Ideas on leading through the COVID crisis

Mar 30

There is a lot of content out there on tactical responses organizations should take and on how the crisis might change our economy. This post is about the mindsets and approaches that may be helpful for leaders as they navigate those tactical decisions.

A quick caveat: this is a living post. The thoughts below are based on reading and conversations I’ve had with leaders, and I’ll be updating it as I learn more. Please let me know if you have thoughts or ideas!

Frameworks and Mindsets

First, retreat to safety

This was the main insight from a senior business leader I spoke to. He said that one of the lessons from the Great Recession was not to spend a lot of time on analysis upfront. Instead, his approach was to take bold, intuitive decisions to get to safe ground quickly, and then to use deliberate, nuanced analysis to determine what steps to take thereafter.

Reid Hoffman also mentioned this mindset on his Masters of Scale podcast. Tactically, he suggested doing a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis. But his wider point was that organizations should first have a defensive mindset in their actions. That includes actions like:

Resetting expenses, since that’s the only thing you control
Conserving cash for liquidity
Proactively talking to bankers and funders about what your needs are and might be.

In another special episode of Masters of Scale, Danny Meyer, the founder of Shake Shack, talked about how his people-first philosophy of business intersects with his decision to layoff over 2,000 employees. He framed these moves as the bitter medicine to make sure there is a business to come back to. But by treating people right as they exit and being as generous as possible with severance and benefits, they are more likely to want to return to the company.

Assume a longer impact, bigger change

Think back to February. The question was: will this come to the U.S.? Then it shifted to: should we cancel sporting events? The first federal guidance on slowing the spread of coronavirus was a 15-day plan. Now that’s extended for another 15 days, with leaders talking openly about extension into May and June.

The point: at every step, we’ve collectively underestimated the length and severity of the issue.

Now let’s think about work. In many conversations with leaders, I’ve seen people approach the pandemic as essentially a "brief break in the norm." The instinct was to take approaches and ways of working that were in place in the pre-pandemic world and simply do them at home. I’ve heard several people casually use “when we’re back in the office,” rather than “if and when we’re back in the office.”

What this shows is a tendency to under-react to change, and a default of doing small iterations in the status quo versus wholesale redesign. To counteract that instinct, leaders might consider intentionally stretching their “worst case” assumptions so that their problem solving is more robust.

For example:

If we have no revenue for 6 months, what would we do? How about 12 months?
What would we do if our key suppliers went out of business?
What if our main competitors go out of business?
We receive funding from the government, but what if it significantly cuts non-essential expenses to free up more money for coronavirus response?

In all those scenarios, the push would be to identify: if this happened, what would I wish we had done today to help us deal with it?

The exercise is not necessarily about planning for those scenarios, assuming that they will happen. It’s more about stretching the thought process so that the options you’re considering today are more robust.

Don’t be afraid of failure and stay focused on winning

Businesses are risky. Things don’t always work out. So Reid Hoffman makes the point that while it’s worthwhile to plan for a downturn, the organization still needs to focus on winning and moving as rapidly as possible to that state.

Some questions that prompts:

Are we still in a defensive mode?
Are we setting ourselves up to win (or are we playing not to lose)?

A key to making the pivot from a defensive mindset to an offensive one is re-framing the current situation. Jocko Willink has one of my favorite examples of this pivot.

Re-imagine work based on the new situation

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Wordpress and Automattic, gave a framework for thinking about distributed work.

Level 1 Autonomy: “Take whatever you did in your office and now do it at your computer, not in the office.” He gave an example that the first movies were just films of plays, as opposed to optimizing for the new medium and capabilities.
Level 2: “What's actually enabled by being distributed?” There, a leader would focus on how to make things more effective.
Level 3: “When you can become asynchronous as an organization, it unlocks so much productivity and so much autonomy for you and your colleagues.” This is when people really start to organize their work around the new set up. For example, they find time to exercise, work at the ideal times.
Level 4: “…when you really start to embrace little micro-habits or ways to improve your day.”

What I found most helpful about that framework is the notion that the gains for the organization only comes when one starts to optimize around the new situation rather than iterate from the old situation.

“What opportunity does this problem present?”

For me, this is the key question. My hypothesis is that the companies and organizations most likely to succeed on the other side of the pandemic are the ones who are thinking now about how they can re-tool for the new normal. It brings questions like:

How is the market changing?
What new customer/stakeholder needs have been revealed?
Who is suffering the most in the new situation (e.g., “extreme users”)? What do they need?
How might the legal and regulatory environment change?
What new things have we learned to do effectively in a virtual environment?

One challenge to doing that kind of deep thinking is the mental tax that the crisis entails. A crisis can feel like crossing the street when there’s incoming traffic—all you’re focused on is not getting hit. While you’re in the street, you’ll be laser focused on the problem in front of you.

It’s only once you get to the other side of the street when you can relax, look back at the full traffic pattern, and assess what’s going on.

Some questions that brings up:

What mindset am I bringing to the problem solving?
How ready are we to look to the future? Do we have enough confidence in the near-term plan to think beyond that?
What routines do I have to step out of the chaos and reflect? What routines do we have as a team to do that?

Communicate the “Why?”

On his Coaching for Leaders podcast, Dave Stachowiak suggests that leaders in a time of crisis need to help their organizations refocus on their “why?” That is: why are we doing this? What is our purpose?

Connecting with that purpose may help people shift their mindset from “things are bad" to “we really need to make this work.” It would unleash positive energy rather than negative energy.

Show how much you care about team members as human beings

One of the hardest parts about working from home is that it interrupts many of the patterns that help us thrive as humans. Some ideas for how leaders might adjust their approach to take into account these interruptions.

Intentional check-ins

Be intentional about replacing the personal conversations that you’d have with team members when you see them in the hallway or by the proverbial water cooler. For example, leaders might schedule 1:1s or send messages to individual team members with a real “how are you doing?” Regardless of forum or message, the core idea is to let them know that you care about their welfare, not just their productivity.

Schedule social-only interactions

Some teams have scheduled video happy hours or team lunches. I heard of another that picked a show on Netflix and they all watch it at the same time once a week. My team instituted a “Question of the Day” in our Slack channel. Some recent questions:

“What are you binge watching right now?”
“if you could befriend one Disney character, which one would it be and why?”
“If you were to perform in the circus, what act would you do?”

The goal of all of those is to maintain the personal connections that make teams strong and make work interesting.

Short meetings and walking meetings

When we’re at an office, we have natural mental and movement breaks in our schedules—e.g., walking from one meeting to the next, going down to get lunch, walking over to someone’s desk. When we’re at home, going from one video conference to the next, we can easily lose or shorten the distance of these movements, and that can sap energy throughout the day. One way to help team members combat this effect is to make meetings last 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 and 60. That gives everyone a natural break for them to move around and to replenish their mental and physical energy.

Another idea is to identify meetings in which everyone will agree to forego video and materials so that attendees can do the meeting while walking outside. A softer version is, as the leader, giving people room to make that choice for themselves by declaring, “I'm going to be walking around the block and not on my laptop; you're welcome to join.”

Provide resources to create a good “office” at home

Some companies are giving employees a budget to optimize their at-home workspaces for extended work. For example, they might buy wireless keyboards, monitors, ergonomic chairs (or lumbar pillows), noise-canceling headphones, or headsets.

Even here, the message from leaders can go beyond “spend to be productive”—which is focused on the organization’s needs. Instead, the message can support that you care about their needs as individuals. For example, “do what you need to do to feel comfortable and effective.”