3 Leadership Lessons for CEOs Managing Through the Ukraine Crisis

The COVID-19 crisis was a profound disruption on top of a flow of others in recent memory that have upended companies around the world. Without question, there’s no returning to the way things were: modern leaders must be savvy and agile enough to know how to navigate a volatile world where one disruption after the next is our reality. As we face yet another crisis with the intensifying war in Ukraine, here are three enduring lessons for how to successfully guide your company through ongoing uncertainty and turbulence.

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Lesson 1: Take a stand with purpose.

Leaders today have seen shifts in the expectations of a multitude of stakeholders, including their employees. People developed a new sense of self-awareness and worth during the pandemic. They are rethinking the place of work in their lives and seeking environments where they feel valued and create impact. They want to connect with organizations that embody strong values and are driven by a clear, compelling, and socially meaningful purpose.

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As a crisis emerges, priority one is to value your people by addressing the crisis with them. Carrying on as if nothing has changed will create an environment in which people will feel they have to be one person at work (who is not impacted by what’s happening) and another in their personal lives (who may be deeply impacted). You can lose the hearts and the engagement of your best people if they feel they can’t bring their whole selves to work or feel overwhelmed at work without acknowledgment of the need for well-being. By acknowledging the crisis, initiating conversations about what’s happening, asking how they are feeling and listening to your people will earn you their trust and respect, which you will need as you move forward as a company.

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From there, the sooner you are able to develop and take a stand on the crisis that ladders up to your organizational purpose, the better. This will give people a sense of agency, which in turn inspires loyalty. At Heidrick & Struggles for example, like so many organizations, our CEO Krishnan Rajagopalan has condemned the Russian government’s actions, suspended operations in the country, and is supporting humanitarian aid for Ukrainians. He starts every team call by acknowledging the conflict, and recently led a spontaneous fundraising effort during a Town Hall that raised tens of thousands of dollars.

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Furthermore, clarity of purpose creates alignment throughout an organization and enables decision making to accelerate performance. In fact, Heidrick & Struggles research shows that organizations that rate high on clarity of purpose are more than two times as likely to rate high on energizing leadership, and organizations that score high on that have twice the performance ratings of others.

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On the other hand, if you are in the position of having real business reasons for your company not to take a stance, it’s equally important that you explain that decision with empathy and transparency, or risk the misperception that you don’t care or care only superficially about those who are affected.

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Taking a purpose-centered approach doesn’t mean you have to be perfect; we learned from the race to transition to remote workplaces during COVID-19 that people respond well to leaders who act yet are humble enough to acknowledge they won’t get everything right.

Lesson 2: Listen and communicate with humanity and transparency.

The way you communicate your position as the crisis unfolds is as important as being purposeful and timely. People believe leaders, not entities, so your messaging must be shared by leaders at all levels. Your messages should be empathetic, inclusive, and transparent: Knowledge is the antidote to fear, and being forthcoming about the secondary impacts on your business, whether it’s worsened supply chain issues, rising energy costs, or antagonizing a portion of your customer base, will foster trust.

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Furthermore, messaging cadence must be ongoing across a multitude of platforms. Since the pandemic, expectations about the pace of corporate communications have shifted profoundly, and people expect to receive information wherever they happen to be in real time. This shift is mirrored in the political arena, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s regular live broadcasts, which embody humanity and authenticity on the front lines. Zelensky’s updates demonstrate the power of sustaining communication during crisis even—or perhaps particularly–in an absence of certainty.

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To communicate sporadically or infrequently risks consequences: At the beginning of COVID-19, most companies naturally communicated frequently, but too many did not sustain communications and, as a result of this gradual disengagement, stakeholders were in turn not as engaged during key return-to-office moments. Contrast this with the example of a CEO who started doing weekly videos at the beginning of remote working, and discovered this frequent and transparent engagement was so powerful that it’s now part of their routine. Establishing a cadence will convey that your attention and efforts are authentic, building credibility.

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Of course, you can’t be a good communicator without being a good listener, and creating space for two-way feedback and one-on-one conversations, especially for team members with connections in the community or the part of the world that is affected by the crisis, is important. At Heidrick & Struggles, for example, one of our clients surveyed their employees about hybrid work preferences and was shocked to learn that a strong majority of people wanted to work from home, so they formalized the company’s workplace policy, illustrating the importance of following through on feedback. At Heidrick & Struggles, we also opened up one of our first meetings after the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine with one partner from that part of world sharing their own experience. This led to an open dialogue so that people could share what they were feeling. We have people with roots and family in Ukraine as well as Russia, and so the conversation became deeply personal, emotional, and cathartic.?

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Lesson 3: Act with agility.

To enhance performance and growth amid ongoing uncertainty and new challenges, you must be agile, and able to pivot with a flexible mindset to changing circumstances. We all witnessed the very real and human cost of politicians and some essential service organizations taking too long to adapt to pandemic circumstances, and it is a lesson that all public and private entities must remember as new disruptions surface. Agility requires four key skills: adaptability, learning, foresight, and resilience.

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To adapt quickly, leaders must avoid playing the blame game and be courageous, seeking out contrarian views that challenge current ways of thinking and traditional business models. At the beginning of COVID-19 and in the early days of the Ukraine crisis, decisive action that challenged old ways of working was required. Always be intentional about connecting all the actions you are taking during the crisis back to your organizational purpose.

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Learning from your successes and failures along the way is crucial to meeting business goals and requires testing and iterating ideas in real time. To learn faster, conduct pilot experiments and do reviews afterward to see what worked and didn’t, and look for disconfirming evidence to make sure they stay on the right track. Google, for example, was one of the first major U.S. companies to send workers home in March 2020. Later, they announced that all employees would have to return to the office in September 2021, before changing their stance again and giving employees the choice of where they want to work. McDonald’s, meanwhile, deliberated for two weeks and ultimately closed its stores and paused operations in Russia while committing to continue to pay its employees there.

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To see what’s coming sooner so that there is time to prepare, use scenario thinking to game out what could happen and stress test your crisis initiatives against those possible futures. In the instance of a potential war in Ukraine, corporate foresight may have entailed diversifying sources of energy or business relations so as not to be dependent on a high-risk factor like the Russian government—similar to how companies that were ahead of the game on e-commerce had a huge advantage when COVID hit.

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Of course, coping with crisis, adapting, learning on the fly, and projecting into the future and is hard metally and emotionally. There will be lots of mistakes and setbacks that require resiliance and a bounce-back ability to persevere. ???

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The good news is that agility reaps rewards—there are numerous examples of high-profile companies like Amazon and Microsoft that acted with agility whose profitability skyrocketed—and all leaders can embrace agile transformation with a little determination. ?

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Applying these three principles to ?leadership is especially crucial now. Employees have more options than ever and are increasingly choosing to leave behind companies defined by rigidity, opaqueness, and a lack of social purpose, and embrace leaders with compassion and humanity and workplaces where they can make real impact. One thing the crisis in Ukraine is teaching us is that leaders and individuals can rise up and make a difference.?

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