair, Vistage International
Some risks you cannot manage, but you still have to deal with them. Covid-19 poses the biggest risk many businesses have faced since the Second World War.
Whilst it is being managed at a national level, individual business leaders are having to respond to its effects.
Working alongside North West-based CEOs, I have found there are a number of core issues that, if tackled with the right mindset, can provide a roadmap to recovery. Have you got what it takes to provide your business with what it needs, not just to survive, but to thrive?
E + R = O
In other words, the Event (in this case, Covid-19) plus our Response to it, will dictate the Outcome.
The pandemic has happened. We cannot control that, nor the national and global response. However, we can control our response. We need to decide on the desired outcome and design our response to make that happen.
Many of the companies I work with are striving to emerge from the crisis stronger than before. Their response to Covid-19 follows three stages: Survival, Reset, and Relaunch.
Survival
The Survival phase is crisis management, our immediate fight or flight response, and CEOs and MDs need a command style that exercises a high-level grip on those matters delegated to their senior teams. Most organisations are now past this phase.
Reset
The Reset phase requires crisis leadership. There is a subtle but crucial change from management to leadership.
Good leadership involves caring deeply about people, creating a compelling sense of purpose, and over communicating. The CEO must manage their own mindset ensuring it is positive, and seeking opportunities. This simple reframe will bring you and your team lots of extra energy.
Decide on the desired outcome, and make that happen
Next, they require a cohesive leadership team, focused around a short- term purpose, namely creating clarity, overcommunicating that clarity, and then reinforcing that clarity.
And yes. Clarity is important. As Alastair Campbell says, once you’re bored of saying it, people will just be starting to hear you!
Relaunch
Most of my member businesses have set up a Plan Ahead team, to think about the challenges ahead when restrictions are eased.
From this point, the CEO needs to become more outward looking, learning from trusted peers as in a Vistage private advisory board. The CEO’s job is not to have all the answers but to have all the questions.
In this Relaunch position the CEO is thinking about how they and their business will emerge from the crisis stronger. This involves understanding emerging trends, realigning and re-imagining the business, and creating robust plans as to how this will be done.
Hindsight is a powerful teacher, and what is being seen today reflects past evidence: that if you are in the business of thriving, not just surviving, mindset and leadership trumps what you do, hands down.
Hamish
advertorial.indd 1 04/05/2020 16:40:02
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