Leadership Actions During Crisis

Leadership emerges during times of crisis. This is especially relevant during the current crisis due to Covid-19 pandemic lockdown since March 2020. This infographic and  article has been published for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship club of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management. The summary of the webinar on Leadership during times of Crisis is given below.

1. Leaders should first show care and engage. During times of crisis, team members could be anxious due to uncertainty of jobs due to impact on business revenues and profits. They would like to help and contribute during this period of crisis provided the team manager and leaders of the organization shows greater empathy, care and engage with their team. The managers and leader can demonstrate this by :

• Organizing virtual team get-togethers over a cup of tea or coffee for a general conversation at a personal and team level before any business transaction
• Communicate regularly using engaging chats, motivating videos and images with your team without being too intrusive into their personal lives
• Continue to organize virtual employee engagement events including for the families of the employees. It could be done through:
• Pre-recorded talent show
• Virtual interactive quiz
• Geek hours
• Virtual photo exhibition
• Virtual Zumba and yoga sessions
• Hobby groups
• Weekly photo campaigns
• Virtual appreciation badges and stickers
• Encourage healthy, stress busting activities . Ensure that your team members take healthy breaks and do not continue working sitting at one place for more than 1 hour. Encourage them to hydrate themselves, do quick stretch exercises and walk around. They need to maintain healthy lifestyle. They could use apps like Healthify to monitor. They can wear health bands if they already have. The point is to monitor one’s healthy or unhealthy behaviours which could have an impact both on physical and mental health.
• Inculcate employee safety and hygiene habits especially as a precaution to prevent spread of Covid-19 . They should build a habit of social distancing especially for Indians who are so used to chat and interact closely. The habit of wearing masks and washing of hands should continue even in the future when they are at the workplace.

2. Encourage Learning and Innovation. The crisis is a great opportunity for both the employees and the organization to invest in learning and innovate. The managers may encourage their team members to participate in online learning events, hackathons to sharpen their skills which could be put to use back at work. This will also ensure their career development and employability. Both managers and leaders should delegate and encourage their ground-level managers to take decisions to encourage practical leadership training. In the course, they may mistakes but allow for room for mistakes as taking actions is much better than taking no action at all.

As the leader in time of crisis, you may encourage your team to publish useful videos, images and quizzes of how they are positively dealing with the crisis. Do not allow for any negativity due to the crisis to spread in your team and the organization.

Encourage employees to virtually participate in Corporate Social responsibility activities like in providing food to migrant workers, contribution to NGOs of their choice to support them in executing on community initiatives.

Organizations too can use this crisis as an opportunity to innovate newer ways to serve their customers or create new products or strategically move into uncharted territories. D-Mart, the popular retail organization in Western India, quickly adapted to the crisis and introduced mobile retail services. They set up mini retail stalls in various housing societies to serve their customers and also ensure business continuity and cash flow. Certain automobile companies like Maruti, Mahindra etc. came to help the government to build ventilators to cope with the crisis. It could also result in collaboration between two business entities like HUL using e-commerce companies distribution network during lockdown.

3. Decide, Measure and Evaluate Performance. As the leader, you need to decide immediate priorities for the organization and your teams. It could include customer support, flexible payment terms, achieving revised revenue targets, business service continuity, process optimization etc.
   Based on the priorities, create a fun-based game like scorecard. Do not be too serious while reviewing the performance to ensure that positivity is maintained and the teams are not discouraged in an environment of pessimism.
   The team can continue to use collaborative apps , google drive to update and share progress on their Key performance indicators and also to record key learning in getting results during crisis.
   
   
4. Identify and Select your Key Talent. This crisis is a great opportunity to observe and select your Go-To solution provider who could be a potential talent. For those in start-up organizations, you may use this opportunity to select key talent and co-founders as many talent could be available in the depressed job market. It is also a great time to network virtually to identify your key resources and co-founders with similar vision and values to be part of your team.

I hope leaders use this time of crisis as an opportunity to paint a new picture for their existing or new organization. You may also suggest other points that could be useful and beneficial to the leaders during this time of Covid-19 pandemic crisis.