Resilience, vision and innovation

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Keywords

Resilience – Vision – Innovation – Sudan – Digital Economy – Social Enterprise

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled Aziz Musa, a transformative leader in the digital marketing realm, talks about his story which led him from Blackpool, to Dubai, Sudan and finally Egypt.

As the youngest public company CEO in the UK, Aziz had already made significant strides in the corporate world. However, in 2017 against a backdrop of political unrest and war, he founded Cush.Digital with the vision of building both a social enterprise and the digital economy in Sudan, 

In this podcast Aziz shares his experience of living through a civil war in Sudan and of having to relocate to Egypt. The process of leaving Sudan during the war was difficult and he discusses how he approached some of the decisions he had to make for his family and employees. This includes evacuating people from a war zone, going through military checkpoints, crossing the border, providing employment and support for families.  He also shares some of the background to his business life and talks about growing a digital agency through client satisfaction and how his company trained over 4,000 people in Sudan in digital marketing, on a pro bono basis.

Main topics

  • The importance of making deliberate decisions and having a higher purpose when facing adversity.

  • Planning ahead and being proactive in managing anxiety and building resilience.

  • Creating a social enterprise alongside a business

  • The 10th Man Experiment

  • Why we need backup plans and to be prepared for changing scenarios.

  • The importance of having a plan to manage anxiety and build resilience.

  • The process of using logic and expertise to determine the real threats.

Timestamps

1: Introductions (00:02-01:41
2: Aziz's Background and Work (01:41-04:01)
3: Aziz's Experience of War (04:47-09:00)
4: Escape from Sudan (09:18-14:37)
5: Building Resilience and Managing Anxiety (14:37-19:17)
6: Planning for Unlikely Scenarios (19:52-23:15)
7: Aziz's Work and Contact Information (23:58-27:33)

Action items

   You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.  

The demise of the annual performance review

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Over the past few years there has been a growing trend away from annual performance reviews. As a result many organisations including Deloitte, Adobe and Accenture are now reporting improved employee morale, productivity and innovation.

With the changing nature of business and employee expectations, organisations need to adapt quickly to ensure business continuity. An annual process of management, monitoring, evaluation and realignment no longer provides this.

By its nature, an annual performance review consolidates a year’s worth of feedback into one meeting with recent events understandably at the fore. This means managers feel they don’t have to provide in-the-moment or regular feedback and employees hold back their thoughts about their role, the organisation and their ideas for potential changes or improvements. Often there is no organisation-wide standard so reviews can be seen as unfair when promotions and salary increases are included as part of the process. 

Many employees want more feedback so the focus should perhaps change to continuous performance management. This would allow a more informal, agile and less stressful process with the organisation able to dynamically set goals, get feedback and improve productivity along with better collaboration, greater alignment and more collective responsibility. Employees would benefit from increased recognition and work evaluation, more performance feedback and empowerment and the alignment of their personal goals with organisational ones

There is a clear correlation between higher level of motivation and timely, accurate feedback so maybe its time for managers to look for ways to give effective continuous feedback.?