How to Lead and Grow during challenging times

​Leading people in challenging times, Positive Leadership in Challenging Times, becoming a Powerful Leader, Leading powerfully in when times are tough

Leadership skills becomes more sophisticated, more refined and more powerful during the tough, challenging and downturn period than in when times are good.

Tough and challenging times are actually the mirror, that shows us how good leader, we are and what we need to do to become even better leader.

Leading is never easy even during the good times, but the challenges change dramatically during the tough times of disruptive, uncertain and turbulent phases of business, life, global and various local scenarios.

How do you ensure that innovation, performance and positive morale sustain going through economic, technical-obsolesce, loss of business/customers and your people are seeing their team members laid off, projects cancelled, budgets reduced.

The bad news is there is no magic wand or cure to solve this inevitable happening from taking place, multiple times – during your this life-time.

But the wonderful news is, if you follow the fundamentals all the times, you would survive and maybe even thrive, if you manage to get your unique formula for growth.

We shall be talking about strategies that we need to imbibe in our DNA, our culture, our employees, ourselves that can help us bounce back, get up from each shock and shake that life treats us with, every time.

We first need to understand that, not all the changes caused by hard times are bad.

In fact, with good leadership practices through increasing their focus on critical components those are essential for sustainable success, and by setting Higher standards and greater demands for efficiency – businesses and people can break the ceilings [where they are stuck] and transit into much higher level than they could in absence of the totally disruptive causes.

The skills that we need to nurture in ourselves encompasses, learning the following, and becoming more effective in doing all these by continuous improvement, unlearning, re-learning and improvisations to fit the changing scenario/situation/people etc.

1.Managing-yourself better and better emotionally, financially, mentally, physically, socially, stress-wise/uncertainty-wise/failure-wise etc* - read my separate blogs on these
2.Leading your team more effectively
3.Managing the Situation more effectively, and ensuring that next time it doesn't happen[although there is no guarantee, that the situation/ crises won't happen, you can definitely become better in facing and standing up again]

All the changes can only begin when we start focusing on our inner self-realization, re-engineering and recreating a newer being.

Understanding our own personality and how we respond, react, think and act under stress, which of our strengths and weaknesses become more evident and which have the biggest impact on others.

Understand that as a Leader, you too would often feel vulnerable* read my blog this to make it your most powerful leadership tool.

Understand that as a leader you don't have to come up with all the answers on your own, instead you need to facilitate idea generation and use the resources available within your team.

Because this is the best antidote to stressful and uncertain times - As when the stress continues, fatigue sets in and people become overly pessimistic about the future.

The things to avoid as a Leader, because if you get sucked by the following temptations, you may not utilize the opportunity that this hardship presents

1.Looking and acting panicked
2.Blaming people openly, even though there could be legitimate reasons for you to do so
3.To react, by letting your emotions control youir response, actions and decisions
4.Assuming, generalizing, distorting, avoiding, magnifying, being short-sighted so as not to be able to visualize a better future
5.To publicly admonish an employee, whose mistake has caused this or some other related set-back
6.Not to share and withholding information, facts and the situation
7.To delay taking hard decisions

Managing Your Business During Tough Challenging Economic and Market Scenario

1.Cash-flow recharging by collecting outstanding debts, using and rewarding the behaviors of your employees that improves cash flow, innovating to create promotions that drives cash flow, selling unnecessary assets, seek better terms from your vendors
2.Increasing your PROFITABILITY through selling those items that gives you better margins, using 80/20 principal, focusing on profitable customers
3.Explore and identify the emerging trend, that can be profitable, geared up and prepare to take advantage of being an early player
4.If nothing works, create an exit strategy which takes care of selling or passing on the business, merging, closing down the business, liquidating and forced closure
5.Find New opportunity – if you are not convinced then read about stories greatest business turn around
6.Recreate your business value proposition from the perspective of your clients – redesigns your products/services/offerings
7.Create innovative customer engagement strategies, to be in touch with the customer and also to understand their needs and customize your offer
8.Create partnership with your key vendors
9.Create a cost-optimization options
10.Make Lean Manufacturing Concepts a culture and way of everyone's thinking and doing to minimize wastages
11.Focus on relationships with employees, retailers, customers meaning all your 360 degree connections
12.If you need to take some really unpleasant, unpopular and tough yet un-avoidable decisions, just take it
13.Expect the best from everyone and reward it
14.Take care of your own self* manage stress better* read about these in my relevant blogs
15.Practice on developing mindset of focusing on seeing opportunity instead of surviving
16.Get into a learning mode, ensure that you and your organization both are what is termed as a learning organization
17.Assume nothing, identify and challenge all your assumptions and also encourage your team members to do so
18.Ensure that you are communicating both verbally, visually, 1-on-1, to the group and with every stakeholder in a transparent manner
19.Empower your people to expand their horizon of capabilities, knowledge, authority based on solid values
20.Simplify processes
21.Always do a thorough investigation and analysis of the mistakes and failures as well as the successes to identify and implement the lessons learned
22.Don't take your employee's anger personally & neither come down on them heavily because you are stressed* learn how to manage setbacks and failures from my blog
23.Intercept and kills rumors immediately at the source in a transparent way
24.Create your vision for the future, make employees excited by involving them in the decision making about the future roles and rewards
25.Create clarity at every stage
26.Understand the drivers of innovation and focus your energies, effort and time on "Innovate or die" of Tom Peter's concept to find, fin-tune and improvise strategies to manage the present and take actions towards future vision
27.Encourage your employees to take risk and recognizes and encourage them to take initiative, challenge and ideate and innovate