This is an important time for your team and business. The decisions you make now will affect your performance over the next five years.
 
What might be happening is that the lead team are not getting to fast effective decisions. This could be as a result of surviving the worst downturn in the economy for the past 100 years. In the boom times, it’s a piece of cake to make decisions. Just rely on your intuition. The depression affects business confidence. Intuition is not so easy to trust.
 
In this stable period, preparation needs to be made in readiness for the upturn. If you are not ready, and your competition is out there doing the right things now, then your business will be behind the game and will find it difficult to catch up.
 
Let’s say there are four key players making decisions at the leadership level. Imagine a scale of 0-9 of risk profile, where 0 means you want to keep all your cash under the mattress, and 9 means you would like to invest in oil wells in Iraq.
 
What if three of you have a risk profile of around 6.5 and the other has a profile of 3.5? If you make decisions on consensus, your leadership will stall when it attempts to make a decision.
 
The smart move is to agree on a risk profile for the business, say 6.5 and make decisions based on that profile, rather than getting gridlocked at leadership level. The business needs to be taking measured risk right now. There are particular actions that need to be put in place in order to prepare for the next upturn.
 
All you need is a simple profiling tool that will enable you to assess each leader’s approach to risk.

The Risk Indicator is designed to support business owners and managers in determining their Risk Profile, which is their appetite toward undertaking business risks.

As with all questionnaires the Risk Indicator provides you with an indication of your current Risk Profile. This means that as time passes and your circumstances change then it is highly likely that your Risk Profile will change, resulting in different business decisions.

The purpose of the Indicator is to give you an accurate indication of your current risk profile and therefore how this is impacting current performance in your business. Re-complete the questionnaire when personal and/or business circumstances change.

To obtain the Risk Indicator tool. visit www.navitasip.com

Ed Percival is a business coach with Shirlaws Business Coaching. www.shirlawscoaching.com