Business leaders are in a precarious position. Uncertainty and volatility continue to characterize the global markets, giving rise to an onslaught of ever-changing challenges.
As consumer buying preferences change, venture capital slows, and economic turmoil adds pressure from multiple angles, some companies will falter. At the same time, other businesses’ bottom lines are climbing up and to the right. This disparity begs the question: Why do certain companies thrive through uncertainty, while others do not?
The average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 index has shrunk by more than one-third since the mid-1960s. But through multiple economic crises, many businesses across industries have persisted. These organizations not only navigated uncertainty, but learned to turn it into a competitive advantage. While different factors contributed to success, there lies a common denominator: Enduring companies master driving behavioral change at scale.
In nature, the species that survive are those that adapt by changing their behavior. Business is no different. Your company’s survival depends upon effectively enabling each of your employees, especially those responsible for revenue, to change their behavior to meet new priorities, contexts, and demands placed upon them.
A business is only as adaptable as its people. And in a world where change is the only constant, agile adaptation is everything.
Far too often, proactive leaders create new business strategies to address changing times, only to watch them languish on the frontlines, as their teams conduct business as usual without as much as a nod to the new approach. In fact, 70 percent of change initiatives fail, according to Harvard Business Review. From a big picture point of view, if your team is unable to turn new strategies into action, your company is unable to evolve. And in a dynamic world, no evolution means extinction.
While simple in theory, driving behavioral change is complex in practice. Humans are not only creatures of habit – we are hardwired to resist change. When our known status quo is disrupted, the brain kicks into high gear, interpreting the change as a threat to our well-being and releasing the hormones for fight or flight. That’s why no matter how good the new idea or initiative is, people’s first instinct is to resist it.
So, what can business leaders do to overcome what’s only natural? It starts with recognizing that your teams need more from you than what you’ve likely given them in the past. Rather than tossing a strategy over the fence and expecting teams to adopt it, as can be the de facto method of doing things at many organizations, invest the time and energy in creating a scalable system that helps your people deeply understand your strategy and the role they play in it, time and time again.
The key to unlocking behavioral change is to equip, train, and coach your teams – only when the foreign becomes the familiar will they be capable of taking action to bring your strategy to life.
By equipping your employees with the resources they need, training them on everything they need to know and do, and coaching them to be successful, you will enable your people to adapt. Highspot has taken this approach and achieved strong revenue growth as a result, as have hundreds of our customers, many of which have entered the public markets in the last two years.
Looking forward, the world will continue to change, as it has for millennia. Humans are brilliantly capable of adaptation – but we’re also not sharks or crocodiles with millions of years of evolutionary practice. People need support. By giving your teams everything they need to change for the better, you’ll be setting your company up for success to endure resiliently, through uncertainty and beyond.
