Leading Through a Crisis Takes Great Care

No one wants to hear that they or someone they know has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Even worse is having to face the news when a loved one or co-worker has succumbed to it.  

For me, leadership took on deeper significance in 2020, particularly when learning of the death of a teammate due to COVID-19. I want to share my experience guiding a global team of 2,400 people throughout the pandemic, and overseeing the safe working conditions of product distribution and integration centers that have remained open out of necessity. 

My environment was different than most leaders at Insight because I have a broad cross-section of teammates who needed to stay on-site throughout everything, ensuring we could meet the needs of clients — including equipping many front-line workers, and mobilizing workstations at hospitals and drive-through COVID-19 testing centers. As a business leader, you never think your top priority is going to be how to keep a virus from spreading within your facilities, but my focus from the beginning was on teammate safety.  

So, we got ahead of everything, considering anything we thought could be beneficial way before the CDC recommended things like masks and cleaning protocols. We’ve adopted every technology as it’s become available to us, including scanning people’s temperatures with thermal cameras, badges that vibrate to tell you if you’re too close to other people, computer vision applications that enhance our cameras to ensure good social distancing, and contact tracing to minimize the impacts of the positive cases and make the right calls to pull someone out of the workplace, if necessary.  

You can put all the measures in place, but it’s still difficult when lives are at stake, especially when there are so many unknowns and people are scared. When you’re dealing with something as important as health and safety, you don’t want teammates to have a question you haven’t thought of — words matter, and so do actions to back them up. You have to instill confidence and inspire them when they’re questioning why they should be there when others are sheltering in place. It’s acknowledging that we know you’re worried about working in the facilities, but also reminding them that they’re so essential. The technology they’re providing is going directly to the biggest hospital systems in the country, for example, and the devices are being used by critically ill patients who want to virtually communicate with their family members.  

I can say with complete confidence that we’ve had no incidents of a teammate spreading the virus in our facilities, and that’s thanks to the preventative measures and response plan we put in place as well as the diligence of our people to do the right thing. Communication has never been more paramount — I’ve cried on calls with the team. We lost a teammate from one of our facilities to COVID-19 this year. He was taking his mom to the hospital when he contracted it. Both he and his mom were unable to recover. We found out in the morning, and we closed the warehouse that day so people could go home and process the news. It’s heart-wrenching. Delivering that news to the team and talking them through it means you have to make a lot of real-time decisions that put people ahead of everything else. Overall, everyone has shown tremendous resilience, and, by nature, we gravitate to optimism and positivity. In many ways, this past year has strengthened us, inspired leadership to be more engaged than ever and brought out the true grace in people. It’s reinforced the idea that the best thing we can invest in at Insight is our people. 

Insight’s response to COVID-19 is one area that shows how we put people first. We are focused on empowering our teammates, giving back to the community, building a diverse and inclusive workplace, and committing ourselves to social responsibility. Our annual communication on progress is outlined in our 2021 Corporate Citizenship Report. 

I would love to hear your stories of how you’ve shown or experienced leadership throughout the pandemic.