The Coronavirus pandemic serves as a poignant reminder of how rapidly things can change and the pressing need for businesses to be able to react with speed and dexterity, calling for the essence of strategic leadership.
There is no script for how to respond in uncertain times, but those at the helm must be equipped with strategic leadership skills to lead from the front and exhibit the values and behaviors they expect from the team. In times of crisis, people look to leaders for reassurance and direction, and effective decision-making amid uncertainty, ambiguity, and change requires one essential faculty: Agility.
Given the importance of being able to pivot rapidly and strategically during crises, what does truly agile leadership, embedded within the principles of strategic leadership, look like? To be effective, leaders must cultivate these four qualities.
Flexibility
Flexibility enables leaders to analyse a crisis quickly, and rapidly shift their priorities to combat new, often unexpected threats. It helps them to comprehend and respond to transient realities, breaking out of old mindsets and finding new ways of working.
The key steps for fostering flexibility in a crisis are:
- Challenging long-standing assumptions within business operations
- Tempering the need for speed and efficiency against quality of execution
- Balancing decisiveness and action with support and empathy when leading people
- Continually course-correcting based on the most current evidence.
Innovation
In a crisis, leaders need to demonstrate their ability to take initiative, pivot in new directions and innovate when necessary.
Innovation doesn’t have to mean a drastic and disruptive overhaul – even small steps can make it possible to refocus and establish practical milestones.
We have already seen countless examples of agility and innovation during this pandemic, from start-ups like Inokyo adapting its autonomous retail checking technology to enable businesses to deploy contact-tracing in their warehouses, to global multinationals such as Dyson creating a portable ventilator to address the global shortage.
The key steps for fostering innovation in a crisis are:
- Encouraging creativity, contrarian views and diverse opinions
- Creating a culture of real-time learning that focusses on performing small experiments and pursuing multiple options at once, rather than relying on a single solution
- Conducting regular reviews to identify lessons from both failure and success.
Resilience
Resilience enables leaders and organisations to respond appropriately to unforeseen events, and rather than allow ‘disasters’ to causes paralysis, actively seek out ways to unlock positive long-term growth potential from ostensibly negative circumstances.
Essentially, resilience is about demonstrating a commitment to optimism, integrity, decisiveness, empathy and open communication.
The key steps for fostering resilience in a crisis are:
- Being transparent and vulnerable to enable people to raise difficult issues
- Taking accountability and focussing on what you can control rather than what you can’t
- Accepting the inevitability of failures and setbacks, and having a plan to bounce back
- Connecting all actions to the organisation’s larger vision and purpose.
Awareness
In a crisis, leaders must be constantly aware of the situation and how it is progressing so that quick decisions can be made.
Awareness means starting with what you know about the situation, identifying where to find additional information and ensuring you remain focused on the central problem rather than on the peripheral distractions that inevitability arise.
The key steps for fostering awareness in a crisis are:
- Projecting possible future scenarios and balancing short-term with long-term planning
- Making decisions that not only address current circumstances but are future-proofed for tomorrow
- Learning from the actions of other organisations.
Summary
Whilst the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses is ever-evolving and will likely only be fully understood in hindsight, it is essential that leaders and organisations view themselves as active change agents, working to keep their destiny within their control, rather than passive subjects of global events.
Cultivating the critical qualities outlined in this article, can enable leaders to navigate this crisis in a more agile manner – and better prepare for the next one.
