Countless COVID-19 impacted business leaders could benefit fromthe support a business mentor or coach can provide.
In the current challenging conditions, business on your owncan be difficult, especially when you’re trying to ensure your business’ survival or maximise its potential. There are numerous strategies and approaches you can take and many issues to deal with.
A close relationship with a business mentor or coach gives you access to confidential support and lets you tap into their broad business experience. You get honest, confidential feedback and an independent sounding board.
H2: How Business Mentoring Can Help
Business mentoring can help find common concerns on strategic issues among business leaders, including:
- Maintaining safe environments for their people, customers, and suppliers
- Improving service and looking after customers
- Focus on how to retain their best people
- Consistent and clear communication to their people, customers, suppliers and community
- Growing revenue faster
- Getting sufficient sales and marketing effort and CRM activity
- Improving cash flow
- Looking critically at cost structures for quick wins
- Developing what the future will look like for the business
- Planning for post-crisis organisation, marketing and sales efforts and operations
- Dealing with and ramping up morale and productivity at all levels
- Setting up efficient, collaborative and productive remote working
- Re-focusing and refining the business’s focus, purpose, values and mission
- Improving quality and speed of decision-making at all levels
- Reassessing risks and containment strategies
- Emphasising and developing better performance and leadership
The issues above and many more are currently challenging business leaders, but help is available from a business mentor who can provide confidential support.
Highlighting one difficult area for leadership is the focus on looking after and retaining key staff. This can be emotionally draining, as many staff are valued, long-standing, loyal colleagues with excellent work performance history, who may have become demoralised, less productive or making poor judgements due to stress. Further, some key staff have unfortunately become surplus to requirement as the COVID-19 crisis has deepened and market requirements have changed.
During COVID-19, the supports from governments have been highly welcomed by the community at large and business leaders in particular. These have critically supported people and businesses to maintain their businesses and jobs. However, these supports will eventually be phased out. And given the inevitable changes required in business strategy, there will be difficult decision-making due to the significantly altered staffing requirements for many businesses. Potential changes in staff requirements may be significant in specific businesses. This change in staff requirements will be driven by shifts in demand by customers and by required changes to the mix of skills, experience and numbers of staff needed to operate and adapt. Business leaders will need to deal effectively with the new emerging economic reality of their business sectors and markets by quickly adapting their business organisations, including people, to compete in the post COVID-19 competitive environment. Strategic shifting provides the best opportunity to remain afloat.
H2: Examples of Strategic Shifts
Strategic shifts impacting organisational structures and people can include:
- Increased demand for online buying and therefore a greater need for more people in online marketing, operational and delivery skills
- Operational changes will flow from the increased flexible workforce continuing to work remotely
- Operational structural changes due to a significant reduction in demand for bricks and mortar office space and the potential reductions in related office staff
A business mentor or coach can work with you to clarify your major issues or concerns and help you towards the best possible solutions. If you need to be confidentially challenged and supported in these difficult times, reach out to a business mentoring professional today.
