What Can Leaders Learn From Covid?

What Can Leaders Learn From Covid?

THE COVID CATASTROPHE:  Most of us are sick of this year and keep longing for some magic carpet to whisk us away from this mess. I saw a T-shirt the other day that read: “2020: Directed by Quentin Tarantino”. Can’t we all relate?

HERE TO STAY:  While we all want this mess to be over, most experts warn that it will be many months, and perhaps years, before we approach anything we recognize as “normal.”

Indeed, most speak instead of the “new normal” or opine that we will never return to anything like that. Fareed Zakaria, for example, the CNN anchor, New York Times columnist and author, recently published Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Zakaria stresses that this is just the first in a long line of pandemics and other catastrophes that we will be facing, especially since we’ve been living in a “petri dish” for years. While we don’t want to hear this warning, Zakaria emphasizes that there is hope in the form of learning that we can glean from 2020.

COVID WINNERS: Zakaria writes, for example, that we need to look at countries that have handled Covid well and understand why. He cites Taiwan as an example and argues that it’s not their form of government or culture that has made the difference, but the reality that they had to deal with other contagions such as SARS, which they handled badly. While the results of those situations were catastrophic, the Taiwanese government learned from their mistakes and managed Covid differently than many countries, including increased testing and contact tracing. The results were that Taiwan didn’t need to endure shutting down the whole country or a tragic death toll, unlike most western countries.

What Should You Do?

ACCEPT REALITY:  Acceptance is usually the last stage of grieving as I wrote in a recent Monday Memo, Employee Engagement Now: What Works. Most of us are grieving the life we used to have. Unfortunately, the grieving process is not quick or linear, so we have been slow to move to acceptance, especially when we have no idea what the future holds. Yet mourn and move on we must if we want to travel to the other side.

PIVOT AND INNOVATE:  The most successful organizations in the current crisis have been faster to realize that they needed to pivot and innovate because nothing was going to change back quickly, if ever. Rice University, for example, managed to continue in person classes by setting up tents for outside learning, while other colleges had to quarantine unexpectedly or utilize remote learning with inadequate preparation.

Similarly, innovative school districts, such as South Bend School Corporation, realized that some students had no access to acceptable WiFi and so quickly outfitted school buses to serve as mobile hot spots for students to use. Who knew that a school bus – that usually sits empty for most of the day – could serve as a mobile Internet café?

 LEARN FROM DISASTER:  Just as Taiwan has been able to cope more effectively with this pandemic, according to most experts, because they learned from previous epidemics, leaders need to start asking their staff what they are learning from the current chaos. While many of us keep asking the question:  when will this ever end?  the innovators among us will ponder: what are we learning? We can all hope that these are lessons we can take with us, even into an uncertain future.

What Do You Think?

We cover these and many more innovative leadership and management ideas in our workshops – live or virtual. Contact us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com