By Declan Noone
It’s a real sucker punch – a hit below the belt and something none of us were expecting to impact our lives to such an extent. The coronavirus has swept in and upended much if not all of our daily life. For those of us living in societies that are enforcing self-isolation and lockdowns/lock-ins, it has impacted every facet of our normally demanding yet structured and safe lives.
While our state, business and societal leaders tell us that this will pass and what we are experiencing is only temporary in the large scheme of things, the fact is it doesn’t feel like that. We are experiencing a sense of loss, a loss of our ‘normal’ life, the way it used to be while also experiencing fear and anxiety for the changes that will inevitably come and impact our lives in the future. The core psychological human needs of safety and stability are not being met. We are off-balance, grasping to gain some level of control in a situation that remains largely beyond our ability or reach to do so. Consequently, it is draining our resources and exhausting our capacity to acknowledge our own agency and ability to move forward, even in such difficult times.
Leading during times of crisis tests your mettle, so to speak. It draws on all your personal resources. No part of your being remains untapped and unused. It’s even harder when you strive to be a positive leader during times of crisis. Why? Because you aim to strike a balance between maintaining the needs of the business (i.e. survival and growth) with the needs of the employees (security, stability and sense of being valued). You fuse tough and decisive business decisions with empathy and compassion for those it will impact, all while demonstrating your authenticity as a leader. Arne Sorenson, CEO Marriott International, through his initial actions and response to the crisis, could be categorised as a positive leader.[1] So too could Gary Neville after his public announcement on 18 March that two hotels he co-owns would close to the public but be made available to NHS Staff for free while also stating that staff would retain their income for the next few months.[2]
Running counter to a positive leadership approach is the more traditional one where business decisions are made regardless of the impact that they will have on others, i.e. it’s about the bottom-line figures and not the figures and people within the company. Tim Martin, the chairman of pub group JD Wetherspoon[3], has certainly been painted in this light over the last number of weeks as a result of his announcements and Pub Group’s decisions regarding staff and suppliers.
How to lead positively in a time of crisis?
I continuously replay these words from Barbara Fredrickson in my mind during difficult times: I am paraphrasing here but ‘Positivity is a realistic assessment of a situation and identifying the positive actions required to move forward’. There are two key aspects here: (1) a realistic assessment; and (2) positive actions.
As leaders, we tend to have a cognitive bias towards over-confidence. We believe that we make decisions based on a realistic assessment of the situation. However, that is not always true. Where we find ourselves today, as individuals, is very different from where we were only one week ago. Our situation has changed, our mental resources have changed, and each of those factors impacts our capacity to arrive at a realistic assessment.
SELF-CARE
So, the first step is to make a realistic assessment of the ‘self’. Self-care is critical. This journey we are on is not a sprint, it is a marathon. If you do not care for your mental health and personal well-being, you will become less effective as a positive leader as time moves on. So ‘check-in’ with yourself now. Ask ‘how do I feel?’, and ‘how is all this affecting me?’ As David Kessler in his recent HBR interview stated, we are all impacted by “the loss of normalcy; the fear of the economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air”[4]. Added to the collective grief is anticipatory grief, which is “that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain”.[5]
Do not hide from your emotions – acknowledge them and allow them to be. Try and avoid over-optimism or hyper-positivity; you cannot ignore the negative and fanatically focus on the positive. If we strive for a realistic assessment of the ‘self’, we must acknowledge negative emotions and their impact on us, our mindscape and our physiology. Only then can you take the positive actions needed to move forward, to move from resignation to acceptance, and to empower yourself to act. To believe that you are not impacted or perhaps grieving over this seismic event/crisis is to hide from reality. Most importantly, allow yourself to feel negative emotions. Just “be” for some time before you move on.
The positive actions you can take now to move forward are:
- Sleep well and eat well.
- Exercise daily.
- Get some fresh air if at all possible (if you have a balcony, garden, etc. use it).
- Create some headspace for yourself. Disconnect and meditate.
- Introduce some kindness, empathy and compassion into your day. There are so many acts of kindness, empathy and compassion being shared across social media right now. Why not replicate these in your own life or become actively involved in one of those good deeds. Kindness is the key to improved wellbeing.[6]
- Challenge your negative thoughts: recognise when you are catastrophic thinking, i.e. worst-case scenario, and find the facts to confirm or refute that train of thought.
- Have some fun: Zoom chats and quiz nights with friends have become a regular habit in my household. It lightens the air and helps broaden our social connections beyond the limitations of the house walls.
- Work on boosting and maintaining your self-efficacy – that belief you have in yourself and your abilities – by
- Reflecting on past experiences of high performance where you overcame significant challenges to create something that you were proud to have been part of.
- Creating small achievable goals and getting some momentum going.
- Reaching out to a mentor or role model – someone you value and admire – and having a pep talk or asking them to tell you about their own experiences overcoming similar or significant challenges.
- Celebrating your successes.
- Practice gratitude. Be grateful for what you have and who you have in your life.
- At every milestone, there will be gratitude and grief in equal measure. Even as we recover, we will also see what has been lost. Allow gratitude and grief to reside in your heart together.[7]
- Invest in your personal relationships. Those strong positive relationships are so important to your well-being.
- Accept what you can’t control (don’t play the victim) and do what you can with what’s available to you on areas you can control.
These actions do not have to be heeded in sequence, and indeed this is not a linear journey. Rather it is a cyclical process of continuous renewal. Take what steps work for you and develop a healthy and positive habit of replicating them in your daily life.
TEAM CARE
So now that you have invested in your self-care, as a leader you now need to transfer your focus to others. In reality, self-care and team-care run concurrently. You need to build your personal resources while also enabling the team to build theirs, which in turn enhances resilience levels and reinforces strong bonds and builds positive relationships.
A ‘realistic assessment’ of the team situation requires you as a leader to demonstrate both humility and vulnerability to others in order to encourage team members to open up to you about the real challenges they and the organisation face. It is about finding out ‘what you need to know’ and not what they think ‘you want to know’.
What is it you need to assess? The external environment and its challenges, the internal/organisational situation and its challenges, and limitations and constraints present within the organisation and/or team. Critically, you need to identify where the opportunities lie in order to shape a vision for the future. You must draw on the collective knowledge and experience of those around you to fully assess what is a highly complex situation and the potential courses of action available to you and your organisation. Tools such as the pre-mortem, worst ideas and even wargaming help you construct a psychologically safe space in which team members can construct and provide clear insights based on knowledge, experience and data to help guide decision-making and in turn shape plans of action.
Once you have constructed a ‘realistic assessment’ based on multiple inputs from key sources and stakeholders, the next stage is taking the positive actions required to move forward. Translating positive actions from paper into reality requires you, as a leader, to have focused on building a culture of trust; respectful and positive communication; empowerment; ownership; positive relationships; and meaning. Once those are in place, your positive actions are: –
- Providing a vision for the future: identify opportunities that can be taken advantage of and provide an optimistic and positive focus.
- Don’t hesitate. Act at the pace required.
- Transparency. Communicate with clarity the realistic assessment of the current situation. Do not sugar-coat reality; many are living that reality and will quickly doubt your assessment if they feel and/or believe you are not being genuine in your assessment. As a result, you will have undermined your credibility and consequently the credibility of the plan. Transparency will also eliminate rumours or ‘fake news’ from circulating and poisoning the group. The more information people have, the more informed and empowered they feel and the greater their own mental wellbeing.
- Ensure that there is a demonstrable shared sacrifice. Lead from the front. If hard decisions have to be made which have an impact on the employees, that impact and those sacrifices should be experienced by the leadership too.
- Tasks enable employees to act. Empower people throughout the organisation/team to take positive action in availing of opportunities and/or creating solutions to the challenges they are facing and will continue to face.
- Continuously communicate respectfully and supportively. You are seen as the standard-bearer – your actions and words set the behavioural norms within the group/organisation.
- Acknowledge when you do not have the answer. There will be occasions when you will be faced with a situation where the unknowns are significant. If you don’t know the intended impact or outcome, say so. False or inaccurate information will only undermine credibility.
- Play: What you and others are dealing with is serious but make the effort to enable people to have fun. Create an environment where people can be sociable and humorous. Greater positive emotions improve the likelihood of a more engaged, creative and focused workforce.
As we live through and strive to lead others through this crisis period, we must not forget that it also creates opportunities for us based on this shared experience:
- More flexible and sophisticated use of technology.[8]
- Less individualism: People can survive individually, but they thrive collectively. Place your faith beyond survival.[9]
- Greater recognition of the role relationships play in our personal and professional wellbeing.
- You can get by with less. The potential to move off the hedonic (I will be happy if I have this, etc.) and onto the eudaimonic treadmill (this includes self-actualization, personal expressiveness, and vitality).
- Being more present as a result of a healthier digital lifestyle.
As a positive leader you can only hope to lead effectively and positively through a crisis if before focusing on others. In our current crisis, we must lead authentically, positively and effectively from remote locations, acknowledging the unique individual challenges each of our team members and/or employees face due to the constraints placed on our freedom of movement and assembly. Building a supportive environment is a necessity for working our way through what we face. Supportive and positive environments drive creativity and engagement, resulting in a greater likelihood of innovation and the development of a ‘can do’ attitude. Any other approach will only ensure you are not best positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that are there today and the new ones that will certainly arise once this crisis has passed.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2020/03/21/marriotts-ceo-demonstrates-truly-authentic-leadership-in-a-remarkably-emotional-video/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-gary-neville-says-nhs-staff-will-stay-at-his-hotels-for-free-video
[3] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/retail-and-services/wetherspoon-s-panto-villain-chairman-may-have-the-last-laugh-1.4212912
[4] https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief
[5] Ibid
[6] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/science-kindness-harding-book/
[7] Angela Blanchard, https://www.zdnet.com/article/words-of-wisdom-for-leaders-battling-the-covid-19-pandemic/
[8] https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-effect-economy-life-society-analysis-covid-135579?__twitter_impression=true
[9] Angela Blanchard, https://www.zdnet.com/article/words-of-wisdom-for-leaders-battling-the-covid-19-pandemic/
