What is business resilience and why does it matter?

This article is written by Dr Alison Miles, Programme Director Help to Grow Management, Bristol Business school.

Resilience means different things to different people. For most of us, it is rooted in our capacity to cope with the changes and challenges of life.

You probably don’t need reminding that you are the key to your business. Your passion, enthusiasm, energy and refusal to give up are what keeps you and the business going.

Resilience is made up of all of those things. It is what keeps us going, bouncing back and getting up every morning. You can think of resilience like the water in a watering can. If it is full, you have plenty of energy, passion and enthusiasm to give to your business, but if it is running low, you and, therefore, the business struggle.

The ability to adapt quickly to changes and challenges is one of the key characteristics of an SME (small to medium-sized enterprise) leader and a central component in resilience.  

In order to be adaptable, SME leaders need the ability to think creatively and innovatively but when our resilience levels are low, we feel stressed and anxious. This causes our ‘fight, flight or freeze response’ which is a problem because in that state, we cannot be creative and innovative. So how can we keep our resilience levels topped up?

Our passion for what we do is essentially the watering can from the analogy above. If it has holes in it, the resilience is going to drain out. Take a moment to think of your day-to-day activities. Are you still doing the things that led you to start this business or take the role? If not, why not?

If you are working on tasks which you can do, but are not passionate about, you can become bored and fed up. Worse still, working in areas where you have no passion and feel you do not have the knowledge or expertise to do the job well is an uncomfortable place and will send you (or your team) into resilience depletion quicker than anything else.

It is not always easy to refocus but taking small ‘1 degree’ turns towards increasing the time you and your team spend on the areas of the business you are passionate about will help. If you are now spending all your time managing people and not making or delivering the project or service you are passionate about, think about how you might be able to merge these roles. You and the business will feel better for it.

It is very easy to lose perspective even when things are going well, and this is magnified when we feel overwhelmed. Sometimes the business seems to be getting away from us, whether it’s growing too fast and we are exhausted trying to keep up, or it seems to have problem after problem. These issues become magnified, growing larger and larger, a little like the ‘big bad mouse’ in the children’s book ‘The Gruffalo’.

The best course of action here is to turn around and face the issue."

The challenge will then shrink back to its correct size and then you can begin to deal with it, one step at a time. One way to gain perspective on these problems is to ‘walk back the cat’.

Maybe you took some time off and are now coming back to a missed order, or an irate customer. It is easy to think ‘well I am never going to go away again’ but instead, look at the issue and ‘walk back the cat’. To ‘walk back the cat’ is to analyse a sequence of steps in order to find out what set a negative situation in motion.

This means looking at what happened like running a film backwards. Look at each ‘frame’ or event to see what was happening at that moment. As you keep going back, frame by frame, you will see exactly where and when the issue happened, and what was happening just before it, and just before that, etc.  Keep going until you find the reason for the issue. Once you have all the information, you can look to see if or how you can stop it happening again.

An effective way to increase your resilience and keep it topped up is to have people you can talk to but think carefully about who you choose. Your family will have your personal interests at heart and may not understand business issues. Fellow directors, partners, or your team may not want to hear that ‘actually at this moment, I really don’t want to do this anymore!’ (and yes, most of us have had that thought on multiple occasions).

One of the most important aspects of the Help to Grow: Management Course is the opportunity to meet other people in the same situation. Even though the businesses are all different sizes and sectors, the issues are generally the same. The relationships that are built during the 12-week course often continue afterwards with some alumni continuing to meet monthly and share both their successes and their issues. The trust and friendships that arise has led to these SME leaders reporting higher resilience levels and greater successes in their businesses.

Find out more about the Help to Grow: Management Course and how it can help you find a peer network here.