Your natural propensity to be proactive will be determined by your personality, your comfort level during your job interview, and the empathy of your (future) collaborator during the recruitment phase. Other factors include: the software packages that you’ll have at your disposal, the policies of the various departments (in terms of procedures), customer relationship management, the behavioral attitudes of your managers (during the job taking phase), and even your professional projection.

So, what is the value of establishing proactive habits among employees on the corporate level?

What Proactivity Really Is

Proactivity is the ability to act on our own initiative, and our own will, without being asked. It also enables you to foresee future requirements.

For example, it may imply preparing the minutes of the management meeting about IT issues that you just attended. However, no one asks you to do so. You take the initiative since it appears to be significant and beneficial.

Advantages of Proactivity

Being Proactive, or reactive, are all attributes that are well appreciated in the world of business and, more importantly, vital in today’s increasingly complicated environment.

Improved Customer Experience:

Employees must be proactive when it comes to customer interactions. The CRM department must be self-sufficient, able to “think outside the box,” and willing to go beyond any potential rule of procedure.

This enables customer relationship management to be more flexible, respond to customer demands more effectively, and contribute to customers' happiness.

Develop the Capacity to Adapt:

Proactive personnel can foresee changes in the environment. They can adapt to change, take the initiative, and iterate procedures to meet the demands of the firm. Such actions are critical to the company’s long-term viability.

Proactivity Leads to Better Communication:

Proactivity necessitates action, and action needs communication. You indirectly bring up essential information by acting on an occurrence and taking remedial steps. By considering what a client has stated and changing your discourse, processes (or even structural organization of your department), these adjustments become apparent and forest the cooperation, communication and exchanges, which is helpful to any sort of business.

Anticipate Potential Risks:

Good communication will beneficially increase collaboration and anticipate assignments that cannot be done in time. For example, there may be employees with personal difficulties that may cause negative influences on their production.

Great communication skills will definitely enable you to develop your skills to predict such problems. If you want to learn more about human behavior, read Covey's 7 Habits book here: "7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

This article is part of our Business Coaching blog series. At Dataczar we talk to a lot of small businesses. We’ve found a few books that we keep recommending time and again. To better help our customers, we’ve added a Reading List for Small Businesses to our website. We encourage every small business owner to read and keep these timeless business books on their office shelf.

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