Think about this: Some of the biggest companies in the world were actually launched during recessions. Companies such as General Motors, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and General Electric were all launched during recessions. They saw an opportunity and responded to that opportunity with an innovative mindset to go on to CREATE their own successes.
Innovation and Renovation
While business is far from “business as usual” right now, it’s easy for some people on your team to think in terms of “Yes, but we can’t do that right now.” This is undoubtedly a challenging time for everyone in the world, but to find opportunities, we need to focus on “Yes, and this is what we can do instead” solutions. Challenge your team to look at how we CAN do things, instead of coming up with excuses for why we can’t.
A company in China called Alibaba launched Taobao, an e-commerce website. They launched the site while they worked virtually during the quarantine for the 2003 SARS outbreak. Now, Taobao is the world’s biggest e-commerce website in the entire world – and it started during a quarantine.
Trip.com did a virtual working experiment in 2014 that ended up changing how they performed their customer service. They decided to implement a flexible working culture after the experiment. Like this example, you can look for opportunities to be more efficient internally with your team as well as looking at pivoting through innovation.
Looking for innovative solutions is a subtle shift that can change your team’s mindset from a reactive point of view to a proactive point of view. So, use this time to look for new opportunities created by the crisis and challenge yourself and your team to find new ways around roadblocks.
This article comes from our online training “5 Keys to Leading Virtual Teams in the COVID-19 Crisis” Click on the link to view the entire training for FREE as well as access other helpful leadership resources.
