Key Leadership Skills needed in a Covid World
by Elmo Alforque, Consultant at Management Strategies and Workplace Engagement Coach
January 24, 2022
Covid-19 has turned the world on its head. Every single one of us has experienced an impact on our professional and personal lives in one way or another. As we look towards the future, business leaders mustn’t lose sight of the skills they’ve developed and honed in the last 24 months of the pandemic.
Lessons Learned
As we look back and reflect on the leadership and organizational experiences, we note the following important lessons.
- Leaders had to quickly adopt a posture of “crisis management” at the onset of the pandemic. They have to be agile and react quickly to both economic demands and emotional emergencies.
- Leadership became more present and visible and the virtual workplace allowed them to do constant communication to everyone in the organization as it responds to the crisis and as it pivots its business workflows to adapt to a digital workplace.
- Leaders had to rethink key decision-making processes to enhance trust, transparency, and teamwork. Decision-making became distributed to empower local leaders to respond to local situations happening as the pandemic quarantine became widespread.
- Leaders also work on building a ‘shared purpose’ with their employees and teams. With teams operating remotely and with uncertainty looming large, employees need an anchor to get a sense of connection and belonging.
- Leaders also had to make tough decisions as several companies were forced to shut down or reduce their workforce.
Looking Forward
As we look forward to the future, we note the following key leadership skills that will be crucial. These include agility, communication, empathy, purpose-driven to build a sense of connection, trust, and belonging with a focus on employee well-being and data-driven decision making.
Agility
Responding to increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments requires leadership and organizational agility. Agility is defined as “the ability to quickly and successfully respond to changes in the environment.” Research indicates that agile leaders tend to possess these five competencies: Learn quickly, Demonstrates Resilience, Empowers Others, Leads Change, and Thinks Strategically.
Communication
In navigating a crisis, honest, concise, and frequent communications are critical. Gallup has discovered unprecedented levels of communication and transparency have increased trust, morale, and productivity. Conversely, when leaders fail to communicate, engagement plummets for at-home workers. It is important to note that employee engagement drives organizational performance especially during hard economic times and massive disruption.
Empathy
Empathy emerged as an important leadership skill during the pandemic. Great leadership requires a fine mix of all kinds of skills to create the conditions for engagement, happiness, and performance, and empathy tops the list of what leaders must get right. Leaders need to balance tough decisions with empathy.
Purpose Driven and Employee Well-being
Leaders and organizations who are truly purpose-driven are thriving a bit more. Purpose can be set aside very easily in a crisis because we have to survive. But we have to remind ourselves that purpose elevates us from surviving to thriving. Purpose clearly shows up in world-class leaders in a crisis. Research has shown mission and purpose have been important drivers of high employee engagement.With Gen Z and millennials now making up nearly half of the full-time workforce, studies show they want an employer who cares about their wellbeing. Developing highly engaged teams results in fewer negative outcomes, more positive outcomes, and greater success for your organization.
Data-driven decision making
McKinsey Global Institute says that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable. Studying the data is the best way to ensure that the changes you make can improve both employee and customer experience and are the result of informed decisions. The level of volatility will only increase in 2022. New variants will continue to emerge and may cause workplaces to temporarily go remote again. Hybrid work will create more unevenness around where, when, and how much different employees are working. Digital acceleration and transformation will bring continued market and organizational disruption. With the following realities, organizations must equip their leaders with the necessary skills to successfully navigate and thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future.
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