Fostering Resiliency In Times Of Crisis: Empathetic Leadership For The Long Term

After the year we’ve just been through, and having seen the ways our teams met the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19, I can’t help but be optimistic about 2021. For my part, the focus now is on something that is much more than just a new management buzzword: “Resiliency.”

We are already busy applying it to our supply chains. For any global consumer product company, the unprecedented health impact and repeated rounds of lockdowns and travel restrictions have multiplied the daily challenge of getting the merchandise from the factory floor to customer’s hands.

In the early days of the pandemic, our management teams were working together to find creative, often patchwork solutions to resolve urgent supply bottlenecks. Ten months later, the focus now is on determining which changes to the systems can build resiliency into those supply chains to carry us through the end of the crisis. And beyond.

Yet even more importantly, this once-in-a-generation experience has been a forceful reminder that supply chains are only as strong — and yes, resilient — as the people driving them. The way our teams responded to the first wave of COVID-19 last spring was simply remarkable.

Riding on a collective surge of energy, commitment, and solidarity, we redoubled our efforts and reinvented many of our standard operating procedures. In a way, we were tapping into a certain resiliency we had built into the company over recent years.

But this experience has been something different. And as the pandemic drags on, even if the solidarity and commitment remain, we know that energy levels are suffering. We must contend with rising fatigue, dips in productivity, and even more serious mental health issues among employees.

Taken together, this requires that we invest in new ways to foster resiliency among our colleagues. We know that such a commitment is crucial for the long-term success of our organization — but we do it first and foremost because it is the right thing to do.

As is often the case, one of the best ideas on this front arrives from one of our national offices: in a pure expression of the kind of empathy we encourage in our leaders around the world, our human resources team in Australia implemented a system, administered by an independent external agency specialized in employee well-being, of occasional unprompted phone calls to simply see how our colleagues were doing, and offer any mental health assistance they might need.

Everything was voluntary and confidential, always respecting employee privacy. Yet the program has been widely appreciated by employees and gave our managers a broader sense of what issues have been arising through COVID-19: isolation and loneliness, uncertainty about the future, concern for the health of loved ones, heavy workloads, trouble sleeping.

We’re now aiming to expand the program internationally, and wherever possible launch in time to confront the tough months ahead as the pandemic continues to threaten our health, as well as affect so many of us who may not have been touched directly by the virus.

The commitment to the emotional well-being of our teams is something that preceded the current health crisis. Yet the past year has taught us the importance of consciously designing specific frameworks for building resiliency, and have begun a series of global workshops with our teams to put it into practice. We’re learning that resiliency is above all about mindset: confronting the reality before you, understanding the meaning of what’s happening, and fostering the ingenuity that’s required to overcome unforeseen adversity.

Looking ahead to 2021, we have a unique opportunity to transform the emergency responses to the crisis into permanent changes that can make us better in the long run. Some are about building our systems to be more efficient, others about giving our colleagues what they need to be able to live and work well. More than ever, we know that people come first.