Faced with unprecedented challenges, it is imperative for enterprises to improve their risk resistance capabilities and organizational resilience. And when looking at companies that have survived countless economic cycles, agile crisis management strategies and a resilient organizational culture are what make them successful.
We combine psychology and organizational behavior to provide enterprise managers with a set of practical resilience system, hoping to help enterprises forge organizational resilience and achieve stability in the face of adversity.
1 Model for Building Organizational Resilience
Organizational resilience, by definition, is the ability of an organization to continuously anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and adapt to increasing changes and sudden disruptive disruptions in order to survive and continue to thrive and even prosper. Organizational resilience has three core functions in business models.
The first is operational resilience, including iterative upgrades in terms of products and technological processes.
The second is supply chain resilience. The “Global Organizational Resilience Study” released in 2021 mentioned that, affected by the epidemic, 88% of the world’s companies have experienced supply chain disruptions more or less.
The third is information resilience, including entities and intellectual property rights.
We need to improve organizational resilience to empower companies to cope with uncertainty.
Organizational resilience is not a simple superposition of the resilience of individual members, but the ability of individuals to integrate through deep connections. Based on this, we summarize the three-stage model of “consensus-co-work-empathy” for organizational resilience, and each stage needs to implement different needs.
Consensus refers to the communication mechanism between people, teams and teams, functions and functional teams. Working together refers to the incentive mechanism to achieve goals through business models, processes, mechanisms and methods. Empathy refers to a trust mechanism in which employees and enterprises are consistent in values such as professionalism.
Taking Xiaomi as an example, as a leading enterprise in intelligent manufacturing, Xiaomi has mechanisms such as Xiaomi Community and MIUI Forum, which reduces communication costs, optimizes management efficiency, and creates a humanized consensus; from the perspective of working together, Xiaomi insists on equal pay for equal work. , implement equity incentives, and use communication, training and other methods to establish a good incentive mechanism; in terms of value empathy, Xiaomi insists that everyone can enjoy the fun of technology, insists on making cost-effective products, and makes employees and users support its empathy.
The “consensus-collaboration-empathy” model provides us with an effective path from individual resilience to organizational resilience. Self-awareness, continuous small wins and love and focus in self-resilience improvement are transformed into consensus, co-work and empathy, and become a powerful tool for enterprises to improve their resilience. Through the three-stage toughness analysis, we can find out the deficiencies of organizational toughness and the direction of optimization.
5 ways to build talent resilience
To lay a solid foundation for organizational resilience, we must start with researching employees, empowering employees and building talents. According to the organizational resilience model of “consensus – working together – empathy”, we have found a commonality in the surveys of many industries. Many companies are already “prosperous” in terms of life cycle, but there are still “adolescent troubles” in the stage of organizational development ”: The corporate goals are vague, the strategy is lost, and it is difficult to integrate the new and the old. Therefore, companies need to build talent resilience. There are five main ways to build talent resilience.
1. Strategy at the same frequency The
survey found that many corporate executives are very vague about their strategic principles, problems, and orientations, which makes the downward conduction of energy gradually decrease.
From the point of view of consensus, insufficient communication between the top leader and the executives means that there is no strategy (some executives even said that “we farmers don’t have to think so far when they wash their feet and go to the fields”). From the perspective of working together, there is a lack of connection between strategic decomposition and play. Executives just execute the strategy, often with “big thunder and little rain”; from the perspective of empathy, strategy formulation focuses on short-term performance rather than long-termism, bosses do not trust the ideas and opinions of executives, and lack a common vision.
Based on this, co-frequency strategy is the first priority to help enterprises build talent resilience. Only by establishing a regular and in-depth communication mechanism at the core level and organically combining strategy formulation and plan implementation can long-term incentives for talent be realized.
2. Talent introduction
Many business leaders love “airborne troops”. Airborne talents may help companies achieve business expansion in the short term, but they are not necessarily conducive to extending the life cycle of the company.
From the perspective of consensus, it is difficult for some airborne talents to devote themselves to new projects, and they often have inertial thinking; and when working together, they are also prone to incompatibility with the system, resulting in the lengthening of the running-in link and the inability to quickly reach a consensus with team members consensus.
Talent introduction is a good strategy, but managers must understand the boundaries and methods. If an enterprise wants to build its own resilience, it must standardize and normalize internal personnel management, and clearly define rights and responsibilities to avoid value deviation. While helping new talents to integrate and adapt, it does not suppress the enthusiasm of old employees.
3. High potential to build
Corresponding to the introduction of new talents, enterprises cannot ignore the incentives for old employees. Old employees have high loyalty and recognition to the company, but at the same time they will encounter bottlenecks in business ability improvement and cognition. Therefore, how to continuously empower old employees and make them grow together with the enterprise is the third major issue in building talent resilience.
Enterprises should list the discovery and training of high-potential talents as an important issue in human resource management, and should not first define the level of new and old employees, and do not create a mindset for employees’ innovative ability. Leaders should handle the relationship between authorization and supervision, build a firewall for both new and old business teams, and fully prepare for the investment of time, energy and emotion (trust) for the cultivation of high-potential talents, so as to complete the closed loop of talent resilience training.
4. Echelon construction
After dealing with the interaction between the new and old teams, you should also pay attention to the echelon construction within the organization. The talent selection and reservation mechanism of some enterprises needs to be improved urgently. In the enterprise team, the old employees have mastered the core business knowledge and practical experience. If there is a lack of summary and experience inheritance, once the core employees leave, the “tacit knowledge” summed up from practice will be obviously broken.
From the perspective of consensus, employees generally believe that the talent training system is the boss’s business, and that the shortage of talents without an independent training system is a common phenomenon; from the perspective of co-working, the turnover rate of grassroots employees is high, and old employees have become the mainstay; from the perspective of empathy, teachers Apprenticeship is constrained in teaching because the master is worried that the apprentice will be able to stand on his own.
Therefore, the building of enterprise talent resilience also needs to focus on echelon construction. Talent pooling and training should be the task of managers at all levels. It is necessary to optimize knowledge and experience within the enterprise, establish an efficient learning system, encourage the old to lead the new inheritance through various forms, and pay attention to the career development of all employees, especially young people.
5. Corporate culture The top-down spiritual outlook of
an enterprise reflects its corporate culture. However, companies with excellent culture are rare, because the culture of most companies has become the personal culture of the boss. Leaders should recognize the need to increase the inclusiveness and motivational role of the culture to prepare for future expansion.
From the perspective of consensus, the mission and vision of most companies often stay on paper and are absent for a long time; from the perspective of working together, corporate culture will affect team effectiveness, and a good culture can improve the work status and performance of employees; from the perspective of empathy, Corporate culture should not be a personal spirit, but a sense of conceptual identity, which requires managers to put the common interests of employees first.
Therefore, the final key to building organizational talent resilience is to optimize the corporate culture so that it can comprehensively and long-term protect the motivation of employees. In response to this, we suggest that companies should sort out their organizational culture according to their own development history, integrate corporate culture into employee assessment and incentive standards, make employees at all levels have a sense of being an operator, and provide care and public welfare that can arouse employees’ psychological resonance. Activity.
5 perspectives on creating resilient leadership
Without a general, no matter how good the employees are, there are no leaders. Another dimension of building organizational resilience is optimizing the leadership of managers. Resilient managers can brainstorm ideas and respond quickly in a crisis. After making decisions, they can unite as one, so as to transmit the culture of resilience to every corner of the enterprise.
1. Leaders should be the first to build a resilient culture
Organizational resilience does not entirely depend on high-resilience leaders or employees, but at the talent level, it is necessary to play a guiding and leading role of high-resilience individuals. Business managers should communicate regularly, continuously and accurately about employees’ career prospects, listen to feedback, and provide a “sense of certainty” to relieve stress.
2. Enterprise value empowers employee development
In response to the crisis, enterprises should aim high at the strategic level and promote enterprise transformation and upgrading with faster changes. The task of leaders at this time is to further clarify the core values of the company for customers, industry and employees. The mission and vision cannot just stay on paper. Managers must make it organically fit with the career development of employees.
3. Replacing trade-offs with trade-offs In
an uncertain environment, many companies’ growth and transformation go hand-in-hand. Most companies see this as more difficult, but highly resilient companies can flexibly adjust and balance between multiple goals, rather than simply making trade-offs.
This requires enterprise managers to combine multi-dimensional strategies, respond quickly to changes in the external environment, and proactively prevent, act, optimize and innovate.
4. Situational strategies to collect different opinions
In a rapidly changing environment, experience and inertia may become shackles, and the insights of the new generation of employees can help decision-makers open their minds. This requires leadership to be more contextual when formulating strategies, simulating business tests under various extreme scenarios, covering the perspectives of employees at different levels and functions. In this way, different feedbacks are extracted from employees of different generations and different work experiences, and integrated into a comprehensive strategic experience through review.
5. Make resilience a long-term strategy
Building resilience is always in progress and requires long-term strategic determination. High resilience is not an end, but an ongoing state. A resilient organization is not simply a business that can survive a crisis and return to normal, but a business that can transform as the environment changes. This requires leaders to continuously implant new attitudes, beliefs, agility and changing organizational structures into the DNA (genes) of the enterprise, thereby promoting rapid iteration and development of the organization.
It is true that, as Ren Zhengfei said, a large number of enterprises need to prepare for the cold winter. But that doesn’t mean it’s a pessimistic signal. For enterprises, the business environment itself is constantly changing with the technological revolution and the continuous development of society. Resilience advantage will surely become an important development strategy of enterprises.
Although resilience is a psychological concept in the traditional sense, the individual, as the smallest unit of society, is the most important resource of an enterprise. Especially in an environment of anxiety and uncertainty, the improvement of personal resilience can effectively promote the building of organizational resilience. Therefore, people-oriented improvement of organizational capabilities and the creation of culture and values are the underlying logic for improving organizational resilience.
