Some leadership considerations in the era of COVID-19
Business leaders now find themselves on the front lines of the COVID-19 outbreak. While there is uncertainty in many aspects of this health crisis, for business the implications are clear: resiliency, agility, planning, empathy, and preparedness are all important factors, today and in the future.
Here are some considerations for leaders in the COVID-19 era.
- The critical basics: your people. Active and open communication, sick policy flexibility, enabling social distancing, remote work planning and technology enablement where possible, decontamination/sanitization of facilities and offices are all essential steps. Importantly, so is listening to your people.
- Consider information carefully. Guidance from authorities. Filter news and reporting for facts. Apply critical thinking to experts and forecasts. Relentlessly update current thinking in a time of rapid change.
- Thoughtfulness around your customer. Thinking ahead about implications for your customers and how you can serve them in a different time. Communicate in a planned and active way with your customers, potentially through multiple channels.
- Agile decisionmaking. Create means to make decisions rapidly. Eliminate red tape.
- Know your vulnerabilities and try to contain risk. Quantification and seasonalization/timing of risk can be important – people, financials, strategy, cashflow, amongst others.
- Capitalize on innovation. Use times of change to innovate in ways that contemplate and plan for a new way of working. Consider short-term mitigation plans and investments in light of potential future advantages to be gained.
- Document and create policies now, in real time, where they did not exist. Prepare for a next crisis. And plan for a changed climate in the wake of this one.
For more – economic analysis, business implications, and new thinking on how to respond, restore, and plan – please visit our COVID-19 resource center.
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