CHICAGO — Because both employee expectations and the nature of business itself are constantly evolving, owners of labor-intensive companies such as drycleaning businesses need to recognize these changes and adapt to the times. Otherwise, they will constantly struggle to fill their labor needs and the atmosphere of their company will suffer.
This was the message of Dirk Beveridge during his webinar, “Reimagining Leadership in a Post-Pandemic World,” hosted by the University of Innovative Distribution (UID). The webinar was made available to Textile Care Allied Trades Association (TCATA) members through partnership with UID.
Beveridge is the founder of the strategy firm UnleashWD and has been a consultant to a wide range of companies to strengthen their sales and leadership strategies.
During the webinar, Beveridge shared some of the findings he has gathered from surveys and from visiting dozens of different companies during the summer months of the past two years, speaking with hundreds of workers and leaders in the process. These findings, he believes, can be applied to almost any industry because the forces at play are universal.
The experience gathered from these tours, Beveridge says, can’t help but give someone a diverse perspective into the reality of the modern workplace.
“I guarantee you if you do that, as I have,” he says, “you will come back a different person after hearing all those stories, and you start thinking about business and leadership differently.”
Beveridge took the information he gathered and started to build a new worldview into the evolution of business.
“As I left those two summer tours, I had two fundamental premises,” he says. “The first premise is that the very nature of leadership is changing more rapidly than most of us realize. The second premise I had is that humanity is going to play a larger role in how we lead in a post-pandemic world.”
The Great Redefinition
For many small and mid-sized businesses, such as most drycleaning companies, the ability to find people to work has been a huge obstacle in the aftermath of the pandemic — so much so that there’s a term for this tightening of the labor market: the Great Resignation.
While it’s still a challenge, Beveridge believes that leaders who look more deeply into the issue can find answers.
“I don’t think the Great Resignation is the overall focus of what we, as leaders, need to be talking about,” he says. “It’s a real issue, but I believe that, at a higher level, and even as perhaps a more important issue for leaders, we need to think of this as what I’m calling the Great Redefinition.”
There are three great forces that make up this redefinition, Beveridge says, and they are colliding in an unprecedented way. These are the external forces, internal forces and people forces. Understanding these factors is key to seeing the big picture of the economic realities as they exist.
“We, as leaders, need to be aware of these forces,” Beveridge says. “How they are impacting our business and how they’re impacting our people, so that we can, in fact, rethink how we lead our organizations going forward.”
Come back Tuesday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll take a more in-depth examination of the forces that make up this Great Redefinition.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
