Nick Gold, MD of Speakers Corner
All the indicators are that the UK will be heading into a deep and painful recession come the Autumn. How bad, and indeed for how long, are the unknowns, but businesses need to use this time to start to look ahead and plan for the future. But how can a business plan when the future is uncertain?
Nick Gold will discuss why the planning needs to start now by creating an entrepreneurial culture within the business that liberates employees to come up with new ideas, to test the market, speak to their customers and find new opportunities. He will also explore how this needs to go hand in hand with a creative employee reward and incentive programme.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset seems, over time, to have become confused and assimilated with a ‘start-up culture’. This might be the case in an actual start-up of course but an entrepreneurial mindset should exist in all businesses, whatever size or heritage.
Even more so, in times of crisis and uncertainty, the entrepreneurial mindset is a necessity for any business to survive and more so, thrive. It allows both leaders and employees to embrace the unknown, accept the uncertainty we find as being part of the challenge, rather than being a blocker to progress.
The ‘Start-Up’ mode is an aura where the vision or idea is clear but the direction of delivery is uncertain, an agile approach and wrong directions are not only common place but welcome within a business where they are learning the path for the successful growth of their business idea and company
As businesses grow and mature, the processes within the business are refined and developed and the mindset shifts to an environment where the whole picture can be captured, analysed and evaluated at the outset. This, from a strategy and planning perspective is a much more attractive and robust offering, it gives greater visibility to the outcomes and risks of a project, it ensures the effective monitoring of the project and it means the future is clear.
The business landscape is a fascinating place now where there is no historical precedent as to what the future holds. At whatever stage of the lifecycle of the business, in marketplaces which are at different levels of maturity, business leaders need to embrace this new mindset and allow their employees to to rediscover, or even just discover, their entrepreneurial mindset.
This will require a change in the way businesses operate. Employees will start to feel liberated, spending less time developing the business plan which has a hypotheses, method, outcome and conclusion, and transition to a culture where the path to an idea is embraced as a test bed for possibilities. It is a place where budgets aren’t clearly allocated in advance but rather the opportunities are continually assessed so resources are refined and directed to areas as ideas open up.
The obvious challenge is that this fluid approach might work for businesses who are not established in a marketplace or defending a position as they have no legacy to protect. It is much harder and more complicated where customers are expecting certain service levels and ways of working. But with an entrepreneurial mindset, this should be seen as an opportunity to build closer relationships, to test new ideas, to spot problematic trends and develop solutions.
The truth is that an entrepreneurial culture has always been presented as a polarised extreme to established business or process) culture. This is simply not true. While there is no doubt that a business trying to marry up different cultures to create a hybrid model has a much more challenging task, but the rewards are so much greater.
The starting place has to be the right vision, delivered from the top level of the business and then implemented so every employee not only buys into the vision that has been laid out before them but they actually start owning the vision too.
In the case of the established business with a secure customer base, the customers also own the vision. Effectively the vision is no longer a top down approach but is actually the values and purpose of the business itself. This ownership means that employees will be more willing to make decisions and take risks in the areas that they are focussed on as they can see how the choices they make can and will effect trying to attain the vision.
The entrepreneurial mindset means that every employee, regardless of role within the business, feels that they are able to contribute to the vision. It means employees are not restricted by job title or role, they are liberated by the vision. It means skill sets are transferred to exploit opportunities.
Business leaders which understand this will develop an incentive and professional development plan for employees. As time moves on and employees start to see the opportunities for themselves within the business, the entrepreneurial mindset we have talked about now starts to become deeply embedded within both the business and employees.
The single most critical aspect to this, the one change that is required for any business as the landscape looks ever more fraught and even more so uncertain is that the business trusts it employees.
It requires leaders to understand that any IP that it owns, any products that it has developed, any brand loyalty or reputation it has developed and maintained over the years, this is now secondary to empowering its people within it. The employees are both the custodians of the brand and responsible for delivering the vision. Above all else, this is the critical aspect for business leaders trying to create an entrepreneurial mindset for the company at a time when forecasting and planning has never been so abstract.
