Will Covid be the making of you?

If you are anything like me, you like to be confident that things will turn out well, and that you’ll weather hard times with enough adaptability, skill and insight to get through just fine. It’s called optimism!

Some business-people I’ve been talking to are consumed by their concern about the continuing economic effect of Covid and the potential consequences they might experience.  Some almost to the point of paralysis. Others, after a brief period of understandable shock, are forging ahead with bold plans to re-invent how they do business, whilst remaining mindful of the fluidity of the situation. These two quite polarised responses suggest opposite tendencies towards optimism and pessimism, rigidity and agility, and as such provide an interesting observation about how people respond to change and uncertainty. 

But what I want to share with you is possibly a less obvious manifestation of the response inside our businesses, that has an unintended but potentially catastrophic consequence.

I think we have already seen the demise of many entities that were in poor shape or unprepared as the lockdown deepened, and many more still are disguising their fragility hoping for ‘a return to normal’ in coming months (even though, in my opinion, many will never see that ‘normal’ again!)  Unable to sustain themselves in lean times, even with government help, they have folded or given up customers to stronger, fitter, more agile businesses perhaps better aligned to trends already in play in early 2020.

For those that remain but are still wrestling with increases in costs, thinner pipelines, and cautious customers, there is still much to do before they re-gain solid ground.

In business, as in life generally, when risk goes up, whether it is due to economic pressure or not, it is prudent to manage resources more closely and to ensure that variables are monitored and controlled. 

But the danger is that our anxiety about what might happen means our response becomes biased towards controlling what is happening. Controlling costs, controlling risk, controlling our fears, controlling workflow…and before we realise it, we have created such a tightly controlled managerial response that we throttle the ability of people to think and act in ways that help the business respond to the challenges, and (if we are not very careful) can convey a lack of confidence that the organisation is tough enough to survive.  This hunkering down is precisely the opposite of what is required.  It’s a survival mentality that turns you into a foot step for more confident operators.

Raising the emphasis on diligent management in tough times is sound but can often result in a corresponding lowering of emphasis on our leadership response to the challenges presented.  At a time when everyone in the business needs to be focused on increasing effectiveness, innovating, reinventing, and finding new ways to continue to serve the long term ambition as well as taking responsibility for cost control and production efficiency - we manage to do just the opposite!

The brightest and most successful enterprises see the toughest of times as a challenge to raise both their managerial competence AND their leadership effectiveness. Perhaps now is the time to be thinking about raising the bar on your performance as a manager AND leader, not tilting it in a bias towards one or the other.