14. I’m worried about adapting to change.

16 things keeping SME owners awake.

This might seem like cold comfort, but the universe doesn’t care about your taste for change. The truth is, change is occurring and you either embrace it or get left in the past. So, recognising you can’t hold back the tide, try some of these things to help get you in a more positive relationship with change.

Having growth as a factor in all your thinking is good for you. When you are looking for how to make things bigger and better will also help with keeping the less exciting things occurring around you in perspective.

Make a point of staying up to date with what’s going on in your market. New technologies, new ways of doing things, shifting tastes and new competitors are all really important for you to know about and if you embrace the opportunity rather than trying to protect the current position, you’ll be well equipped to remain relevant.

Contingency planning can be invigorating. Get together with your most trusted people and do some imagining what the future might look like. It isn’t about nailing what will happen because no-one knows exactly what that is, but it gets you match fit as a team who are outwardly focused and battle ready for whatever happens (and possibly even taking a lead.

Do you know what the hardest thing in business can be? It’s authentic feedback from your team, your suppliers and your customers and yet it is the most important thing you can ever seek. You don’t have to like the answers because they mightn’t match what you think about your business. What it does give you is a clinical and 360 view of how everyone other than you thinks about you. This feedback can be transformational if you choose to listen and act on the results.

Change requires flexibility. Find the middle ground between your long term vision and what the market is telling you. The truth is that they aren’t always right, but by the same token, neither are you. Flexibility/adaptability are the traits of someone who is in the game playing hard and if you can be gritty enough to keep your dream alive and be humble enough to hear what the market says, you’re way ahead of the game.

When you hear the word “change” it often has the frightening element of being unspecified in its scope. I’m suggesting that you take a disciplined approach to any change. Break it down into its component parts. By looking at elements in isolation, it will help you see how they all fit together and instead of wresting a monster, you’re responding to specific elements that you can manage without being overwhelmed.

How you talk to people in a change process is vital. There is an old saying that suggests this – if you want to know whether someone has mastery over a subject, get them to describe it so their elderly grandparents would understand it. If you talk to your people in densely layered jargon, it might just be that you’re not entirely sure of what you’re trying to say.

Change means different stresses and strains in different areas of the business. Just keep an eye out on where those changes are biting earliest and hardest and make sure you’re resourcing them appropriately.

There’s not much new under the sun and it is highly likely that what you’re experiencing in changing times has been experienced by others, both in your market sector and in divergent industries. For the most part, people who have been through significant events are happy to share their wisdom and insights. Don’t try and grimly push through alone. Talk to people and be humble enough to listen and learn from what they say.

Some of the best learning is done by leaping in the deep end and learning by trial and error. It can also be very expensive because while you’re fumbling about in the dark, others may just be taking advantage of expert training that can short circuit the “tripping over” part of learning. It’s seldom a mistake to seek training.

I talk a bit about continuous improvement. In the instance of adapting to change, use the close cousin of continuous improvement – iterative change. If you leap in and adjust all the levers and dials at the same time, you won’t know what thing made what difference. Be disciplined and make a small adjustment and then see what happens. If it works, bank that and make the next iterative change. This way you can make good progress at a pace that isn’t intimidating and if you have to row something back because it didn’t do what you thought, it’s not a major.

I know I’m going to sound like a bumper sticker here, but it can’t be helped. You can view the world as being full of problems and you’d be perfectly correct. It is. But, you can also choose to see the world as full of interesting challenges and your energy is going into finding solutions. Problems are scary, boring and pointless. Finding solutions is liberating to the mind, body and soul. I recommend choosing that.

Times of tumult can be very wearing on the team (and you). Find the places where you’ve made some progress and celebrate them. Life is all about contrast and if it’s all trudging forward one step at a time, people burn out. But, when the trudge is counter-pointed by a bit of silly frivolity it brings back the light and dark that make living interesting and rewarding.

Taking care of your people is a no-brainer. Any business owner worth their salt will always have an eye on this – right? Just as important is taking care of yourself. A word of caution here. It’s a really bad look for you to be extravagantly taking care of yourself and paying lip service to the team, so proportionality is the word here.

Adaptability isn’t something to be summoned for a heroic endeavour and then forgotten about. It is a state of mind that you really need to embrace and keep alive at all times because nothing stays the same forever and the requirement for you to adapt will come up again and again.

If at any stage you would like to reach out and talk in more detail about any or all these issues, or even ones that aren’t mentioned, please call me on +64 275 665 682, email me at john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz or book a time to talk, either face to face or by Zoom. Any call will be free, confidential and with no obligation to do anything else.