People Are Your Greatest Assets: Three Leadership Strategies During COVID-19
DRD ADVISORS LLC
During COVID-19, it is vital for leaders to demonstrate to their employees that they are in fact the companies’ most valuable assets. Here are three ways you can walk the walk rather than just talk the talk: Prioritization, Agility, and Creativity.
1) PRIORITIZATION
While financing the business, appeasing clients, and keeping up to date with account receivables are all incredibly important considerations, businesses do not exist without employees. When this passes, and we all know it will someday, your employees will forever remember the COVID-19 crisis and, by mental association, how they were treated by the leadership team during that time.
Tips for Leveraging Prioritization
Over-communicate: Prioritize your people by taking time each day to give them updates.
Slow Down: Take a step back and remind yourself that immediate action may not always be the most effective remedy. A core mantra for marine snipers is “fast is slow and slow is fast.” In other words, the fastest way to accomplish goals is to work carefully and methodically.
Listen to Management: Schedule daily video calls with middle management to better understand the most pressing issues your employees are facing.
Send out Checklists & Quantify: Provide middle management with short checklists or simple questions they can ask their direct reports every day. Examples of questions can be found below.
(a) How are you doing (scale 1- 5).
(b) What is the overall team morale (scale 1-5).
(c) Is upper management doing a good job of communicating (scale 1-5).
(e) Is there anything management can be doing better.
2) AGILITY
Crisis affects every part of your business. Some executives have a wide breadth of experience across many company functions while others have more specialized backgrounds.
Tips for Leveraging Agility
Take Inventory: Take a personal inventory of the business areas you have specific expertise in and stick to those. You do not have all of the answers – COVID-19 is new territory for everyone so having a well-rounded, reliable team is more valuable than ever.
Create a Task Force: Identify internal experts from each department that you can put on your Crisis Management Task Force (CMTF). Bring in additional content experts if needed (e.g. we have one client who has retained a medical professional to sit in on the CMTF meetings to answer COVID-19 health and safety related questions.)
Meet Daily: Meet with your CMTF at the end of each day to provide updates and share new information.
Disseminate Facts: All CMTF members should communicate using facts, not opinions.
3) CREATIVITY
Think creatively by brainstorming full-fledged scenarios of possible events to see how vulnerable your company is to the crisis. This way of strategizing, called scenario planning, helps leaders create cognitive maps that provide a reference point for effectively navigating unfamiliar terrain.
Tips for Leveraging Creativity
Work the Problem: In crisis situations, egos need to be left outside of conversations. Personal issues have to be tabled and the central focus needs to be on working the problem, together. Highly functioning CMTFs are not comprised of individuals that like each other – the group requires mutual respect and goal alignment to creatively solve problems.
Utilize Probability-Weighted Decision Making: Use probability-weighted decision making (i.e. the combination of the probability of something happening with the actual economic impact) to determine the real potential impact of each scenario.
Stay Objective: Because thinking about doomsday scenarios can be difficult, keep team members’ emotions in check by sticking to facts and staying objective. When emotions start to creep in (and they will), stop the conversation. While you should emphasize that its normal to feel this way, remind everyone that they have a job to do and a responsibility to all of their employees.
Executives need to remind themselves that their employees are their most valuable assets and, therefore, require a significant level of support right now. Incorporating Prioritization, Agility, and Creativity into your game plan will help you lead your team through this crisis. You are all in this together so if you put in the time to implement these three strategies then you will come out of this together, stronger than ever.