COVID-19: RESPOND AND RESTORE

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Agile decisionmaking. Create means to make decisions rapidly. Eliminate red tape.
5. Know your vulnerabilities and try to contain risk. Quantification and seasonalization/timing of risk can be important – people, financials, strategy, cashflow, amongst others.
6. 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.
7. 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.