Leaders in Crisis

Leaders in Crisis

Today, we find ourselves faced with a war not too far away from some of our partners. What does it mean for our business relationships with them? How does it affect our daily leadership questions with our clients? What will be the impact on our economy? While questions one and three are not easy to answer, we can certainly talk about question two.

The biggest challenge seems to be that our generation has no experience in handling such a crisis. A couple of weeks ago Covid was the major global crisis. Covid has increased the process of digitalization in many industries, including in the executive search industry. Years ago, we were used to having face to face interviews with our candidates, and now we do most of the preliminary interviews by video. We have learned that this saves a lot of travelling time for the candidates and helps to reduce costs.

The question remains: what will we learn from this war? Different leadership skills? Different risk assessments?

One thing we learned in the army was to take decisions. It’s better to take one wrong decision than to take no decisions. It?takes?good analytical skills to analyze a situation, but it also?requires?courage to?take?the decision after the analysis.

In interviews and assessments an executive search consultant must find out if the candidate is able to take decisions. This could be achieved by asking questions on previous situations the candidate was facing: what was the situation, what was the outcome of the analysis, what was the decision, what was the impact of the decision?

Conclusion: the actual war is terrible indeed. But it also shows what is important to conquer a crisis: taking decisions. Our leaders must be able to take decisions.