If life didn’t get rough occasionally, there wouldn’t be so many clichés about weathering storms and silver linings. While in the thick of it, these sayings may offer little satisfaction or meaning. But when your Middle Market firm emerges on the other side, you may be able to see the wisdom.
So, when your organization is struggling to stay above water, you may not be able to stop and say “Someday in the future, we will have really learned something from this and we’ll be better off for it.” Hopefully and ideally, however, that will be the case.
One of the keys to maturity and growth is being able to objectively evaluate difficult times. And then learn from them and be better in the future. Knowing how to approach adversity and what to learn from it makes your company resistant and resilient.
The Best Lessons Come From Problems And Disasters
If you polled 1,000 people in the C-Suite, you’d find many people who’d tell you they can’t remember details or lessons learned when everything was working as it should. And, the majority would probably tell you they learned their biggest lessons in difficulty. Why? It’s often easier to see more clearly in moments of pandemonium.
Some of it is a proclivity humans have for being able to key into negative experiences more easily. But honestly, when your back is to the wall and you don’t have multiple solutions at hand, what happens? You sink or swim, right? You adapt, you fix and you make do. So, it isn’t a stretch to understand why people feel facing adversity and surviving teaches more and more important lessons.
Your Middle Market firm clearly doesn’t want to court trouble, but remembering that innovation and solutions often come when everything looks bleak can be helpful for calming your teams.
Taking Stock When You’re In The Flames
During a problem or a disaster, it can be hard to calmly be an observer to what is going on. As leaders, it comes with the territory. You will have teams of people from all areas of your company looking to you to lead.
It’s important to be able to calm fears and help facilitate solutions. But, it’s equally important to remain as objective as possible and to be able to see the situation clearly, without judgment or fear. If you can take a few minutes each day to see where you’ve been the day before and define clear steps for where you want to be in the immediate future, you’d be doing a phenomenal job of taking stock and documenting progress.
Helping Leaders Rise From The Ashes
In times of struggle, your C-Suite may be your strongest allies and supporters. Ideally, anyone that you’ve set into a leadership role will rise to the occasion. But, it isn’t a stretch to say probably you’ll be let down by at least a few leaders.
Interestingly, you probably will identify a whole new batch of potential leadership candidates – by their actions. By remaining calm, truly researching the problem and solutions and through natural leadership tendencies, you will likely identify several new managers and leaders.
By commending their calm manner and capable skills and then helping to develop their natural leadership traits, your Middle Market organization can benefit from adversity through stronger leaders and new members of the leadership team.
Encourage innovation, honesty, and employee brainstorming during difficult times, you might be surprised who brings you viable solutions.
Evaluating Processes Afterward
Once issues have been resolved and your company is back to happier and healthier times, it’s probably the best time to evaluate what led to the issues and what can be done to prevent similar events. It might be the right time to completely evaluate all processes related to the issue.
⦁ What directly led to the problem?
⦁ How about indirectly?
⦁ Which processes need to be overhauled to prevent future issues?
⦁ Could some processes be updated?
⦁ What helped to contain the problem?
⦁ What exacerbated the issues?
⦁ Which team was of the most assistance?
⦁ What were complete revelations that came to light?
Realizing that your Middle Market firm can come back from adversity stronger, leaner and with better coping skills for the future are strong motivating factors to figuring out how to learn from tough times.
So what’s in the Mighty Middle Market for me? — get it right now at www.Go4ROI.com.