Personal Leadership During and Post Covid-19

The outbreak of Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way we work, learn, and spend. While many of challenges, risks, and opportunities are currently unknowable, in two previous blogs I offered several factors to stimulate your thinking and action. 

In Covid-19 and the World of Work, I suggested seven factors to keep in mind as you evaluate your next steps for success in the “new normal.” The seven are: 1) Consumers, 2) Social Mores, 3) Urbanization and Globalization, 4) Struggling Institutions, 5) Remote Work, 6) Employee Health, and 7) Government and Doing What’s Right.

In Strategic Leadership—Critical to Leading into the “New Normal” I offered five actions for consideration. The five are: 1) Energize and Focus Your Senior Leadership Team (SLT). 2) Make Decisions and Take Action, 3) Perform Stakeholder Analysis, 4) Evaluate Individual Resilience, and 5) Focus on Re-skilling and Succession Planning. 

Here, I offer some personal leadership skills, attributes, and actions to consider as you lead your organization into the “new normal.” Clearly, the list of leadership styles, behaviors, skills, and attributes associated with outstanding senior leaders is extensive. For example, leaders and scholars identify such qualities and skills as: 

• strong mental acuity and emotional intelligence
• being humble
• being quick, confident, and decisive when making decisions
• being trustworthy
• able to persuade others to gain buy-in
• having stamina, resilience, and drive
• being flexible, engaging, agile, and adaptive based on the situation and context faced

While all the above—plus numerous others—will enhance your ability to lead and manage your organization, I offer the following to stimulate your thinking and possible action.

Have an Open Mindset

A prerequisite for success is an open mindset. Without it, you fall prey to the status quo. Being open-minded allows you to change your views based on new information and facts. You are adaptive and flexible to new ideas and experiences. It allows for you and your organization to be agile. A key component to being open-minded is to be curious. Being curious is to probe and ask questions—an inquiring mindset. It is a never-ending learning journey

Think Strategically and Systematically

While there is no common definition for strategic thinking, in many ways, it is an overarching term that reflects the objective to identify connections, patterns, and key issues to conceptualize a holistic viewpoint of the external environment as related to the organization. This allows you to formulate a strategic vision to lead the organization into the future. You will have difficulty aligning the organization with threats and opportunities if you cannot think strategically.

To be an effective strategic thinker, you need to sharpen your skills as a systems thinker. Unlike basic analysis in which you break a system down into its various parts, systems thinking involves seeing the whole, not just the parts. Seeing the whole system with its interrelationships, linkages, patterns, and interactions enhances your ability to find solutions to vexing issues and problems. It also allows you to identify leverage points at which you can influence the system in a desired direction.

Exercise Influence

The majority of those you seek to influence will be outside your authority. Examples include peers, stakeholders, media, key constituents, analysts, the Congress, and others whose influence or actions (for or against) will affect your ability to accomplish the desired future state of the organization. Your ability to exercise influence, persuade, and negotiate is essential.

You must have the person-to-person influence skills needed to deal persuasively and collegially with others who are as effectively persuasive and who add as much value as you yourself do. You must negotiate constructively with near equals who have both personal power and the ability to commit resources to achieve shared objectives.

Be Authentic, Have a Strong Sense of Self, and Take Responsibility

Your perceived authenticity demonstrated through your actions and communications during Covid-19 will generate loyalty and support from your stakeholders. You will most likely face moral and ethical issues while formulating, developing, and deploying strategies necessary to successfully embrace the “new normal.” You and your SLT must have the courage to do what is right, legal, and ethical, regardless of the consequences. Personal and organizational reputations, credibility, and legitimacy are at stake based on the actions and decisions you make.

Enhance Your Self-Awareness

The senior leaders I talked with concur that self-awareness—the knowledge and understanding of your beliefs, values, behaviors, effectiveness, and impact on others—is the most important factor in senior-leader success. This is especially critical during a major crisis such as Covid-19. You can’t be clear about who you really are without self-awareness. While you may have a strong self-image and exude confidence, you must be willing to be vulnerable. If not, you won’t grow!

For example, it is important to fully understand why you continue to do the work you do. Are your hopes and desires for the future based on meeting meaningful personal wants and needs? What drives you as a leader?

You should have a firm grip on your operational values as well as your moral and ethical compasses, stay within them, and be authentic. Knowing your core values and ethical framework is essential when making decisions both during and post Covid-19. This is especially important when you are faced with uncertainty, confusion, and unpredictability while operating under immense pressure and scrutiny.

Maximize Your Learning and Growth

While stating that you must maximize your learning and growth may seem like a cliché, it is especially important as you navigate the pandemic and lead your organization to a desirable future. Furthermore, it is critical that you learn deliberately. This means scheduling time to read and reflect and making that time sacrosanct. Focus learning efforts into unfamiliar areas and environments. Learn about trends, issues, challenges faced by your organization. Doing so will enable you and your SLT members to discuss such issues confidently. You can’t leave your learning to chance. It is essential to recognize that intellectual complacency or leaving your growth to serendipity and randomness will result in poor performance and mediocrity.

As part of your learning, you may consider using a leadership or executive coach. A coach can help you understand the issues and complexity you face, keep you grounded, evaluate your leadership performance, and debate proposed ideas and decisions.

Take Time to Think and Reflect

You can’t delegate or outsource your thinking. You and your SLT members must take time to think and reflect. Like learning, schedule time to think and reflect and make it sacrosanct. You need to think about what you are doing and whether it makes sense. Continuous learning and reflection help to create fresh ideas and stimulate new insights.

It is all too easy to succumb to ongoing, often seemingly urgent, operational issues surrounding the pandemic and its aftermath. Without conscious effort, you will find yourself with extraordinarily little time to think about where the organization is going and determine whether your strategy is appropriate.

Reflective thinking is a deliberative, purposeful act with the intent to gain a more in-depth understanding (sense-making) of an experience. Unfortunately, while you may recognize the power of reflective thinking, taking the time to do it is difficult. In some cases, taking the time goes against the culture of fast-paced, action-oriented organizational environments, especially when in a crisis.

You may not feel right about apparently doing nothing while thinking about a previous experience or attempting to connect the dots of some peripheral bits of information. Nevertheless, this is exactly what you must do to be effective.

Sustain Your Mind, Body, and Spirit

Dead leaders are not in great demand. Clearly, leading at the senior level is very demanding, requiring you to have great physical and emotional stamina. Maximizing the health of your mind, body, and spirit is critical if you want high performance.

How, in today’s 24/7 disruptive world, can you find time to exercise, eat healthy, read, and sleep for eight hours? Yet, if you want to be on top of your game cognitively, emotionally, and physically—with acuity, energy, stamina, good working memory, and alert decision making—you must focus on your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Failure to address any of these three factors compromises your senior-level performance. The strength of your mind, body, body, and spirit is critical to success 

Reputation, Credibility, Trust, and Legitimacy

Make no mistake, you must manage your personal reputation, along with that of the organization. Reputational risk is where you are expected to be out in front communicating, talking, and making the right (often tough) decisions. Loss of reputation can lead to loss of legitimacy, credibility, and trust. Doing so could even bring about the destruction of the organization.

Bottom-Line

Never forget that you were selected as a senior leader to deliver results—and you are expected to do so in an aboveboard, ethical manner. Be authentic and true to your principles. Always keep challenging your assumptions and continue learning. Be open to different voices and enable a variety of approaches that provide candid feedback from stakeholders and organizational members. Listen—if you’re not listening, you’re not learning. Most of the successful leaders I know are characterized by a strong drive for increased personal competence and leadership effectiveness. And they are willing to invest energy and resources to achieve it.

As you lead your organization into the “new normal,” don’t forget to love what you do, to be passionate about making a difference, and to continually question “How do I get better?” Ask yourself questions, such as, “Am I being authentic?Am I open to new ideas, regardless of the origin? Am I controlling my emotions? Am I allowing myself to be vulnerable, showing empathy, with a sense of humility? Am I leading based on my values and principles? Am I still energized and excited about leading the organization? Am I passionate about learning all that I can?”

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