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Taking an organization through any type of transformative steps is, in theory, to make it something great. Taking it from something maybe good to making it great, making it a sustainable organization, a profitable organization, a company that is poised for long-term growth. But you will never have that, unless resiliency is really a bedrock of the culture. And there is a lot of ways to do that, but some of the elements of a resilient organization is obviously – or a resilient person or a resilient team, just like we have in the SEAL teams – we build resilient teams that are made up of resilient people and we bounce back from adversity on the battlefield better than our enemy.
And it’s not just a behavioral thing, it’s a mindset thing. And it’s an execution thing. But organizations that can have, let’s say, just a little bit of healthy paranoia – who are constantly looking for threats and opportunities. We’re running almost a constant SWOT analysis looking for our strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities that the organization either has today or will face tomorrow. Organizations that are resilient today are also doing a better job of replacing sort of old-school hierarchies with more dynamic, agile ecosystems of empowered teams and leaders, that increases team engagement. The more engaged your workforce is, the more resilient your organization will be, to again bounce back from whatever adversity you might face.
Adversity can come externally from market conditions that you don’t foresee. It can come quasi-external and internal, when let’s say your largest client that eats up 25 percent of your revenue leaves. Well, that’s obviously going to be a big change for an organization. But resilient organizations plan for those things. One of the things I talk about in the book and some of the case studies I focus on, are building resiliency into your business strategy, being financially solvent, planning for the future, having great talent acquisition programs that are constantly in motion, having great sales and marketing strategies that really continue to build a great brand that people love, that people emotionally connect to. And when you continue to build on those things, you build a very strong organization that’s not just outwardly strong against the competition, but it can navigate market volatility better. It can navigate internal issues the organization is facing better, and will ultimately be a financially healthier organization than other organizations that don’t focus on resiliency as a part of the business strategy.