Most Companies would have started their year with an exciting business plan and stretch targets/ objectives geared to how 2020 was meant to go. The UAE had been working tirelessly to build the infrastructure required for the highly anticipated event of the decade, Expo 2020. Business in the UAE was planned to be booming with much needed growth. However, when a global pandemic is announced, any business plan would have been placed in a drawer as businesses had to immediately react to lockdown, remote working and often placing the business into survival mode. As the world starts to emerge from lockdown and Companies start opening their doors again to their Employees and customers, a mistake that managers could make is to assume the business plan and objectives they had set are still relevant and to try and carry on as business as usual, forgetting they have pivoted, that this way of life is the new normal and we have to learn to live and work with the restrictions that are here for many months to come.
Business shouldn’t wait for things to get back to normal, but rather accept this new normal and implement strategies accordingly. Mike Hoff The Source
With this in mind, now is the perfect time to regroup your senior management team and get focused on some creative strategic thinking underway. We have found that CEOs or MDs who sit down weekly, for a couple of hours, with their key 5 to 7 senior executives and look beyond the current year creates a very positive mindset amongst themselves and the rest of the company as the vision filters throughout the organisation. This also allows the executive team to keep a close eye on emerging trends, something that will be vital as the world emerges from the worst loss of GDP in history. The speed of change is now showing itself to be vital for businesses to recognise that it is imperative to avoid procrastination as every day counts as we restart the economy locally and globally. It is the local Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) that form a huge percentage of country’s economy, often more that 95%, that will be the foundation of our recovery. The leaders of these businesses must pivot, adapt and scale their operations now. In addition to the operational management changes required to move business now from a survival period to a thriving one, the effective leadership 24
