7 Ways Resourceful Companies Navigate Turbulence

In turbulent times, companies must discover what kind of adjustments are right for them to stay relevant. It can seem overwhelming. But there are a few ways to think about resourcefulness to help companies of any size manage through stressful environments.

In our Dandelion Strategy model, resourcefulness is key. Dandelions send down a taproot first and go deep so the plant can hang out all winter and wait for the perfect time to emerge. This foundation gives them some stability for the battle ahead. By the time you see what's going on the dandelion is way ahead of you. The dandelion has a plan for survival—but it also looks out for the surrounding ecosystem. They bring up nutrients that help surrounding plants. They loosen and aerate the soil in some places and hold on to it in others to fight erosion. They even fertilize the ground around them ... and people rave about the iron and Vitamins A, C and K, Folate, Calcium, and Potassium dandelions add to salads.

How would you rate your brand on resourcefulness? How do you take advantage of the opportunities around you? How are you using what you learn?

Dial up your resourcefulness with these seven steps:

1. Embrace the chaos. Business and life are rarely linear. When you plan for the chaos and build teams that can adjust on the run, challenges are just puzzles to be solved. And you can hire good puzzle solvers.

   Computer programmers and mathematicians use chaos theory, instead. This says that instead of keeping to a predictable pattern, we’d be better off—and find solutions faster—by moving in non-linear ways. The author and economist Tim Harford put it this way: “When everything is perfect, when everything is tidy, we're on autopilot. And we're not necessarily living in the moment, we're not necessarily paying attention. And that's a problem for us.” Embrace the chaos, live in the moment, and thrive in the turbulence.

2. Listen to the people on the front lines. That’s where people are making real-time adjustments to the market and customer and supply chain issues to keep things rolling.

   Plenty of companies put up posters or engage in employer branding campaigns to motivate staff or remind employees that their ideas matter. Those can be effective. They can also be vacuous and empty. What we’re talking about here is really listening to the people who see and hear the needs, frustrations, wishes every day. I’m always surprised at how many amazing—and amazingly simple—solutions come out of conversations with the teams on the ground. Management can’t see it all and should never think it is their job to solve every issue. Get on the ground, listen, and act on the information provided.

3. Expand your market. You may need to change your game a bit. Some say if your organization is not evolving, it is dying! How are you evolving to meet new, emerging demands?

   Uber launched UberEats in 2016 in mostly large markets. By 2018 they were expanding into smaller markets and competing with challengers like DoorDash and GrubHub. Adoption wasn’t hitting the numbers everyone wanted in part because consumers saw food delivery as a solution to a problem they didn’t have, and restaurant owners saw the costs as too high. Then the pandemic happened and restaurants were effectively shut down. This put UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub, and the rest of the delivery industry in the spotlight as viable and necessary solutions to both consumer demand and restaurants staying in business. To put this expansion into perspective, consider that Uber made $10.4 billion in 2019 from its legacy business, but only $7.3 billion in 2021. Over that same time, Uber Eats grew from $1.9 billion to $8 billion in revenue.

4. Consider new ways to deliver your product or service. If customers can’t get to you, how do you get to them? How can you meet them halfway? If you can’t stock what you had before, how can you still deliver delight and surprise for your customers?

   For example, there are all kinds of rumblings about looming toy shortages this Christmas. That’s going to be a problem but it’s not top of mind yet. It will be. If Christmas is part of your game, how could you change the game and be the hero?

5. Partner with other businesses. Dandelions don’t just look out for themselves. And neither should you. Who else could help you thrive? How could you help them? How could you link arms with companies offering adjacent services so your combined services solve even more challenges for your customers?

   During a past recession I worked with a company that specialized in community waste services dominated by mom and pop operations. We found their customers couldn’t afford to take a week off to attend elaborate trade shows in Vegas. We interviewed a number of these business owners and found they wanted the information and exposure to new ideas, but all of that had to be more convenient for them. Our solution was to partner with adjacent companies and conduct regional shows so customers could drive over—not fly—get the information they needed and get back home the same day. It solved a number of issues for the manufacturers and their customers.

6. Stay connected with your customers. What’s your feedback loop? Who’s keeping their finger on the pulse? Make sure the person or people you put in charge of monitoring customer feedback are in the right seat. Look for someone who thrives on collecting information (good and bad), mining for insights that can make a difference, and then turning those insights into actionable data.

   I once worked with a start-up company that had a senior leader in charge of monitoring customer response. According to reports inside the company, customers were in great shape and loved everything about the brand. By contrast, a little social listening indicated the company was far behind on deliveries, didn’t return phone calls, and was quickly building a reputation for bait and switch. It turned out that the executive was only responding to good news from customers. He was ignoring the complaints. And those complaints were piling up. The company had to put another exec in place fast to save and rebuild the company’s reputation.

7. Celebrate the lessons. I encourage you to build a learning culture, not just a good news culture. In good news cultures, executives make it clear that all they want to hear is what worked, the good news. Bad news is punished as are the people responsible for it. As a result, people learn to avoid risk because taking chances means you might fail. And failure of any type could get you fired. That’s never the case in resourceful and innovative companies. They stretch, they stumble, they bump into things. Take 3M, for example. Scotch tape and Post-it Notes are just two of the many products that came to life because 3M empowered their people to tinker outside of their box. Scotch added adhesive to cellulose strips for an auto body paint masking solution while Post-it repurposed a light adhesive that didn’t have a reason to exist into a tool used all over the world.

   Resourceful companies do exactly that. Like 3M, they give people permission to try new things and stray from their normal course of work. Sure, some of those things won’t work, some will underperform, and some might take off into outer orbit.

   That’s why it’s important to celebrate the lessons learned and share the highs and lows as a group. Google’s former Head of People Operations Laszlo Bock stated in his book, Work Rules!, “it’s also important to reward failure” so as to encourage risk-taking. Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, said, “At Intuit, we celebrate failure. Literally: Intuit has a Greatest Failure Award. Because every failure teaches something important that can be the seed for the next great idea.”

   Resourcefulness requires being able to imagine solutions that don’t exist yet. That kind of thinking happens best when people feel safe from prosecution within the company. Build a culture that enables courageous thinking and exploration. Celebrate what you learn and grow from them.

What ways have you found to be resourceful in these turbulent times? Let us know by commenting below.

Does grace have a place in business?

Grace isn't something people talk about in the office. It's the kind of touchy-feely emotional connection executives can't quantify and therefore don't want to address. Yet it's exactly the kind of connection more executives could learn to use to transform their organizational culture.

I run into the fundamental attribution error in executives in all kinds of companies. If you're not familiar with the term, it's when we assign someone else's actions as tied to their core personality when we give ourselves a pass for the same actions. It's easy for us to say someone else is stupid or irresponsible when they make a mistake and without even thinking about it excuse our own similar actions as being influenced by factors like schedule, stress, distractions, etc.

We give ourselves grace for our issues but quickly blame others as fundamentally flawed for the same issues. Even worse is when we blame others for problems we've caused them.

I've found that in healthy business cultures, people work hard to do the right thing most of the time. And in pushing forward they make mistakes for all the right reasons. When those mistakes are made, management owes it to their teams to have some grace. We could all use a lot more grace.

Four Principles for Being a Better Communicator

It’s been said that a confused prospect never buys. Know yourself, know your stuff, know your audience, and know what success looks like, and you too can be a successful communicator.

Nosce te ipsum—Know Thyself

In the world of effective sales and communication it boils down to one simple truth: People buy you before they buy your product or service.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve heard the aphorism, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Usually this was said in the context of making sure I didn’t screw up some big performance or meeting. It’s been applied to everything from code of conduct to dress to presentations and proposals to tone of voice and eating style.

One of the best and hardest experiences of my life was selling books door to door for two summers for the Southwestern Company while in college. During an intense week of Sales School, in which hundreds of college students from around the country are taught how to sell, one of the fundamental ideas driven home is that people buy you first and whatever you have to sell eventually, maybe. For a student trying to pay for college selling door to door, it’s an easy concept to adopt because you know beyond a doubt that you aren’t that good at selling anything and, if you have any hope of surviving the summer, people had better think you’re a decent person.

But there’s more to it than just being decent. People tend to make decisions at a gut level, emotionally, very quickly and decide whether you’re worth their time or not. When you’re selling door to door, your prospects check you out before they open the door. If they determine you’re not a threat, you might get a chance at pitching your goods. It’s what happens in speed dating: in just a few minutes we believe we can determine whether the person sitting across from us is worth another cup of coffee. Scientists call these kinds of snap judgments rapid cognition.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, addressed the idea of rapid cognition, where decisions are made in one to two seconds and at a gut level before your rational mind has a chance to catch up. I liken it to the average couch potato racing Olympic world record holder Usain Bolt in a 100-meter race. Bolt would sprint down the track, cross the finish line, change his shoes and grab a drink before Mr. Potato stumbled to some sort of ending.

Science tells us over and over that most of us feel a long time before we understand. In communication, that feeling is hugely important because you must know that the people you’re communicating with feel a connection with you—or don’t—in only seconds. So your well-prepared message, your 200-slide PowerPoint deck, your incredibly detailed logical, rational discourse on your topic du jour doesn’t stand a chance if your audience is turned off by you in the first few seconds and certainly first few minutes of your engagement.

This means you need to know you very well; your strengths, your weaknesses, your presentation style, when you tend to oversell or shut down, what you evade and your natural biases. Self-awareness helps you avoid some obvious social landmines so you don’t stumble in your first impression.

How you dress and speak are somewhat obvious elements as well. If you overdress for a casual discussion, or wear shorts to an executive presentation, you communicate that you don’t know your audience. Since we tend to prefer people who are like us, your social mismatch can close down the pitch before you get started. And your audience may never tell you why you missed.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth your time and money to look into some type of personality assessment tool, like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or DiSC. These tools can help you understand how you're wired and how the rest of the world may see you.

Know Your Stuff

Clarity starts with company purpose then cascades down to what products the company makes or services it offers.

I’m always amazed by how many people show up to presentations underprepared to talk about their own products or company. It’s a fundamental element of sales and good communication—you must know what you’re talking about. So get and be prepared.

You can’t sell what you don’t know. Why does your company exist? Why should anyone care that you are here and why would they care if you went away? According to the Meaningful Brands Index released annually by Havas Media, 73% of all brands could disappear and consumers wouldn’t care. The study covers brand authenticity, brand stories and brands contributing to the overall well-being of society.

I work with a range of clients every year to clarify and define their authentic story. We’ve found that companies without some fundamental purpose beyond making money have a hard time rallying the troops within the organization, and confuse their customers as well.

You might ask, “What does company purpose have to do with good communication?” The answer is simple: when you don’t first understand your organizational purpose, you run the risk of chasing after any shiny object. When that happens, two people from the same organization may have a difficult time telling the same story about their company, or the products and solutions that company offers.

Become an expert in your own company, its products and services, its history and legacy stories. If you're selling a service, you owe it to yourself and to your audience to know exactly what you can and can’t do, how your product is different and better than the competition, and how to solve the challenges your audiences face. Once you have the details down, you will be able to tailor your communication to suit your audiences. Not everyone is going to be excited about the same things, so you must be able to adjust. But you can’t adjust if you don’t have the fundamental knowledge to draw from in your conversation.

Know Your Audience

People desire information that addresses what they need, so you stand a better chance of making a true connection if you start with what’s most important to them.

We humans are a selfish lot. We think about ourselves first and often. Think you’re different? Find a group picture with you in it. Who do you look for first? That’s right, you. Most people do. Then we find the people we like in the photo, then the people we don’t like (just in case they look bad in the photo) and finally, if there’s time, the other people who just happened to be sharing our space at the moment the photo was taken. It’s natural, it’s human, and it’s the way your audience thinks every time you try to communicate. You have to know they are more interested in themselves than they are in you. So it makes sense to understand what you’re up against.

In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey identified one habit as “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Making it a habit is exactly the point. In sales and communication you have to overcome your own desire to talk about yourself and whatever you have on your mind. Your audience is looking for information based on what they need. Seek first to understand them, then move on to help them understand how you and your product or service might solve a problem.

Just as personality tests help you figure out your communication style, they can also offer some barometer to measure your audience. Some people like big stories, some just want the facts. Some want to know you’ll always be there and cover all the details along the way. The faster you can read your audience the better chance you have of effectively communicating and closing a sale.

Know What Success Look Like

Start with the end in mind, and make sure both parties share in the spoils.

Stephen Covey also said to “think win-win”. In its base form that’s all there is to it. You need to have some idea of what an ideal outcome is—and that outcome should always include some form of shared value. Unbalanced outcomes aren’t sustainable for the simple reason that we humans like things to work in our favor. Bend the odds too far in one direction and the other party is eventually going to opt out of the deal. This is true in relationships, marriages, business deals and trips to the casino.

When you begin your conversations with the idea that the outcome will be good for both parties, you are more likely to look for positive compromise and stay open to creative solutions to the challenges on the table. Since both you and your audience ultimately want to win, it only makes sense to build your conversation from that angle and work to help both sides succeed.

Effective communication doesn’t have to be tricky or difficult. It’s one of the reason I use the tagline “logical branding.” When you apply these four principles—know yourself, know your stuff, know your audience and know what success looks like— conversations, sales calls, ads, social media posts and more just seem to end well on a more regular basis.