Struggle Less, BE More

Be Conservative and Take Risks: The Work of a Leader

Are you an opportunist? Do you want to grow your business, even while everyone else is anticipating stagnation or even a decrease in growth?

Then you’ll need to be able to make a critical distinction between the two faces of your business: your internal operations and your work in the marketplace. Because, depending upon your industry, you might need to be conservative and “back to basics” when it comes to working on your business, but remain aggressive and innovative when it comes to serving your customers.

You see, many leaders can only hold one view, and then apply it to everything they do–as in “We’re going to hunker down and see if we can weather this storm.” While it might be the time to be prudent and conservative in many areas of your business, now might be the best time to really be innovative and try some new things when it comes to growing and expanding with your clients and markets.

But it’s easy to get stuck in all or none thinking. It can be hard to cut back in some ways and spend more aggressively in others.

So here are three ideas for helping you maintain a “let’s not dig ourselves into a hole” mentality AND a “let’s take advantage of this pause in the market to take the lead in our industry.”

1. Find a business or organization or leader who is clearly in high growth mode (even, especially in today’s economy), and spend more time paying attention to and hanging around them. You need constant reminder that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, not everyone is waiting for the economy to turn around…some are doing the turning! They can be your inspiration.

2. Increase your goals – basing them on wider possibilities for your future instead of on your worst economic predictions. Increase them based up your best ideas of what you could start and how you could develop, in spite of economic conditions. For sure, if you don’t have big, compelling goals, you’re very unlikely to reach them.

3. Encourage and support your people in taking risks, reaching out and developing work for the future—even as they are taking more prudent steps when it comes to spending in basic areas. In other words, it still makes sense to spend money in order to make money. And sometimes the most strategic steps from a growth standpoint would look foolish if viewed under the conservative spending magnifying glass.

Bottom line: Don’t be the leader who leads her own business to stagnation because you neglected to be the chief visionary and take bold steps toward the future.

(This post was previously published in the October 2010 issue of Business Leader http://www.businessleader.bz/ )