Managing through ambiguity, turning our darkest hour into our finest

Nothing can prepare anyone for what India has been witnessing as the second wave of the Covid19 surges; it is no longer a wave, but a tsunami. The messages of losing near and dear ones, colleagues have become ever so frequent. Each loss is personal; every name has a face. The feeling of being overwhelmed is not a sign of weakness. There are no management playbooks that train leadership to face one of our darkest hours. Yet, one is required to stay composed, take decisions, and ensure business continuity, above all be truly humane.

I have always led more from the heart, than from the head. My mantra has been throughout my career to do the ‘right things,’ rather than ‘doing things right’. My heart now tells me that employee wellbeing and health is our foremost priority in this hour of crisis. I am extremely fortunate that our organization too believes in this.

Today, my colleagues are not only worried about their own health, but also that of their near and dear ones. They are rushing around to organize a hospital bed, an oxygen cylinder. We must create a support infrastructure to help each other. If every organization does this, then we would have covered a large slice of the population. At the same time, we cannot use our privilege to take away scare resources from those who need it. It is time organizations fulfilled their social responsibility to the fullest. We must walk the talk today and stop preaching.

Though there is no template to manage a tragedy such as this, we must go back to our basics of focusing on what is known and staying open to possibilities when navigating an ambiguous future. We shouldn’t minimize the risks but communicate with candor about situation.

People facing a crisis together, always bond strongly. Today we must forge this relationship, seek out those who have the courage to stay undaunted in the face of a catastrophe, and build teams to ride out this emergency together. Our survival will depend on dealing with this crisis with empathy, with our collective wisdom as a team, and the ability to stay clear headed.

We’re not alone in this calamity, the world is passing through some degree of crisis or other. We can only be safe if we all are. The virus has a way of journeying beyond borders. The world needs to work to ensure that every individual is vaccinated, patent laws must be waived to allow Covid19 drugs to be manufactured by pharma companies the world over and made available to every country. It is tragic that while some countries have been able to vaccinate 70% of their populations, there are some who haven’t even achieved 1%. Let us not squander an opportunity to build a better world. Let us turn our darkest hour into our finest, together.