COVID-19 2020 – Building the plane while you're flying it.

If you are a leader during the COVID-19 humanitarian and economic crisis, you are in all likelihood being tested as never before. We need to talk about this truth. It's not just you. The kinds of changes and choices that are being demanded are disruptive, painful, and the final results of our decisions are unknown. Beneath the rapid strategic choices and genuine care is fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion for many of us. The COVID-19 pandemic is wrecking lives, economies, and businesses and has posed an entirely new set and scale of questions that seem to morph weekly if not daily. COVID-19 is a global tragedy and a cruel, relentless and unforgiving teacher. What will we learn and salvage?

The grimness of daily news is inescapable but we must continue to speak about solutions and hope. Even when we don’t know what we don’t know. So much is about being present and hopeful and optimistic, but also being true to fact. We are making decisions lightening fast with incomplete information and the digital space amplifies the sound of decision-making and compresses time to the point our heads spin and hope falters. We often don’t understand or appreciate which mistake is the best one to make when there are options (including doing nothing) and no clear path forward. Too often the default position is a numb continuation down the most familiar path. Acts of commission weigh heavier on us than acts of omission as we tend to find those who act to be more blameworthy than those who do nothing. COVID-19 decisions are not for the faint-hearted.

Our leadership imperative is to speak to ideas that make things better for people who need us most, and then act on them. We need leaders who are agile enough to call the best shot fast, enable positive deviance, and model decisive and empathic behaviour all while fuelling, energising and enabling critical response. Damn that’s a lot to deliver on every single day.

People First

“We are all in the same storm, but we are not all in the same boat.”

We need to protect dignity, wellbeing and values above all else, and maybe do so virtually. This demands the ability to recognise that people approach work, stress and challenges with a myriad of styles and mindsets as diverse as people themselves. To maintain positive accountability, leaders have to demonstrate sincere appreciation for the work and personal challenges their teams are facing. In many organisations leaders talk about putting their people first, but their actions are not seen as supporting the rhetoric. In normal times this is very unfortunate, but in a crisis it’s disastrous. 

Recovery is not the same as resilience. Resilience refers to the tensile strength in materials. It explains how far a tree will bend in a hurricane before it topples, how well a roof will resist a tornado, how much impact concrete will absorb before it explodes. Resilience is a property that ensures survival and the potential for bouncing back. We need to plan for more than recovery.

Some people, personally and professionally, seem to be getting through COVID-19 unscathed while others are struggling to make ends meet and stay in business. Essential workers have continued to work in their workplaces, confronting challenging public behaviour and fear of contagion. Some of us have worked from home. Some of us have lost financial security, employment and mental health. It has been fascinating to see those who carry themselves with dignity and grace even during the toughest situations and those who do not or cannot. Perhaps a crisis such as this one does not develop character, it reveals character.

North Star

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked”. Warren Buffet

Right now, purpose needs to take precedence because people need a North Star, a reference point they can employ to measure their security. People spend most of their waking hours at work, so their workplace is their reality in good times and bad. Optimistic people lead resilient organisations, and optimism is a function of foresight. Optimism provides a positive, consistent, and comforting touchstone for people inside and outside the company. We need leaders who dare to be vulnerable and show just how much they really care – with individual care and collective care at scale.

The Future of Work is Wellbeing

With the growth of the digital economy, our “always on” way of working, the stresses in managing work-life integration, and now dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, assisting employees to look after their wellbeing has never been more important. We will see possibly permanent and significant changes in how we think, behave and relate to one another. Our ability to focus, to feel comfortable around others, even to think more than a few days into the future, will degrade. But we may also feel the desire to cope by caring more for each other with an accompanying re-grounding in more enduring values and pro-social behaviour.

Loss of control of daily routine, a sense of normalcy, personal freedom, face-to-face connections and expectations of safety defined people’s experiences during the 2003 SARS epidemic. Studies from the SARS, Ebola and Swine Flu outbreaks all recorded significant and protracted spikes in feelings of anxiety, depression and anger. Collective resilience and post-traumatic growth are other possible parallel futures that look like adapting and accommodating, rather than resistance to, the suffering and collective trauma.

Psychological distress will be a prominent emotion in workplaces across the world, and it’s not something most managers know how to address. It will manifest in ways we haven’t seen before. Leaders need to view employee mental health decline as a clear and present danger to organisational recovery but also as a key opportunity to building psychological safety and wellbeing. Lip service and tokenism will be viewed cynically by workforces and damage engagement, productivity and performance metrics. An integrated, holistic wellbeing framework is required that starts at the top with genuine commitment and flows through all layers of the organisation, supporting by training, quality information and communications and consistent behaviour. Building a culture that promotes resilience should be a top leadership priority with proactive programs that empower staff to take responsibility for their wellbeing during COVID-19 both promoted widely and freely available.

Normal human responses to the global pandemic may be compounded by excessive workload, job uncertainty, working from home pressures and financial stress. Each individual will react differently and empathy and compassion will be needed to support each person transition with intact mental health through to the other side whenever that eventuates. Leaders need to initiate vulnerable, safe and authentic discussions about whole person wellbeing.

A pandemic of kindness?

"Even in our grimmest moments, we can hold despair in one hand, and hope in the other." Jess Hill

We are operating in an age of radical transparency in 2020. How businesses act and the decisions they make during these times will have significant potential consequences. Try to find the opportunity in a crisis. Not because we should be looking to profit out of adversity, but because when things are bad we can still be a force for good. When things go back to normal, it's not going to be the normal that we were used to before and we must consciously shape it. Nothing about this time is business as usual. The world has suddenly morphed into a dystopian film, and nobody knows exactly how or when it will be over.

None of the things we are doing right now are normal. Flattening the curve has warped our lives and the "new normal" is getting old fast. The measures we are taking are unarguably necessary to reverse the tide of a significant health issue. Others are merely poor substitutions and workarounds that we can hopefully be given up soon. This is temporary abnormal. Passengers thrown from a sinking ship into lifeboats haven't taken up rowing. They are getting through, surviving, doing what they can to adapt to change that has been foist on them suddenly and horribly. Will it last? For a while yet. But all the other problems and divisions may eventually come creeping back if we are not vigilant and conscious of how we shape this. "New normal" is used as a soothing reminder that we’re all "adapting" but COVID-19 continues to impact us all very differently. This is our "new now" which presents the dual challenge of accepting what we have to do differently for an unknown period of time but also still creating a space to hold hope that things can change for the better. Maybe we have realised that what is enduring is human connection, a sense of contribution and love. Could this become our biggest lesson of all?

Show up as the leader you need and want to be.

“It has put everything I thought I cared about, valued and have taken for granted on notice and up for review.” Me

Leaders can take action to allow more positive emotions such as hope, compassion, gratitude, and optimism to rise. They can start with healing and transforming themselves so they can genuinely embody these things. Emotions are contagious and leaders’ emotions are especially so. Brene Brown recently said in a NY Times interview "a crisis highlights all of our fault lines" and there is a risk we will work our stuff out on other people. Don't rank your suffering. We never know someone's private life really. And don't expect everyone to function at their pre-COVID levels. This is a marathon, not a sprint and we need to manage our energy to match this sustained demand. It is easy fall down the rabbit hole of worry spirals when we focus on things that are beyond our control and right now, we’re in a global situation in which a lot of things are out of our control. What do you need? What boundaries can you set for yourself?

There is potential for increase in human connection despite social distancing, and a grounding in enduring values. The constant pressure to be better can be relaxed for now. It’s perfectly OK to slow down and not give into the perpetual pressure of always working to be better because those productivity ideals can be just as toxic as laziness and procrastination during self-isolation. We are now able to focus on what’s always been of the highest importance: love, compassion, connection. This is a beautiful window of opportunity.

The COVID-19 elephant in all our rooms right now represents illness, mortality, financial insecurity, loss, and loneliness, along with unexpected moments of grace and resolve. Residual trauma will be an unwelcome inhabitant in us all when we’re on the other side. But, ending pretending to each other can offer freedom, relief, and validation. Being authentic can elevate our patience, empathy and compassion towards one another. We are being invited to find light amidst the darkness. We are all in this together quite literally even as we build the plane as we are flying it. An invitation to discover our resilience and deepen social capital. Gratitude builds grit and grace.  As we individually and collectively rise and rebuild, we may just uncover gifts of post-traumatic growth like a centering of priorities, clarified core values, new definitions of success, stronger connections with friends and loved ones and an enhanced appreciation for life and those who make a genuine contribution to our betterment. Let’s all make that choice.

Future Thinc, from Human Psychology, train over 2000 people a year in managing mental health, improving wellbeing, enhancing resilience and leadership capability uplift. Contact us to discuss your organisation's L&D needs and blended learning concepts. - [email protected] or go to www.futurethinc.com