What are some of the essential leadership skills for coping with a recession? A tough recession can make you question what matters in your business. And that is not a bad question to ask. It also leads to questions about where you focus your energies.

In answer to these questions it is useful to note that what is often required is perseverence, to remind yourself to keep at it!

Leadership Skills to Keep Going

So here are some key leadership skills to help you keep going during tough times:

1  Keep in touch – the simple secret behind good leadership is to regularly spend time with your colleagues. A distant leader too often feels like an absent leader. You should also more than ever think about how you keep in touch with your customers. How can you keep listening and engaged with your customers?

2 Keep it simple – simple takes a lot of effort. Complexity leads to frustration and an unhappy workplace or worse unhappy customers. A recession is a good time to check that you keep what you do simple. Most things in business tend towards complexity if left alone. To keep things simple you need to be vigilant.

3 Keep it real – sometimes a healthy dose of pragmatism is needed in the workplace. Some things can’t easily be changed and, whilst they may cause you angst or some frustration, they don’t seem to go away. In such situations use a sense of pragmatism to help you keep things in perspective.

4 Keep up to date – your knowledge and expertise will always need updating. It needs refreshing, renewing and replacing, as and when new ideas make some of the old obselete. A recession is a good time to think about what areas of your knowedge you need to update. Are there new areas in which you need to develop expertise?

5 Keep it fresh – take a look at how you do business. Do you have the same enthusiasm as when you started? What motivates you at work? Think about what energises you? What things/people are sources of energy for you? Spend time  doing more of the things that are sources of energy for you.

6 Keep on track - in a recesssion its easy to lose track of what you are doing. In trying to balance conflicting demands or coping with budgetary and resource cuts, you can easily lose focus. With so much going on, it’s easy to be knocked off course.

So our final “keep” keeps all the others in place!

You can find out more about our our approach to the recession with our service:  antidotes to austerity.