The 5 Habits Of Highly Resilient Businesses

Common traits that allow companies to emerge successfully, whatever their industry.

As any successful boxer will tell you, resilience is NOT the ability to take punches. It’s not about bouncing back from adversity; it’s about being able to move quickly, adapt to a situation, have awareness, and take advantage of the growth opportunities that emerge from disruption.

Look at any major crisis, and you’ll see that the most resilient organisations share several common traits that allow them to emerge successful, whatever their industry.

1 They think through the stages of recovery

Many companies approach disruptive events - like the COVID-19 pandemic - with a crisis management mindset: they focus on immediate actions aimed at getting through the worst of it. For resilient companies, this is only the first step. They also make sure they can hit the ground running in the aftermath.

There are numerous recovery models out there highlighting the importance of planning in phases, but I’m especially fond of Google’s: respond, rebuild and reframe. Importantly, you’ll find that it’s the rebuilding phase that’s often more predictive of success than the initial response.

Take Germany’s manufacturing sector during the 2008 financial crisis: they used the downtime caused by reduced demand to upskill workers and retool their ways of working. This helped the industry bounce back more quickly.