September 2020SHARE
September 2020
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Summary

A world crisis like this is a great opportunity for leaders and their businesses if navigated smartly. It’s an opportunity for trial and error of new innovative business streams, for reshaping stronger and more effective teams, for exploring big growth moves, and for building strong, trusted relationships with your clients. Read this article to understand the 5 key traits that business leaders should possess to thrive in crisis.

No one could have predicted how 2020 would play out. Media calls it a textbook Black Swan event. But is it?

A Black Swan is an event so unpredictable that it’s beyond what we can predict or prepare for, and that can have a severe impact and inflict catastrophic damage to an economy. On the list of past Black Swan events are the 2008 U.S. housing market financial crash, the similar dot-com bubble of 2001, or the 79.6 billion percent Zimbabwe hyperinflation case of 2008.

We can all agree on the similar catastrophic economic impact from COVID-19 so far and the grim forecast for multiple sectors of the economy; but what’s different from the events highlighted above is that this time it was entirely predictable and will happen more frequently in the future.

Pandemics, epidemics, and disease outbreaks are not unusual. They have been registered in history for centuries, with many of them having similar global impacts at the time.

We had enough warnings and data to say COVID-19 was predictable and the same data predict pandemics will be more frequent in the future. Bill Gates told the world in his now seemingly prophetic 2015 TED Talk that the next global threat to humanity would not be a war, but a global influenza pandemic. He added, at the time, that we weren’t ready for it. He was right. We did not have the supplies, the protocols nor the data infrastructure ready. It became uncharted territory for almost every organization.

But companies that have been managing well during 2020 have been the ones where their business leaders used this forced opportunity for adapting and shifting their business practices. Showing that it’s time to start acting differently, to lead with short- and long-term adaptability planning. It’s time to rethink how businesses are operated, how they can be more efficient, how they can add new value to their clients and how they can find new clients; and to reshape organizations to shift to behaviour and mindsets more fit for a new way of operating. Building a resilient business will demand that leaders balance between fallback plans and growth momentum.

These are 5 key traits that business leaders should possess to keep their businesses resilient and growing during a crisis:

Unfortunately, business leaders’ crystal balls have become fogged and can no longer be trusted, but there’s certainly value in expecting the worst, planning for it, and reacting quickly if needed. The sooner you start practising backup planning and adapting to new plans when necessary, the more efficient the process will become, and the less of a burden on the organization this will be. Business models should be rewritten to embed short and long-term adaptability.

Business leaders should be humble and avoid the temptation of sticking with decisions made using outdated data. Do keep reviewing your data and keep adjusting your team goals based on objective, good-quality, and trustworthy information, and shift course whenever needed.

Business leaders should be humble and avoid the temptation of sticking with decisions made using outdated data. Do keep reviewing your data and keep adjusting your team goals based on objective, good-quality, and trustworthy information, and shift course whenever needed.

Use this year to review your company data and how it is processed, so you and your organization can read it more clearly and faster.

The world has never changed so fast and unpredictably as now, in a time where geographical, political, and big economic decisions change without much warning. Being an ostrich leader may run your business into the ground alongside your head.

Teams always have big expectations from their leaders. They expect leaders to be perfect, dedicated beyond a life-work balance, and often forget they are human. But the more human business leaders are with their teams, the more those same teams trust and empathize with them. And in times like these, where people live in constant uncertainty, and where they are facing more stress than before, the need to empathize and pay careful attention to employees’ needs is paramount.

By the time we go back to a new and more predictable normal, a part of your staff will be experiencing some level of trauma and loss – whether in their lives, due to health or economical suffering from someone they know and care; or in their workplace, due to colleagues that have lost their jobs, or the sense of struggle and lack of control new job practices have put on them.

Business leaders have to create a culture where there is time to discuss loss and stress, and address the emotional impact on their staff, taking the opportunity to highlight their company’s purpose and values where relevant, and how a brighter road lays ahead. Don´t delegate and instead, take this opportunity to be the face of an open and nurturing company culture.

Moving fast and effectively on building empathy as a business leader will help your teams rebound faster and will set up a stronger foundation for success on similar challenges ahead, building a more motivated workforce.

Business leaders are being called upon to take on decisions they were never trained for, even related to their team’s health regarding working from home, or when is safe to return to the office.

Be open in exhibiting vulnerability by lowering your guard, and demonstrating how you feel. By sharing your concerns and uncertainties, you present others with the space to share their experiences as well. Once people have the space to share their raw emotions, they become more able to tap into their generosity, wisdom, and strength as a team. You will be seen as more approachable, relatable, honest, optimistic, and grounded.

An example was the May 5th, Brian Chesky public letter addressing his Airbnb employees regarding the layoff of 25% of staff globally. A very difficult moment not only for any CEO, but equaly difficult for any business and brand. By being very transparent and embedding his feelings, he portrayed himself and the company as very human and relatable, and transformed a delicate PR moment, into very a positive one, where his letter was shared and praised by millions.

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Before 2020, the concept of true remote teams – where employees routinely work from home – was reserved for a handful of tech companies. For everyone else, proximity was a necessity.

The office was where employees worked, and even the location of the office, whether around the world or inside the city, also affected business performance in most industries. But most businesses around the world were pushed suddenly into remote working.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” The quarter is the new year, and the fastest will win. Some were better prepared than others, but it has been a quick and steep learning curve for all. When I look at the road ahead, I see a future where staff, or parts of it, will work from home. I see an opportunity for presenting employees flexibility as a perk, for cutting fixed costs in workplaces, and for tapping into a much larger pool of talent, without the hassle of visas, relocation, cultural adaptation, and in most cases, with decreased human resources costs.

But managing remote teams is a new challenge. Employees are adjusting to it, and they are confronted with unfair challenges: children and pets, mediocre office ergonomics at home, unlimited distractions, and lack of accountability. Business leaders need to make their communication and goals more clear, transparent, more frequent, and open to feedback from all stakeholders to keep a healthy dialogue in place.

What starts as a challenge can become an opportunity for collaboration across the globe. With COVID-19, our Superunion team in London feels as close as the Superunion team in Hong Kong or Sao Paulo. The only barrier is time-zone and in very few cases, language. But all those are minor barriers. COVID-19 disconnected us physically from the colleagues we used to sit next to, but connected us virtually with everyone in our agency network, no matter where they are located. This means we can truly source globally for the best talent in our network to place in a client project, creating stronger project teams. We can also work more efficiently around the globe, taking advantage of multiple time-zones, and drive through progress faster due to seamless continuity.

It’s also an opportunity to explore all the new cloud tools available to managers that have spawned across the last decade, understand the ones that are practical and applicable to your business operations, and invest further in virtual team collaboration. Integrate these digital tools across your network, and standardize work procedures, so anyone at any time can plug in or out, independently of geographical company culture, language, or time-zone.

As higher data bandwidths across the globe expand and become more accessible, digital tools only previously available in a physical, centralized workplace will make it possible to access computational power or tools from any device – reducing investment in hardware and IT per worker, and allowing businesses to scale their workforce faster to be more reactive to the market.

In 2020 many businesses and sectors were forced to innovate. Education being one of them, where teachers from all ages and all around the world were pushed into remote teaching, using technology they never had proper training for. Even though it was a forced leap forward, it was one that will bring much effectiveness and value.

Other sectors have not faced such an obvious necessity to evolve in their digital transformation – but that can be more dangerous. Business leaders in these sectors may not have felt the need directly, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t happening and your competition isn’t already taking advantage of it.

When Winston Churchill was working to form the United Nations after WWII, he famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. This is still pretty good advice. The market is ripe for innovation, risk, and transformation. Not only for the world but for your team and your clients. The average person doesn’t hope for change in their workplace, their job responsibilities, or their company business practices, but this year, people are more ready and willing to adapt. Innovation is accepting risk and failure into the business equation, and currently, the market is more willing to accept failure caused by progress.

Prepare your business for secured continuity, using more computer automation on tasks and pipeline sections when possible. The dependency on workplace-bound jobs will diminish, and help you tap into a remote workforce more naturally, and make your business more resistant to similar future pandemics or outbreaks.

During past world crises, companies with resilient, future-ready, and innovation-focused business models have grown away from their competitors, and the ones with legacy or stale business models have fallen behind or didn’t survive.

There’s a long list of companies that were perfectly positioned for innovation and were leaders in their industry, but due to their risk-averse vision or long development times, were left bankrupt or eclipsed by smaller competitors that took risks. On this laggard list are names such as Nokia, GM, Atari, MySpace, Compaq, Blockbuster, Kodak, and Toys’R’Us.

On the other side of this spectrum are names such as Nike, Apple, Google, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and Alibaba. These companies have an internal culture prone to inspire ambition, they put their talent first, manage their innovation funnel carefully, and grant their innovation teams wide autonomy and power.

Conclusion

A world crisis like this is a great opportunity for leaders and their businesses if navigated smartly. It’s an opportunity for trial and error of new innovative business streams, for reshaping stronger and more effective teams, for exploring big growth moves, and for building strong, trusted relationships with your clients.

But this opportunity demands business leaders that can excel in more and broader areas, who are more generalist in their skillset and that can embed risk in their operating model while managing limited crisis budgets.

References:

  1. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/02/574177.htm
  2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22146/
  3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2-months/
  4. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/most-innovative-companies/large-company-innovation-edge
  5. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/leadership/understanding-consumer-ethnography.html
  6. https://www.forrester.com/fn/zfMi9xbnD5hnJgBn2UmDr”>https://www.forrester.com/fn/zfMi9xbnD5hnJgBn2UmDr”>https://www.forrester.com/fn/zfMi9xbnD5hnJgBn2UmDr
  7. https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-brian-chesky/
  8. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blackswan.asp

Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, “Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence,” Psychological Inquiry, Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 1-18.

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