Ed Valdez, Partner & CMO with Chief Outsiders, recently summarized six important steps that dealers can take to navigate their business through the COVID-19 pandemic and onward.
The steps were drawn from a Harvard Business Review article, Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus. Valdez recaps the six most pressing actions businesses need to take to ensure the health and safety of employees, centralize communications, and stabilize operations to be able to move forward toward recovery.
The steps are as follows:
Update Intelligence Daily: Mobilize your leadership team daily to make the most out of rapidly changing information and identify what is essential for the sake of efficiency, effectiveness, and the wellbeing of employees. Try using channels such as Microsoft Team, Google Hangouts Chat, Zoom, Slack, and others for real-time connection.
Constantly Reframe and Adapt: “The higher you grow, the deeper you bow.” Look at the big picture and decide what is considered urgent versus what is important. And be flexible and open to change.
Choose Agility vs. Bureaucracy: Embrace an agile mindset and regularly evaluate what you need to stop doing, start doing, or continue to do.
Balance Your Response in 7 Areas: Communications, employee needs, travel, remote work, stabilizing the supply chain, business tracking/forecasting, and being part of the broader solution. Constantly reassess alignment across all operations, and particularly in the area of customer support.
Use 6 Resilience Principles: Redundancy, diversity, modularity, evolvability, prudence, and embeddedness. Encourage diverse thinking. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Prepare for the Next Crisis: Plan for the unexpected and what may be in your blind spot. What else can happen that we haven’t anticipated? And do we have a plan for it? “What do these plans look like from the view of the supply chain, partners, operations/logistics, our customers and all stakeholders and/or investors?”
To read the original article by Harvard Business Review, click here.
