Building leaders for a post-COVID world

It’s been published first in the Economic Times. 

“The rearview mirror in business,” Warren Buffett once said famously, “is always clearer than the windshield.” Yes, more often than not, things do look easier in hindsight. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our personal and professional lives in unparalleled ways. Even though none of us had a plan in place when it all started, we knew that we had to take ourselves, our families, and our businesses decisively towards tomorrow.

While the rearview mirror promises to be clearer, what we need now are leaders who can adapt and rise to boldly steer us into a post-COVID world. Experts are unanimous in their belief that a meaningfully different set of skills will be required to move from a survival mindset to a robust, sustainable growth path.

New times, new measures of success

To build enduring brands and create a workforce of the future, more than ever before, organizations need to start identifying new measures of success. It’s not just about knowing how to do your job. Instead, an individual’s innate curiosity, risk appetite, and the ability to deal with the ambiguity are the essential skills now. And it is humility, inclusiveness, and emotional intelligence that will continue to be the real game-changers. Diversity of all sorts is vital to an organization’s growth trajectory. Having an equal number of female and male employees should no longer be a nice ‘can do.’ Ensuring adequate representation from a racial diversity viewpoint is critical. Because equal opportunity just makes good business sense. Most importantly, companies need leaders who are open to learning, unlearning, and relearning and newer ways of learning

As the COVID crisis gives learning a new face, it has also ensured that organizations tweaked learning opportunities for their leaders. In full transparency, we, like everybody else, had little idea of the impending pandemic and the scale with which it would impact the world. But in this context, the start of our journey to transition to a 100% virtual learning experience a year ago, with more built-in role plays and other engagement tools, was fortuitous. In the last month alone, we logged a record half-a-million learning hours! This has not only helped participants overcome online fatigue, but also led to 5X more leadership connects during virtual in-person skill development sessions. Diverse, cross-functional teams are continuing to find solutions to real-world problems. To complete the wholesome experience, we added virtual graduations with our employees’ families logging in.

Distributed leadership, and why titles don’t matter

Failing to provide the right learning initiatives at the right time to the right group may leave the workforce unprepared for critical challenges. Inspiration can spring from any crisis. Even global pandemics can sometimes make individuals step up and rise to the challenge. The last few months have thrown up wonderfully inspirational stories of distributed leadership throughout our company. It was still early days in the pandemic when our leaders across businesses and geographies collaborated to build remote working plans for the entire organization. Teams also proactively designed new solutions to help our clients acclimatize to the new normal too. At the same time, we were also witnessing innumerable individuals from our ~100K workforce setting such a high bar for what fearless and genuine leadership looks like.

As shelter-in-place orders came into force, a young employee from the Phillippines used her own car to drop her colleagues to their homes. She was also instrumental in enabling work-from-home for other employees by delivering their computers to them. In Jaipur, India, another employee used a special curfew pass to collect her colleague’s computer and continue working from home for her client. Over the last 6 months, close to 700 of our employees have also volunteered several hours of their personal time to operate COVID-19 support call centers for patients and their families in Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka, and Arunachal Pradesh. When each of us has our hands, and lives, overflowing with ever-growing to-do lists, this willingness to go above and beyond is a source of great pride for me. And, there were countless other stories from cities around the globe where our people were making masks, delivering meals, and helping their communities adapt and rise. Also on their agenda was to support each other through this crisis. A cross-functional group of mid-level managers even got together to rethink employee engagement in a virtual world. We’ve had teams putting the ‘fun’ into fund-raising for non-profits while working out together on Zoom, playing virtual bingo, participating in choreographed dance performances, or tapping their feet to virtual music concerts.

Tomorrow is here to ensure that the necessary new-world skills are present and thriving, organizations will need to hire and upskill the existing workforce with an eye on tomorrow. A host of proprietary learning programs we have developed help us build a talent pipeline for next-gen leaders and also prepare high potential managers for leadership roles. These are the cornerstones of our talent integration and development model. And not only has each of them created a brand for itself, internally and externally, it has also helped strategically add value for our clients.

Wherever we choose to look out from – the rearview or the windshield – leadership and learning will continue to be indispensable to each other.