By Kaushika MadhavanIt is about a year since India went into the lockdown. As luck would have it, I had assumed the India leadership role for my organisation in January of 2020. My elation at taking charge ended very early and abruptly as I was thrown into an unknown-unknown situation by March. As I reflect on the last year, navigating through various phases of the lockdown, five leadership lessons stand out:
1. Consult: One of my earliest lessons was that as a leader my role was not to know all answers, but to leverage all resources at my disposal to get to one. This is especially true in an unprecedented context like the Covid-19 lockdown. Involving and consulting other colleagues extensively helps generate alternate options to consider, better weigh the pros and cons of the choices in front and leads to overall better decisions. I used to have a leadership meeting once a month before the lockdown. Very early into the lockdown, we shifted to a weekly frequency to exchange thoughts on what each of us were seeing and suggestions on how we could respond as a firm, thereby helping me navigate the evolving situation better.
2. Co-Opt: In rapidly emerging situations one thing all leaders face is a deluge of decisions – minor and major – that come to them. This can and does get overwhelming quickly. The only way to handle this is empowering others to step in to take calls. Leaders can agree on boundary conditions early on to ensure they are consulted in critical aspects that they need to weigh in on. Early in the pandemic, we set up an internal Covid task force, comprising partners and heads of key functions to constantly monitor the evolving situation to suggest actions on aspects like how we can support when our employees get impacted by Covid-19, how we handle our talent intake programme, etc freeing my bandwidth to focus on what I needed to.
3. Communicate (a lot): Uncertainty leads to an exponential increase in organisational anxiety. Communicating regularly with all stakeholders, in fact, doubling or tripling the engagement frequency is necessary during periods of uncertainty. Just the act of engaging with leaders and getting their questions answered is a big balm on employee anxiety. One of the key choices a leader makes is the tonality to adopt in these engagements. My instinct was to be positive and sunny given the sombre external environment – I did not want to add to the glumness. However, it also felt inauthentic to be positive when everyone is seeing all there is around. I felt calling a spade a spade will at least help me come across as authentic. The tone to take was not an easy choice for me. I took inspiration from Admiral Stockdale, who survived 7 years of being a prisoner of war in Vietnam (and had undergone over 20 tortures) and came out much stronger. Counterintuitively, according to him, it was the optimists amongst the Prisoners of War who did not make it in the end. He says, ‘you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be’. (Jim Collins has written on this, calling it ‘the Stockdale paradox’). So, I reinforced the faith that we will prevail while acknowledging the challenges in my all engagements.
4. Clarify the decision triggers: Often, a key source of organisational anxiety is a lack of clarity on what decision will be taken and when. In an uncertain environment, even the leader typically does not know the timing of actions to be taken. What helped me on this front was providing clarity to my colleagues on the process and the triggers that would drive decision making for us as an organisation. For example, one of the natural concerns our employees had was whether the massive economic contraction would lead to headcount action. When it was not clear how deep the contraction would be, or how long it would last (especially in the early phases), it was very hard to give clear answers. A leader cannot avoid answering such questions since it leads to anxiety. What worked for me was defining the process and the triggers we will follow to address the situation as it evolved: highlighting that the first pass would be on leave balance utilization, second on bonus reduction/sacrifice, third being salary hike deferral, fourth taking a salary sacrifice (starting top down), and only if all of these were insufficient to tide over the situation would we take capacity actions. I also promised to be upfront before triggering any of these. Looking back, I’m very happy that we did not have to use any of these levers in tiding over the situation. Being clear in the decision sequence and sharing the triggers helped assuage anxiety during the early uncertain period.
5. Be calm: My final learning is to be calm and countenance calm always. It is very easy and natural to pass on the stress you feel as a leader (and there are many that a leader has) to your team members. I kept telling myself that with the extent of external stress all of us were facing, my team would benefit from not having to deal with an additional source of stress from me. Deep breathing, taking time out to read, learning to cook (a new skill I acquired in the lockdown!), and tending to our plants were all things that helped me maintain my calm and avoid transferring stress to my team.
The last year was not easy. I had my share of personal (the safety of my family) and professional (when and in what shape we would come out of the pandemic) anxieties. As they say, it was a baptism by fire. I am happy it is behind us. The lessons I have learnt though, will last a lifetime.
The author, Kaushika Madhavan, is Managing Partner and Country Head at Kearney India.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHRWorld does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHRWorld will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
