Reflections from Leading through Crisis

Here are my top 10 reflections from being in a general management role during a challenging external environment in Sri Lanka through a 2-year period. This is by no means exhaustive, and these are my personal views. If something resonates with you, I would love to learn from your experience and will appreciate your feedback. Here goes...

1.Gaining role clarity: As I reflect on the General Management role, it is not about being the smartest or most knowledgeable in the room. The role is about building a great team connected by a shared purpose (putting Sri Lanka first became ours), inspiring and motivating colleagues, communicating well across stakeholders and being an invested coach and mentor for our people. This shared purpose kept the team optimistic, and we chugged along even when the chips were down.

2.Trust takes time: Like most meaningful things, trust takes time to build with teams, peers, managers, and stakeholders. It compounds over time and allows you to get through difficult phases with relative ease. During the economic crisis and faced with existential questions for the business, the trust between colleagues in the team enabled us to stay positive and keep our head above the water. More on this theme in this article on 'Keeping teams positive ' that I had co-authored with Santosh Menon

3.Size of the business:?It is an important factor that drives both investments as well as attention of the senior leaders. But, in a way, it’s what you do with it that matters more. If you show consistent, measurable performance, focus on people, and achieve outcomes in the right way, leaders will notice even if you lead a relatively small business within a large regional P&L.

4. Communication matters: Delivering high quality work is fundamental but is not a replacement for good communication. Our role as leaders is to highlight the work of our teams. Among our most important role as leaders is to bring out the best in people and they will do the rest. Avoiding any toxic positivity type narratives and being open about personal struggles enabled the team to lean on each other in a pragmatic way during the crisis.

5.Speed > Perfection: In the emerging markets context and given the competitive intensity in our countries; speed is often more important than perfection. ?This is especially true with commercial decisions. The winner can take it all in our markets and we need to priortise action over analysis. This can range from leveraging a trade scheme at the right time, embedding the right commercial levers within various channels, taking, or refusing a price increase opportunity. It can increase the risk exposure, but the trick is to know when the risk-reward trade-off is worth going for.

6.Behaviour > Values: Our teams’ see the leaders’ behaviour, how we show up, what we say and what we do in good as well as challenging times, and these things matter more than any value framework. It has been a constant endeavor to stay consistent in terms of my leadership behaviours and keep myself and the team on a journey of on-going self-improvement. More on this theme in this article on 'Balancing Values & Value ' that I had co-authored with my colleague Prasad Magammana

7.Being Fair & Firm + calling out > Giving people a long rope: Being fair, firm, and friendly as a combination usually works well. I think a good thumb rule is to allow people to make a mistake twice but not thrice. In large organisations, we can sometimes be soft on such things. We should call out the wrong behaviours and not allow them to become the norm. When performance slacks and it’s associated with intent and attitude issues, we must move quickly. The longer you wait, the more painful it becomes. People first always but we must not shy away from taking hard calls when required.

8.Being a follower: Having the single point accountability for the country while retaining the followership mandate within the region was a good mix. There are times when our leaders make decisions that impact our operations. Whatever our personal views are, it’s important to align with the decision. Our leaders deserve our trust and leadership is as much about being a good follower.?

9. The job description is only a starting point: In leadership roles, the job brief should not come in the way of expressing yourself through the role. We can and I would argue are actually expected to go beyond the brief. A crisis does a great job of making your job description irrelevant and places demands on you to embrace many unfamiliar areas.

10. Putting yourself first: It starts with self-care. I had to me at my best, physically, mentally, and emotionally to be of value to my teams. Shout out to Sangeetha Aiyer for her coaching on this front. The better I got at each area, the more value I was able to add to my people. This is perhaps the one lesson that will stay with me forever.

Thanks for your time in reading this note.?