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In my experience as a mentor and consultant to business owners, I too often hear their frustration and pain with today’s pace of change and worldwide competition. The days are gone when you could get long-term satisfaction from repeatable processes and an innovative product. It is time to change your mindset from “change means new pain” to “change leads to positive opportunities.”
Running a business is also not a solo process, so you actually need a team of people with the same positive mindset about change around you. Actually, I find that most of the team members in today’s generation of business workers start out with more creativity, innovation, and energy, and look to you as the leader role model on how to feel about change and deal with it.
Thus it is critical that you and other business leaders project a positive mindset on the realities of change, from the moment of hiring, in every communication, and providing rewards versus penalties for workers proposing new ideas. Here are my recommendations for how to get started:
1. Celebrate change as a learning opportunity. Remember when you were excited to learn new tools and processes and look forward to a better future. Nurture your creative instincts and set aside time for experimentation and innovation on your favorite passion, rather than endure the monotony of the same old thing. Make change an expectation.
2. Strive for a team of the best and the brightest. In business, you need a team to deliver. Spend more energy choosing the right people to work with you and communicate your expectations and guidance clearly. These people will support and incent you in making leaps forward, and you will learn leadership as well as new delivery skills.
3. Focus on responding quickly to customer demands. Leaders in business, including Amazon and Google, have found that initiating multiple timely experimental business changes leads to making non-linear steps forward, and failures are seen only as learning experiences. Plans with a long development cycle are often obsolete by time of delivery.
4. Concentrate on counting results, not hours worked. Enjoy results and new skills acquired rather than focusing on the hard work to get there. Experience should highlight the expansion of your knowledge on any subject, rather than simply doing the same thing over and over again without new thinking. Allow your experience to create breakthroughs.
5. Surviving global competition requires more big ideas. The era of a global marketplace is here, so you need to think bigger to stay in the lead. Be sure to use every means at your disposal, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to broaden your scope on innovation and customer cultures. Integrate multiple disparate small ideas to a great one.
All business change and real innovation must continue to begin with an intimate knowledge of your customer’s needs and evolving requirements. You can garner many of these easily by reviewing the Internet and participating in key social media platforms. There is still a place, however, for face-to-face customer interviews, usability forums, and formal satisfaction surveys.
The most customer-focused business leaders are already capitalizing on the recent increased sensitivity to higher-level values, cultures, and politics, which include saving the environment, helping disadvantaged cultures, and feeding the hungry. For examples, see Bombas for its unique buy-one-give-one model, and 4Ocean for its focus on environmental sustainability.
It is time today to build a positive mindset on the need in your team and yourself for business change. Not doing it will jeopardize the long-term viability of your business by reducing team engagement and satisfaction, as well as competitiveness. Be the role model your team needs, and really enjoy your role for a change.