Crisis Management During COVID and Leadership

COVID has certainly thrown most businesses into unprepared challenges. It has invariably created new scenarios for businesses to project and revise their strategic plans.

There have been a fair amount of articles and conversations about preferred approaches to crisis management during covid. We all know the difficult financial situation COVID has thrown businesses into. Most businesses have responded by cutting costs and forcing redundancies. In one of the previous articles we discussed impacts of short term vs long term effects due to these decisions.

As much as we need to ensure the survival of a business -we also need to ensure that the business can survive beyond a crisis. In such a situation, we do need to think whether we can achieve that without our key resources?

Crisis Management during COVID for Leaders

I am highly motivated by the concepts of agile manifesto into decision making. Although not perfect, the need of this hour is to respond to a situational demand. In this case it is the question of crisis management during covid. How does an organisational leader tackle the negative impact of a highly unexpected downturn?

Personally for me, the answer is in three key facets:

Collaboration

The crisis due to covid is not a challenge for the leader alone. Granted that an organisation looks at its leader to navigate through crisis and look after its employees. However, the employees have a much larger role to play.

Having gone through a startup downturn during the 2008 economic recession, I can only think of how I could have handled it differently. The first point of action is – the problem is not just for the leader but for the entire team. The challenge of crisis management during covid is far too big for few people to shoulder responsibility.

We will need to gather the collective response from teams about how challenges can be resolved. A key starting point for problem solving for a leader is in transparency and trust in its team

Transparency

The COVID situation has happened to all – everyone in the company has something to lose and thus deserves an opportunity to come up with a creative solution.

I do agree that it is not a simple situation to find a quick solution for. The situation needs to be clearly established

• What is at stake?
• What happens if the organisation does not take creative measures?
• What does the company really think for the future?

The above are only pointers but I am sure you get the picture. If we want a collaborative and collective solution – we need to start by being honest and open to our people.

Communication

A key temptation with communication is to either play down the situation or exaggerate. A leader is not going to prevent crisis by doing that. Communication needs to be transparent and provide an objective view of where the challenge really lies.

Communication is not just about saying how bad things are – but also about why. We will also need to see it from employees perspective as well and trust that they have company’s best interest at their hearts.

• We can possibly achieve this if reach the employees only midway. The communication needs to be about what has gone wrong and how we want to improve it.
• The company must talk about sacrifices being made by leaders if we are expecting the same from employees too.

In either cases – communication is a key resolution for crisis management during covid. Yes, it will not solve all problems, but does give an opportunity for new and innovative opportunities to come by.

Summary: Managing Crisis as a Leader

The key takeaway in this discussion for me is in the leaders extension of trust to achieve resolution collectively. It is certainly not an extremely innovative solution, but surely a start.

Gone are the days when only the leaders take decisions on the outcomes for a company. It is about every team member involved in a company and collectively finding the resolution. After all, we are talking about crisis management during covid. The impact has been huge on everyone – it would be close to naive if we let decisions to be made in vacuum.