In times of crisis, it is common to feel trapped, challenged and often border on desperation. Emotions overwhelm us, the gaze of others takes on ghostly proportions and we project scenarios that terrify us and limit our intellectual capacity to make decisions.
We fear the dissolution of our ties. Guilt, fear, and terror of failure invade us. Many crises extend over time and the attrition process is very significant.
"In adversity lies the seed of opportunity."
It's one thing to say it, it's another thing tolive it.
Managing the crisis is one of the greatest skills that an entrepreneur can develop.
It is true that in the midst of the deepest crises, we can discover our strengths, reinvent ourselves and, finally, take our companies to another level, opening new paths of growth.
We can prepare, manage risks, anticipate scenarios, understand what to expect. shocks will impact what way to our business model and prepare contingency plans, but the truth is that the greatest learning in crisis management occurs during the crisis.
Emotional intelligence plays a fundamental role. Effective emotional management, based on our self-knowledge and empathy with others, is essential to enhance our leadership and maintain the calm and pro-activity of our teams.
In a crisis context, our ability to manage our emotions and accompany those of our team makes a significant difference.
Of course it must be accompanied by our intellectual capacity for diagnosis to be able to clearly understand the impacts on our business model and its actors and find the paths and opportunities. It is essential to focus, define and communicate a clear strategy.
The bad news is that a more volatile and dynamic world will present us with infinite shocks that will impact our business models. It will be It will be impossible to avoid the crisis, and the crises will be recurrent. Remember that the business world replaces the paradigm of efficiency with that of flexibility.
The good news is that the skill of change management sustaining, seeing the opportunity and taking advantage of crises is internalized, it is learned. Each subsequent crisis is handled with another level of experience, self-knowledge, and peace of mind. We find mechanisms to gradually move through them in a different way and make them easier for the rest of the team.
At the beginning of the COVID crisis, having access to the issue quickly (I lived in Hong Kong at the time) and even with minimal information available, I published and the following tips went viral on Linkedin. I close the article with this practical example.
Above all, I recommend that you not go through the crisis without asking for help. It is a moment of enormous vulnerability, but let yourself be accompanied by people who have done it before.
I invite you to share your experiences, comments and tag colleagues who may benefit from this article or the content of my newsletter.
