Blog Post

Leaders are not just for Christmas – or for a crisis

leadership Nov 06, 2020
Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash

Yes, it’s a really cute photo but it can be a rough life being a puppy.  Lockdown has led to lots of them being bred, sold at a high price and dumped because they are much harder work than they look.  Now what on earth has that got to do with leadership?

Well the link is not quite as tenuous as you might think.  There’s an awful lot being said about the need for great leadership right now (some of it by me) and its true. We need every ounce of leadership we can get to take us through Covid.

In tough times we need great leaders to get us through.  But leaders need to take note of what happens to wartime crisis leaders – however good they may be. They so often fail in peacetime.  Sometimes (and this happens in business), it’s because the world needs a different face.  But sometimes it’s because the leader did not realise that what guaranteed success in war did not guarantee it in peace.

There are questions here for all those leaders who are working their way through the Covid crisis.  Can you be a good leader in both good and bad times? If so, how do you do that?  

A really good place to start is with the realisation that both are equally difficult.  Being a leader is very hard, as so many people discover.  When you have fought to get to the top it’s tough to find that it is not what you thought it was going to be.  

In a crisis you have to hold the vision of the future while you deal with the present.  You must be able to deliver hard messages with clarity but without depriving people of hope.  You have to react to ambiguous events and take the hard decisions.  You have to deal with the loneliness and the carry the burden of those decisions, and above all you have to keep going to the end of the crisis. Often you are making a choice between two not very good ways forward, you may not know for a long time whether you got it right or wrong.  Often your leadership style will need to change from what it was before. In a burning building you will need command and control – there is no time for consultation.

As the crisis comes to an end, assuming you and your team have survived, then you may think you can take a deep breath and a few weeks off.  Think again.

You are now a leader in recovery, hopefully heading for better times. This is just as hard as crisis leadership, but quite often without the support of the focus and the adrenaline rush that you would have had as a crisis leader.

You will need to modify your style away from command and control, to something that is more collegiate, but the essentials are still the same.  You have to find a new future vision and then communicate that vision with clarity and energy.  The hard decisions may feel even harder now recovery has begun.  The loneliness is still there – it comes with leadership.  At the end of the day the buck stops with you.  You still have to keep going.

Great leaders are able to hold both the now and the future and to have a vision for both.  They inspire in the now, they keep teams and companies together but always with one eye on the future.   Fail to do that as a leader and you risk your own future and perhaps that of your organisation.