Stay calm

It was only two weeks ago, though it feels like a lifetime – a chat with a friend about how she and her family were still looking forward to their Easter holiday to Italy, while I was looking forward to celebrating my 50th birthday at the same time with family in New York.  What pipe dreams they were!

 

As many have said, first and foremost, this COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis.  One which is likely to act as a catalyst for massive societal change.  Who knows which predictions will come true, and which will look to be faintly ridiculous. For those business leaders who are simply navigating their way through the days, hour by hour, it is important to keep a cool head.

 

Staying calm is often more regularly described as ‘Don’t panic’.  But to borrow from a topic in those child-rearing books for new parents, a negative command such as 'don't panic' requires us to double process in order to work out the right behaviour.  Simpler to give a positive command in the first place.  Often, what is good for children ends up being pretty good advice throughout life.

 

This first principle is important at a personal and a company level.  At a personal level, your body is healthier if you avoid the stress hormones created by letting your mind become anxious.  And at a company level, it is essential in providing the right mindset for leaders to make the right and required decisions.

​

Buy time

Buying time is the opposite of doing nothing.  All crisis experts will tell you that in a fast-changing situation, making a decision and getting on with implementing it quickly is so much better than making no decision at all, even if it turns out that there may have been a better course of action to take. 

 

Working out what decisions need to be taken, in which order, and what facts you need to make those decisions, is key.  This creates the time to work out what comes next (buying time to get to the next base).  And make sure, as a leader, you surround yourself with the right people - a crisis will quickly find out those in the team unable to step up. 

 

Being decisive and calm will communicate to everyone else that you are in control of the crisis (even if that is not how it feels).  This perception is crucial - it is embedded deep in the human psyche that this is what we are looking for from our leaders.

 

For in the absence of that control, we as humans will fill the void with something psychologists call “compensatory control” – an alternative story that creates the equivalent sense of control (at a broader level, this is a the heart of the attraction for conspiracy theories).  And at this point, leaders will have lost the trust of their people.

 

Do the right thing

Finally, make sure that you use your moral compass to navigate your way through what will inevitably be difficult trade-offs.  All crises have a shelf-life.  And people, will remember the decisions taken during a crisis.  Do the right thing throughout, and customer and employees will reward you with the loyalty afterwards.

 

Of course, you have to survive through the crisis to be given that opportunity.  And that is where the trade-offs begin. How long do you pay wages at the expense of shareholder dividends?  Do you start offering services for free to support customers? Do you divert production facilities to make health products required by society but which are completely new to you?  

 

The answers may not be easy.  But collect the facts.  Make the decision.  Move onto the next issue.  And make sure you tell customers and employees regularly what you are doing, and why.  If you keep doing the right thing, and they see that, you will keep their trust to get the company through to the other side.