Sometimes we concentrate so hard on overall resilience and business continuity that we neglect another vital aspect – the resilience of individuals in the organisation. While it’s true that there is often a positive spill-over from enterprise to employee, people need attention just as much as processes. Resilient people are better able to plan, execute and manage crises if they have to. Take a look at the list of characteristics below. If you think about how these points could be applied at a personal as well as at an organisational level, you’ll already be a big step ahead.
- Keep a sense of perspective. Business continuity planning gives you simple and effective methods to measure risk and decide priorities, methods individual can apply for themselves too.
- Set goals, go after them and leverage successes. Building resilience in an enterprise is often a case of setting manageable, achievable goals, and getting increasing support as each one is met. The same works for your personal goals too.
- Make the effort to communicate well. Communication skills can be learnt if you feel you don’t quite have them at the moment. The better you communicate BC objectives and results to your colleagues, the more resilience you’ll build up personally too – a mutually reinforcing cycle.
- Follow good advice you have given to others. Whether it’s good BC practices for staying in business or healthy eating for staying in shape, you owe it to yourself to ‘walk the talk’ too.
- Consider change as part of life. Nothing stays the same. Nothing ever has. Life is change. When you accept that notion, you’re already half-way to managing it.
- Act decisively. Use information, use tools, communicate with others to get points of view, decide on a plan and do it (get any third-party support you need as well). If you make mistakes, accept that this is always a risk and handle them effectively. But with the resilience checklist above, you’ll probably be making fewer mistakes anyway.