Leadership During a Global Pandemic

As businesses all over the world are being impacted by COVID-19 nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly important to stress on the necessity to follow ideal leadership practices. As a Professional Services Business Leader in the Information Technology field, I found myself obligated to rearrange my priorities in order to pass this challenging, real life/real-time, unexpected leadership test.

Let me share with you my insights and observations based on the past few weeks, and my suggestions and guidance that will help you handle your employees and customers effectively during the upcoming weeks to maintain efficient business operations given the current circumstances.

Employees

Safety First

People are your most important asset; they are the reason you’ve came so far. It’s very important to prioritize their safety over anything else. This will ensure long-term productivity by keeping your team healthy during both pandemic phase and post-pandemic phase. And as a consequence, it will also maximize your people’s loyalty to you and to the organization.

Be Tasks & Goals Oriented

Evaluating employees’ performance according to their no. of working hours is totally irrelevant and makes no sense now. Get rid of this old-fashioned management approach. Communicate tasks, deadlines & expected output clearly, suggest direction or approach, and then don’t interfere. Let your employee do the job. There’s no room for micro-management, your employees are most probably working remotely, so you can’t call them every hour to check on them, it will sabotage their concentration, and you will become anxious for no good reason. Set goals, assign tasks, track progress, forget hours.

Enable, Delegate & Empower

It’s time to enable, delegate and empower your team during this unprecedented circumstance and to minimize unnecessary communication, as well as expedite work progress while communicating clear objectives, expectations and boundaries.

Mission & Vision Reinforcement

Remind people of the company’s mission & vision specially during this time, remind them of their role in helping organizations, individuals and the world overcome the current challenges using the products or services you provide. This will keep them involved and motivated even though they are working out of office and don’t get to see their colleagues.

Trust

Foster an atmosphere of trustfulness and hold everyone accountable regardless their level or position, as it’s the best way – and only way in my opinion – to get work done with high quality. Trust your people.

Stay Connected

Current circumstances should never impact team interconnectivity by any means. Every leader must be fully connected with their team, to provide guidance & support, and track activities. It’s a good time to emphasize on project management frameworks such as Scrum. Make sure to utilize online communication tools without overusing it. Keep communication optimized so that people can focus on the tasks in-hand.

Stay Positive

Everyone is currently either stressed or a bit stressed, we are surrounded 24/7 by media outlets that’s pouring negative news and updates like we’ve never experienced before. I urge you not to become an additional source of stress. Demonstrate extreme positivity yourself, be cool, make work fun, inject jokes during discussions & calls whenever there’s a chance. The human-side of you needs to be seen now.

Customers

Be Responsive & Supportive

Customers are expecting you to be there for them during this tough time, to be more of a partner than just a provider, and to really show them that you care about their business and their success. Being fully responsive & supportive in such circumstances will be highly appreciated by them.

Be Innovative

Predict customers current and upcoming problems & needs, whether for your existing customers or the new ones, and offer innovative solutions that will help them maintain the efficiency of their business operations given all the new changes and new consumers’ demands.

Be Relevant

For the time being, focus only on solutions that will help your customer overcome the current challenge and outgrow it. No need to discuss solutions that won’t make sense nowadays unless there’s a specific requirement from the customer side. And definitely avoid offering solutions or products that thanks to the crisis became outdated overnight. Give your customers their space, don’t be pushy, and expect delayed responses from their side.

And finally, work closely with your senior/top management and team members to achieve these recommendations.