The global challenges unfolding across the country in the past few weeks have presented a huge humanitarian and economic challenge. While medical professionals, governments and industry leaders are tirelessly working towards containment and stabilization, business leaders and owners have a similar challenge: leading your business through the coronavirus crisis and beyond.
One of the best articles published about how to navigate the road ahead stems from Harvard Business Review: Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus. While the authors outline 12 lessons for "Responding to unfolding events, communicating, and extracting and applying learning," the infographic below recaps six of the most pressing actions you can take to:
• Ensure the health/safety of your employees.
• Centralize communications.
• Stabilize operations to bolster a way forward toward recovery.
The summary below also augments the strategies with a few supportive tactics gleaned from prior client engagements that required immediate and decisive action.
1. Update intelligence daily: Since virtually all firms have had to operate remotely through networked teams, mobilizing your leadership team daily can help you and your teams make the most out of rapidly changing information. It's also important to separate the signal from the noise: to identify what is essential for the wellbeing, efficiency and effectiveness of employees. Decide what channels to use (Microsoft Team, Google Hangouts Chat, Zoom, Slack, etc.) for real-time, daily and weekly communications for now, near-term and your next priorities.
2. Constantly reframe and adapt: A Chinese proverb reminds us to be like bamboo: "The higher you grow, the deeper you bow." Balance the big picture with the tactical: decide what's urgent versus what's important. Be open to change: what was first priority yesterday may be the second priority today.
3. Choose agility vs. bureaucracy: Large firms need to embrace an agile mindset not only for software development, but also for marketing, sales and operations. Regularly evaluate what you need to stop doing, start doing or continue to do (if the latter is still working well). Encourage your teams to ask their respective leaders what barriers they can remove (or what they can do differently) to help streamline what's best for the customer.
4. Balance response in seven areas: Communications, employee needs, travel, remote work, stabilizing the supply chain, business tracking/forecasting, being part of the broader solution. (See the HBR article for more detail.) While all teams need to regroup to determine the "new normal," constantly reassess marketing/sales alignment and alignment across all operations - especially, customer support.
5. Use six resilience principles: Redundancy, diversity, modularity, evolvability, prudence, embeddedness. Encourage teams or sub-teams to be modular in their problem solving and encourage diverse thinking. As Einstein said, \"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Rise up to look beyond your own company ecosystem to look at your team's ecosystem in your community: are there some ways in which you or your team can help those around you?
6. Prepare for the next crisis: Establish a new cadence for scenario planning: What else can happen that we haven't expected? And what other contingency plans do we need to minimize risk? What do these plans look like from the view of the supply chain, partners, operations/logistics, our customers and all stakeholders and/or investors? Be transparent inside and out to identify critical paths and backup plans to minimize future disruptions and increase cross-functional team proficiencies.
Ed Valdez is partner and CMO with Chief Outsiders, a leading fractional CMO firm focused on mid-size company growth.
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