How Resilience-Based Ecosystems Help Entrepreneurs Manage Change
If a company is structured like a rainforest ecosystem, it will already have the internal resilience to handle unanticipated circumstances, such as the CEO and the rest of the C-suite being fired by the board of directors.
That is precisely what happened at one of my former employers, where the board of a medical clinic company requested me to take over as interim CEO in order to prevent a mass flight of doctors and nurses. It was my responsibility to rebuild the trust between personnel and leadership that is necessary for ecosystems to thrive.
Given the high employability of doctors and nurses and the possibility of losing the executive in a single stroke, there wasn’t much stopping them.
Our immediate issue was keeping our staff, so as a senior director supporting and managing the HR departments of over 50 clinics, I was in a perfect position to help.
I made sure they all understood how vital they were to the clinic and the community they supported. I then requested that the board take a backseat while I mended these connections. This nine-month process made me vividly aware of how interdependent we are. Teams’ mutual reliance is the foundation of ecosystems, and this provides a potent metaphor for successful change management. In the end, a silo does not exist in the rainforest.
You are who you are? Which is more natural—the forest or the ocean?
We recently presented the concept of the ecosystem at our all-hands meeting at my current employer using a video that highlighted the relationships between our departments, and it was a huge success. Our marketing team even employed the analogy outside to demonstrate the interdependence of the various touchpoints in the client experience.
When they realized that their departments represented the attributes of the plains (marketing), the ocean (technology), the earth (HR), and the mountains (enterprise sales), they were ecstatic. Many people laughed a lot when they realized that Customer Support was being compared to the jungle and that they never knew what would happen with the calls they got next.
We sincerely aimed to emphasize that each person needs to collaborate, form relationships, and create enduring links in order to flourish. Developing this connection can also strengthen resilience. When you observe a rainforest, you will see that it constantly rebuilds from the inside out, allowing it to survive even when its resources diminish. Similar to this, departments may get overburdened as a business expands, but by acknowledging our interdependence, we can work together to address change, which is the most threat to an ecosystem.
The “Why” of change management
Within an ecosystem, nothing occurs in a vacuum. We gather all the important stakeholders in one place when a department needs to make a big change so they can understand how it will impact every other department. If it is a heavy lift for that department, we look to other members of the ecosystem to support that change.
As a stakeholder, HR’s job is to make sure the “why” behind the change is communicated. When this doesn’t happen, I’ve seen change management go wrong. People need to understand how their actions contribute to the intended business outcomes even though our verticals, strategic plan, and quarterly targets are all well-defined; otherwise, they will feel cut off from the ecosystem.
In the wellness industry, where we offer software solutions, genuine value delivery to clients requires strong collaboration between Marketing, Technology, Sales, Support, and HR. People on the ground will totally buy in if our “why” is to support solopreneurs up to mid-market and enterprise organizations. This is because they may notice that customers are taking their counsel literally. The ecology as a whole is then affected by this constructive incentive.
Standardize Optimal Procedures
After HR has determined the “why” of the change, you should inquire as to whether additional people, resources, or training are needed prior to implementation. However, ecosystems are teeming with life, so HR need not always search beyond the organization. We combined an individual’s experience, education, objectives, and job description with LinkedIn’s AI solution to uncover our “hidden workforce.” We frequently discover that someone with the necessary skill set already exists within the ecosystem.
Next, you need to benchmark best practices. This falls into three categories:
- If you have managed this kind of change well before, document it and then aim to refine the process to do it even better.
- If you failed in the past, find out what went wrong and do a root-cause analysis so you don’t fall into the same trap. (For example, just because you once spent $1 million on marketing and it yielded 10,000 new customers, doesn’t mean spending $2 million will double the gain.)
- If this is an entirely new change, benchmark it against other organizations that have done it before.
Recall to include all appropriate parties in the benchmarking process. External forces have the power to reveal any discrepancy between departments and functions, just as logging, fires, and droughts can completely destroy an ecosystem. All the components must work together harmoniously for the ecosystem to use change to its advantage.
Adapting and thriving together
Change management can be divided into two categories: changes that we can anticipate and control, and changes that we occasionally need to make fast in the face of an emergency. In my previous employment, I discovered that even dire circumstances can be turned around, and that prevention is a far better course of action, when the board fired the C-suite.
An excellent way to keep teams cohesive and promote a culture of community where no one operates alone is by using the ecosystem as an analogy.
As our rep from Customer Experience (symbolizing the subterranean layer in our ecosystem) said in the video: “We heavily depend on our Customer Success, Marketing, Engineering, and all major stakeholders to continuously improve our solutions through an iterative and user-centric approach.” When everyone is aware of their impact, organizations are best placed to adapt to change in their thriving ecosystem.
