How to Build Perseverance In Your Team

As business owners, we likely understand — at least from a theoretical perspective — the importance of perseverance to our business success. And while we might find perseverance hard to come by in the most challenging of times, we have a real, vested, interest in finding it.

Yet, if we are running a business with employees, neither our failure or success lies solely in our own hands. Our team also plays an important role in how much we are able to achieve in our business and also, whether the business crumbles under internal and external threats.

What might those internal and external threats to a business include?

Internal threats to our business might be a product that isn’t selling well, a system that is broken, or customer service troubles.

External threats to our business could be a crazy virus that has the majority of the world on full or semi-lockdown, a competitor moving in next door, or even acts of nature you can’t control.

Unfortunately, any of those threats (and more!) can be hard enough on a business owner who is truly vested in the lifeblood of the business. Alternately, they can be downright soul-sucking for your employees or team.

What to do? How to build perseverance in your team?

1. Address the Fear and Possibly, Anger, Head On…

The worst thing you can do when your business is faced with turmoil or trouble, is pretend it doesn’t exist. Like parents that are fighting so that the kids can hear and then stop when the children enter the room, the uncertainty of problems that are known, but not dealt with in a straight-forward manner, can cause major anxiety. Alternately, if you explain in a straight-forward way what is happening and how you are managing the problem(s), it can alleviate some of that anxiety and install both hope and optimism in your team. Since both hope and optimism are important elements of perseverance, this will go a long way to keeping the spirts of your employees up and keep them vested in helping you and your business get (back) on the road to success.

1. Embrace Challenges as Opportunities

When your business — and employees — are faced with challenges, try to reframe them as opportunities. What can you learn from the challenge to make your business better? Involve your employees in the solution—ask them for suggestions and ideas. Turn that quest into a contest. Nothing gets spirts up like a little friendly competition. Or if there is downtime due to the challenge, take this time to have workshops or inservice training that will help your business bounce back faster when the threat has passed.

2. Reward Small Victories

Often, when a business and its employees are facing challenges, it can cause an attitude of gloom and despair to fill the business environment and permeate within the team. To combat this, look for even the smallest of victories that you can celebrate to keep morale up. It will likely surprise you just how effective this can be,