Thomas Davies, CEO at Temporall
Crises strengthens the need for finance leaders to make fast, high-quality decisions – and the pandemic has reinforced the importance of having a clear and compelling strategy. But perhaps more than any other factor, the COVID-19 crisis has underlined the importance of a resilient business culture.
For many, resilience will be synonymous with business continuity planning. And to some degree this is true. But there are foundational values that each and every organisation must have in place if they are to successfully manage any period of disruption. Critically this is not simply about responding to today’s challenges, but about ensuring your business can seamlessly tackle change in whatever form it takes.
This culture of resilience can’t be built overnight, but key steps towards achieving it can be taken immediately.
The foundations of your business culture
This human component of organisational resilience is essential to both immediate response to, and acceleration beyond, the pandemic. Sadly the implications of COVID-19 have shown that for many financial services organisations, historically their investment in the human side of resilience has been limited. Leadership teams often have no real visibility of how their people are performing under pressure – or indeed how they themselves are positively or negatively influence the organisational response.
The process of developing resilience has clear stages, with the most effective investment in your culture starting with an honest appraisal of your current situation. Every organisation has its inbuilt preconceptions, assumed strengths and weaknesses and defaults to which people turn. Some of the simplest issues organisations face in addressing resilience are those such as a lack of understanding of the business’ core values, its mission or the vision that leadership teams have laid down. This commitment to a shared agenda creates a galvanising effect under pressure. In contrast any gaps within your organisational alignment immediately begin to undermine your continuity.
There are other elements of your culture that also need to be appraised – such as the effectiveness of management structures, line management processes and communications channels from executives. These compliment the more traditional continuity strategies around tool sets, variable working structures and emergency procedures.
Without this kind assessment, it’s very difficult to lead positive changes in culture.
Alignment is everything
Clarity is essential to an aligned and motivated workforce. The most effective resilience strategies need individuals and teams to interact seamlessly; in a crisis there’s no time for miscommunication or second guessing.
Trust is also important. Leadership teams must nurture a culture in which delegation is possible, and transparency is always there. If people cannot be open about challenges faced or concerns felt, problems get buried under the surface. In the fast moving, high stakes environment of the typical financial services organisation, this nuanced approach to culture can often be overlooked.
The problem is that many businesses state they operate in this way, but don’t. They use ‘trust’ as a corporate value – but fall short of making employees part of the objective setting process, or giving them freedom to use frontline experience to make meaningful decisions. This lack of alignment within the core of the corporate culture means that strict process setting is the only way to direct outcomes. Yet experience shows that crises undermine and force changes in procedures – something that’s incredibly hard to manage with every disruption you face. You don’t know how your team will react to such changes.
Remember, truly resilient businesses don’t have hidden surprises waiting for them.
No strategy is evergreen
Crises are hard to manage because of their unpredictability. Uncertainty has a tendency to demoralise and distract a workforce, and employees are quick to identify if the strategy coming from the leadership team is misaligned with the reality on the ground. So when you know you’ll always have to deal with unknowns, you need to be ready to adapt with them.
Each time a decision is made during a crisis, the situation should ideally improve. But if you’re not looking at current data it’s easy to rely on assumptions (or worse still, luck). As part of a drive towards resilience, businesses should increase the cadence of insights and their use within strategic planning. Understanding how the parameters you covered in the initial audit can be continually analysed is key to this phase. In turn decision making and risk management is significantly improved, whereas if you’re without real time information, your resilience can quickly become compromised.
Share success and don’t hide from failure
In high performance industries such as finance it’s not natural to share failure. But in the short term, hidden pitfalls prevent continuity strategies from coming to fruition, and in the longer term learnings are overlooked. Organisations that are truly resilient must be open about the mindset, behaviours and actions that deliver strong organisational resilience.
The challenges inherent in weathering a crisis are more evenly distributed across the business when behaviours associated with resilience become part of your performance analysis. When upfront metrics are shared, and access to insight democratised, delegation becomes more effective. This in turn breeds resilience and hence success. Teams are more motivated as they share in the rewards of resilience. And should a strategy not work out, with transparency, everyone can learn together and improve.
The organisations that most effectively persevere during the pandemic will not be those that simply ‘survive the best.’ The real winners will be those who have built a resilient culture, and can operate far more effectively in the landscape that follows lockdown.
