Businesses are typically governed by sets of values, principles, and philosophies that dictate how they’re operated and managed. Sometimes, even small changes to this collective posture can make a huge difference in the outcomes of the organization. Notably, adopting a proactive posture throughout your organization can help you save time in numerous respects, especially in the IT department.
What Is a Proactive Posture?
What exactly do we mean when we talk about a proactive posture? Essentially, we mean a collection of values, processes, and positions that collectively allow your organization to work proactively rather than reactively. Proactive measures are designed to minimize the possibility of potential problems, hopefully long before they ever occur. Reactive measures, in contrast, work only to address issues once they arise.
For example, by using CSPM, you can proactively look for and correct potential issues in your cloud service infrastructure. This is far superior to merely reacting to cloud infrastructure issues once you begin to notice them.
Hypothetically, proactive posture can be beneficial for any business or department. That’s because we can logically deduce the fact that preventing an issue is always better than responding to one, assuming there are no hidden benefits to the issue that might change the weight of its impact.
But how exactly does this save so much time? And how do you implement a proactive posture in your business?
The Benefits of a Proactive Posture
These are some of the most impressive benefits of adopting a proactive posture.
Issue prevention.
Arguably the primary reason to adopt a proactive posture is to prevent issues before they arise. By analyzing your terrain, making reasonable predictions, and deploying better systems and strategies, you can eliminate most potential issues and decrease the risk of any issues that remain. While this does require an upfront investment of time, it should save you time in the long run, especially if your proactive measures are designed to be consistent and evergreen.
Issue mitigation/minimization.
Along similar lines, working proactively can help you mitigate and minimize potential issues. Some problems are going to naturally make it through your initial screening systems, but this is an inevitability that every business has to deal with. Fortunately, proactive measures can reduce both the number and severity of issues that ultimately make it through. This should make your job as a problem solver much, much easier.
Total time savings.
Proactive management is a way of working “smarter, not harder.” Accordingly, it affords you significant time savings across many different categories. You won’t have to spend time immediately responding to fires. Additionally, you won’t have to waste time conducting root cause analysis and making reports. You also won’t have to spend time making embarrassing PR announcements about your internal failures or explaining how these issues occurred to your bosses, partners, or investors.
Analysis and understanding.
The course for proactive management requires you to fully analyze and understand the local terrain. For example, if you want to effectively and proactively manage your IT infrastructure, you need to fully understand the technological needs of your business before you can make effective decisions. The very act of conducting this type of analysis helps you better understand your business landscape so that you can optimize for efficiency across many different areas.
Reputational preservation.
Finally, understand that a proactive posture allows you to demonstrate competence and expertise while preserving your reputation. Almost any catastrophic failure within your business that’s relevant to the public has the possibility of blemishing your brand image. If you prevent these issues from ever emerging, you’ll never have to run damage control, and you won’t have to spend as much time building up your image or reputation in the PR/marketing space.
Are There Weaknesses or Limitations?
With these benefits in mind, are there any weaknesses or limitations to adopting a proactive posture?
The short answer is yes, although the benefits are numerically and effectively superior.
Upfront costs.
There are some extra upfront costs associated with adopting a proactive posture. It takes time, money, and effort to conduct the audits and deploy the systems necessary to prevent most issues. Almost undoubtedly, this time, money, and effort will be less than what you would spend if you had a reactive posture. However, it’s still an expense you must consider, and if you’re on a razor-thin budget, you may not have the luxury of proactive effort in every area you want.
Departmental limitations.
Not every department in your organization will benefit equally from proactive posturing. In IT, most problems are predictable and preventable. In PR and marketing, it’s much easier to achieve your strategic aims when you plan in advance. However, when it comes to procurement, a reactive management style may actually be better than a proactive one in some cases, since it limits the risk of overspending on unnecessary assets.
The risk of novel threats.
Deploying a proactive posture reasonably allows business owners to feel more comfortable about existing risks and threats. However, sometimes, this sense of security can grow to a problematic size. That’s because proactive management only allows you to protect yourself from risks and threats that are reasonably foreseeable. Novel threats and risks can still jeopardize your business, and if you don’t also have potential reactive measures in place, they may be especially troubling.
Reactive weaknesses.
Similarly, if you put all your time and attention into proactive management, you may not have the reactive teams or resources necessary to resolve problems as they arise. Remember, proactive posturing is about minimizing and mitigating issues; no proactive measures can perfectly guard against all imaginable threats. You still need measures in place to respond to new incidents.
Implementing a Proactive Posture in Your Business
If you’re interested in implementing a proactive posture in your business, these are some of the best places to start:
Core values.
Your core values reflect what you want your business to be. Making a list of core values isn’t going to make those qualities magically appear within your business. But, they will serve as a source of inspiration and guidance for all your leaders and employees. If you make proactive posturing an absolute priority for your brand identity, it’s going to be much easier to facilitate its development on the ground level.
Leadership.
Ideas and work styles tend to flow from the top down, even in relatively small organizations. Accordingly, if you want everyone in your organization to work more proactively, you need to appoint and encourage good, proactive leaders. Make sure the leaders of all your departments and teams understand the importance of embodying this value.
Hires.
Similarly, you need to gauge the proactive posture of each new candidate you consider bringing into your organization. Look for people who are eager to squash potential problems before they have a chance to emerge.
Education and training.
Comprehensive education and training can also help you introduce the idea of proactive management to your employees. Not everyone intuitively understands why proactive work is typically better than reactive work.
Formal processes and protocols.
Reinforce these ideas with formal processes and protocols that employees can easily follow. For example, you might have a routine maintenance schedule in place that forces employees to inspect pieces of equipment before they have a chance to fail.
Investment.
Investing in research and development, as well as new tools and systems, can help you adopt a more proactive approach to business. Don’t be afraid to put extra time and money into resources and internal structures that can set you up for success.
Consulting.
If there are areas of your business where you continue to have recurring problems, or if you can’t quite figure out the proactive pattern necessary within them, consider hiring an external consultant. Consultants often have the knowledge and expertise necessary to help you solve these problems. On top of that, they’ll bring a neutral, third party perspective that might be able to help identify problems you didn’t initially notice.
Routine auditing.
Don’t assume that all your leaders and employees are following all your processes and adopting proactive management styles just because they happen to be part of your core values. It’s much better to conduct routine auditing, so you can evaluate how proactive your organization is. Additionally, you can also know whether departments and teams are succeeding or failing, and potential paths for future development.
Ongoing analysis and refinement.
In line with this, it’s important to conduct ongoing analysis and refinement. It is possible to be too proactive, such as spending time and money on problems that are especially unlikely. But for the most part, there’s always room to improve your proactive approach.
With a proactive posture in place, your business will be more agile, less susceptible to risks and threats, and better capable of saving both time and money. Saving time and money is valuable for nearly every conceivable business. So, every business owner should be looking for new opportunities to incorporate proactivity on a continuous basis.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Yan Krukau; Pexels; Thank you.
Deanna Ritchie
Editor-in-Chief at Calendar. Former Editor-in-Chief and writer at Startup Grind. Freelance editor at Entrepreneur.com. Deanna loves to help build startups, and guide them to discover the business value of their online content and social media marketing.