Lessons From The Crisis And A Clarion Call For A New Style Of Leadership

7 key themes to help leaders reset their business strategies

It’s been a time like no other for this generation of leaders. A time when resilience, agility, and empathy have been the ‘go-to’ strategies in the leadership playbook.

But what have we learned from what we’ve all been through? How will it change us as leaders? And what does it tell us about the most effective ways to lead out of lockdown?

In March 2020, as many parts of the world began to lockdown against the virus, I set out on a project which led to a book “Leaders in Lockdown” and has now become an evangelical movement to help people improve the way we lead.

I followed 28 global business leaders through the crisis – sharing emotional and intimate moments with them as they hunkered down in their houses and their kitchens trying to make sense of what was happening. It was a window on the world, observing business leadership in action at a time when no one had the answers.

The leaders I worked with ranged from the CEO of hotel businesses in Asia to media moguls, to the titans of financial services, to the big brains of American tech, to entrepreneurs whose billion-dollar companies lay in tatters.

More recently, I have been sharing these insights on leadership with hundreds of senior executives. The aim is to help them pause and take a breath – many for the first time since the virus broke out. The sessions have been cathartic, raw and often game-changing for the individuals involved.

The hope is that this process of reflection and renewal will help leaders prepare to adapt their styles for leading out of lockdown. The evidence of these hundreds maybe thousands of leadership conversations point to what leaders want to hold onto from the peak of the pandemic and what they want to leave behind. Most want to keep the agility and pace which they showed at peak pandemic, but they want to do that in a way that doesn’t burn everyone out. We’re talking sustainable agility.

They want to maintain the better working together and the focus, they achieved as the virus took a grip. They want to give up being busy fools, doing unproductive work which doesn’t impact the true outcomes they are trying to achieve.

They are passionate about holding onto the care and compassion they saw in the white heat of Covid. They would dearly love to keep the trust that they felt between themselves and their colleagues in this most stressful time in their careers.

To enable these leaders to take forward these learnings from lockdown requires the evolving of a new style of leadership. Command and control as a blunt instrument of leadership are dead. The crisis has shown that. Presenteeism as a trait is equally redundant. Empowerment was king.

It was a new kind of leader who was most effective in the crisis and a new kind of leader who will be predominant in the future. This is how one senior executive described what she saw as a blueprint for post-pandemic leadership.

“Being kind. Being compassionate. Being empathetic. Being inclusive,” she said. “No longer is the leader the one who has all the answers. The first thing they do is listen and acknowledge the pain and the answers will follow. Empathize, walk in their shoes. Lead with no hierarchies. Be willing to be humble and curious. These are the leaders who are succeeding at this time. We have undervalued these things in the past because we liked leaders chasing for growth and talking up profit and adopting the Superman-style of leadership.”

Our leadership project also identified seven key themes to help leaders reset their business strategies and help to reset society.

Leaders who put purpose at the heart of their business during the pandemic fared best. In the future, the purpose will no longer be just words to be emblazoned on a website. It will be essential for engaging employees, customers, and investors. As one leader put it, “Companies with purpose last; brands with purpose grow, and people with purpose thrive.”

The pandemic highlighted that the world of work prior to Covid is not fit for the future. We moved many millions of people from the office to the home in what seemed to be an instant. Now the challenge is to reinvent so much of what we do in the workplace through innovation and creativity and through listening to our people. We need to define hybrid working and transform the psychological contract between employer and employee.

The virus widened inequality in so many ways. The role of all leaders in business, going forward, must be to act decisively to counter worsening equality, diversity, and inclusion in society and in business.

The virus exposed the selfishness of countries and our political leaders far more than it showed our ability to be compassionate internationalists. The role of business leaders in co-operating across borders to solve the existential problems facing society must be game-changing in life after Covid.

The virus reminded us of the importance of resilience, in all its guises. From personal resilience to see us through to operational resilience to the power and strength of our balance sheets. As in every crisis, cash was king.

The crisis exposed that 40 years of supply chain decisions based on cost and productivity mattered little in a pandemic. Supply chains will now be re-drawn. Some manufacturing may move back from Asia to the US and Europe over time. Businesses will want to de-risk the possibility of grinding to a shuddering halt the next time a virus hits the world.

We need to radically re-think how we maximize the potential of our leaders and our people in the new world of work. We must factor in a greater focus on mental and physical welfare; reconsider what kind of leadership is most effective, and invent new strategies for maximizing the performance of a hybrid and distributed workforce. Upskilling the world’s line managers is also a key task to tackle as we emerge from the crisis.

This is colossal in the box for leaders. There is so much for leaders to change. The pace of that change will never get slower.

The challenge now for all leaders is to not go back. In fact, there is no going back. Not least, because your competitors are already heading to a different place. Leaders must move forward to a better world of business. As one of the “Leaders in Lockdown” put it, “Why can’t we build a world fit for our children to live and work in, rather than the one we were all destroying before we had ever heard of Covid?”