Businesses are not without crisis. Being a womanpreneur, however, may place you in a more uptight position. It cannot be denied that there is still some sort of silent stigma to women in business and when crisis seems to inevitable, finding ways to cope with such circumstances must be foremost on your mind. While other womenpreneur may crumble easily when under pressure, it is imperative that you rise up to the occasion and find a way to overcome such adversity and continue to thrive.
Fortunately, there are ways for you to make any crisis situation work to your advantage. You can also practice it to perfection. To get you started, here are some points to consider:
1. Take a pause and do nothing. Do not panic either. While it is noble to immediately act and rectify the problem, some womenpreneurs tend to be taken by their emotions in a roller coaster ride leading to horrendous results. So before you jump into the situation, try to take a step back, compose yourself, and see the problem from the outside looking in. This will help give you a better perspective and respond in a more effective and productive manner.
2. Consider consulting a reliable crisis management team for tough situations. This is even more so in situations that directly impact community or environmental standards. These firms know precisely what buttons to push and when to do it.
3. Confer with your own team particularly on internal issues or crisis situations involving product, service or brand. Do acknowledge that you cannot do everything in your lonesome. At this point, you will need everyone’s cooperation and ideas. As a rule of thumb, playing the blame-game will get your efforts nowhere. So, seek out your team’s help and find solutions instead of adding more to the problem.
4. After weighing everything, it is time to pursue your planned course of action. Be proactive when managing a game-plan though. Always have contingencies in place. Make sure also to create identifiable measures to help monitor if the executed plan is effective or not.
5. Assess carefully the root cause of the problem, how it got blown out of proportion, and how it was being handled. Look at possible gaps in the measures being done. Through careful evaluation, you can prevent such crisis situation from recurring or device certain policies that could mitigate matters before they get worst.
6. Always maintain a positive mindset. Most womenpreneurs tend to consider a “worst case scenario” which is a good thing but not during a crisis situation. See mistakes and fiasco’s as avenues for improvement. Always believe that in every mistake lies the learning of how to do it right the next time around.
Indeed, there will always come a time for a crisis to crop up in a business. No matter how big or small, it is imperative to craft a robust crisis management system. In doing so, you can simply expect the unexpected and formulate solution to mitigate, if not eliminate, the issue at hand.
