Recession Resilience & Agility - RRA

The Problem BSG Discovered: Peacetime leadership is fundamentally different than wartime. How prepared is the executive team as a WHOLE to weather the next business storm, whether the next economic recession, trade war, competitor incursion, or industry transformational innovation?
The Solution BSG Developed: Recession, Resilience & Agility - Have the entire team assessed for gap analysis focused on resilience & agility, the 2 biggest contributors to “grit” and those who are better able to persevere and pivot.
What is it? A specially tuned psychometric assessment that stress-tests an executive’s leadership “grit”—their propensity to be able to effectively & efficiently respond, recover, and redirect the business in the face of business headwinds—economic, internal or external—that may require a pivot for the business.

Assesses either incumbent executives or prospective executive candidates on the resilience/agility axis, the 2 most important criteria for executive success in the face of adversity—recession, industry shake-out, unexpected international trade tariff impacts, competitive leap-frogging (“Amazonization” of one’s industry), etc.
Peacetime leadership is fundamentally different than wartime—determining the make-up of the executive team. How prepared is the executive team as a WHOLE to weather the next business storm? Have the entire team assessed for gap analysis and weakness probing.

A Widespread Need

Seven out of 10 executives say that their organizations experienced disruptive change during the last year. And more than 80% say that the pace of change is speeding up in organizations all over the world [American Management Association 2018 survey].

Understand Key Factors

Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make a person resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Key to resilience agility is the ability to work with ambiguity.

Key Definitions

Agility

The capacity for moving quickly, flexibly, and decisively in anticipating, initiating, and taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding any negative consequences of change.

Resiliency

The capacity for resisting, absorbing, and responding, even reinventing if required, in response to fast and/or disruptive change that cannot be avoided.

Balancing Attention to Agility and Resiliency

It is tempting to think that the pace of change can best be matched by building agility, while the disruptiveness of change is best matched by building resiliency. In this scenario, fast-paced markets are met with speedy product innovation, and severe setbacks are offset with robust response management. However, it is risky to overemphasize either agility or resiliency to the exclusion of the other. The strong correlation between the two concepts in our study indicates that they are different but indeed linked. Agility and resiliency are both essential, and they must both be actively developed, although the relative emphasis given to each may vary over time as the relative pace and disruptiveness of change varies. The task is gauging which of the two is needed most at a point in time. To do so requires having multiple, explicit, agreed-upon metrics and indicators of when agility and resiliency are being excessively pressured due to environmental conditions. Gaming and simulations of a variety of extreme situations, along with taking every opportunity for candid debriefs of actual failures and poor performance, become important ways of identifying those indicators.

WHO IS BSG? AN INSIDER LOOK AT OUR EXECUTIVE SEARCH FIRM

We get asked a lot of questions. That is natural—after all, when you're considering who to place your trust in for a high-level upcoming executive search you're going to need to cover all the details up front. But in our 20-year experience we have detected a clear pattern of the most frequently asked questions and concerns from prospective clients.

We've gone ahead and compiled them here, as answered by Managing Director Clark Waterfall. He's (quite literally) heard it all and answered it all before. We invite you to join him and get to know BSG.

Recession Resilience Agility

RESEarch behind the RRA tool

WHO IS BSG? AN INSIDER LOOK AT OUR EXECUTIVE SEARCH FIRM

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