Leading your team through the COVID-19 crisis

Leading a team is challenging during normal times. It can be punishing during a crisis.

Right now, many of you will be dealing with the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Your employees may be worried about their safety, and the safety of their loved ones. Some may be worried whether they’ll still have a job in a few weeks time. They’ll be bombarded with information, some of it factual but a lot of it not. Many of you will be already working from home, which can make leadership more challenging (but no less necessary).

When you’re in the midst of a fast moving situation, where good information is difficult to get, and there are real penalties for poor decisions, the weight of leadership can be almost too much to bear.

How can you lead your team safely through to the other side of the COVID-19 situation so that you can emerge stronger and more cohesive than when you went in?

Short answer: It’s not easy. In fact, it may not even be possible. You may just not have it in you. The reality is that you just don’t have the necessary skills and experience. Your team probably won’t even listen to you.

Have I convinced you you’ll probably fail? Good, because that’s exactly what a crisis will do. It will surprise you from behind, knock you to the floor, and kick you as you try to get up.

Here are some practical techniques that you can apply to improve your effectiveness as a leader during the current crisis:

Understand who your people need you to be

This is situationally dependant, but it’s the key to unlocking your potential as a leader. Who do your team members actually need you to be? Do they need you to tell them what to do? That’s probably unlikely in a business setting. Do they need you to send them news updates on the situation? Maybe, but probably not. Maybe they just need you to be open with them about what’s really going on, and what the potential risks are to them.

The good news is that if you’re not sure, you can ask.

Build a foundation of trust

If your team doesn’t trust you now, there’s no way they’ll trust you during a crisis. Trust takes years to develop, but mere seconds to burn to the ground.

Focus on building the trust of your team, starting from now.

Be available

To lead a team you need to be with your team. If you’re team is in the office, you’re there with them — door (or cubicle, or hot desk) open. If you’re working from home, make sure everyone has your email and mobile number, and knows they can contact you whenever they need to.

Make time

A crisis will always be demanding on your time. Every small change in the situation will appear to demand a response. As a leader, you still need to make time for your team. If someone wants to have a chat with you, drop everything and have a chat with them. When you have a spare moment, spend that with your team.

Listen to your people

Your people will tell you what their needs and concerns are. You just need to give them the opportunity to do so, and be willing to listen to them when they do. You also need to be the kind of person they will be willing to share their concerns with. As mentioned above, you have to establish trust as early as possible to enable this to happen.

Let them tell you how they’re going or how they’re feeling. Ask good questions to dive deeper. Acknowledge you understand, and give tacit permission for them to continue. Often people solve their own problems — they just a way to externalise them in a high-trust environment.

Show empathy

You can’t pretend to know how other people are feeling during a crisis. How they look, or what they say, may have no bearing on what they are actually thinking or feeling. You may never know exactly what’s happening in their personal lives. This is why it’s important to connect one-to-one with your team members.

If you’re working from home, every few days have a video chat with each of your team members to see how they’re going. When you do this, make sure you actually let them tell you how they’re going. This isn’t an opportunity for you to talk. Let your people say what they need to say. Acknowledge their fears and concerns. Be fully present for them.

Remember that empathy is not necessarily sympathy.

Communicate regularly

As we’re watching the current crisis unfold, it should be already clear that a crisis can be a confusing and anxious time. For your team, asignificant amount of anxiety will come from not knowing what the real risks are, and how these risks will actually impact them or their loved ones. Anxiety can also come from not knowing what the company is doing. Is the company stepping up to support employees? Are they managing the situation at all? Will I have a job by this time next week?

Make sure your team knows what’s going on. Share updates on the facts of the situation, and provide details regarding what the company is doing to respond. Be specific. Answer any questions they may have (if you don’t know, commit to find out by end of day).

Tailor your communications to focus what your team needs to know, not necessarily what you feel you need to say.

Address concerns early

Address concerns when they are a murmur and before they become a roar. If people are grumbling about something, listen to the grumbles. Ask questions. Get to the bottom of their concerns. Ask others to get additional perspectives or to determine whether there’s a consensus.

Remember that you may not necessarily share their concerns. You might not even think they are valid. That doesn’t actually matter. Take their concerns seriously and address them as they come up.

Maintain your composure

No matter what happens, keep your shit together. Remember that you’re the person your team members (and probably others) are looking at to measure the validity of their own feelings of fear and anxiety. If you’re freaking out, they will freak out 10x.

Take slow deep breaths and hold it together.

Above all, your team needs you to do that.

Be realistically optimistic

Tell your team how it is, but also make sure each and every person on your team knows that there is hope, and explain to them what they can personally do to be part of a positive outcome. This will help engender a sense of mission, which is the key to moving through a crisis together as a team.

DO NOT downplay the seriousness of the situation. That’s poor leadership, and something we’ve already seen happen at the highest levels of some governments. At the other end of the spectrum, don’t run around yelling that the sky is falling. Rely on facts and solid analysis. Be almost dispassionate, and don’t engage in conjecture or in hypotheticals.

Mentally prepare for the worst

Leaders should be prepared for all outcomes. Looking at the COVID-19 situation, what’s the worst that could happen? Well, people could die. Your people. Or the people your people care about. Thinking further along the timeline of the crisis, people could lose their jobs, or be landed with health care bills they can’t afford to pay. Think through how you would respond if each of these things happened. Visualise it. How would you react? What would you say? How do you think you would feel?

Visualisation is a very important tool for leaders, and one that you should be using routinely (crisis or no crisis).

Take time to decompress

As a leader, it’s easy to feel as though you’re not only dealing with your own stress, but you’re required to deal with the stress of others as well. It can be overwhelming, even for experienced leaders.

Make sure you take time to collect yourself and relax. Enjoy a good meal with someone you care about. Do something that can take your mind of the crisis, if only for a short while. The activity that works for me is a short walk outside. Find what works for you.

Don’t be too concerned if you fuck some things up

Leadership is hard, and the demands of a leader during a crisis can be crushing. You’ll make mistakes. As all you can hope is that you make the small kind. Be gentle in how you evaluate your own performance. The key is to know that you did your best with what you had available to you. Of course, all leaders know that sometimes your best just won’t be good enough.

That shouldn’t stop you from taking action. In a crisis you can’t just stand still. This is even more important when facing a viral pandemic, when literally every minute counts. An imperfect decision may be significantly better than no decision at all.

If you do screw things up, be open about it with your team. Be your authentic self. Explain why you made the decision, why it didn’t work out the way you thought it would, and what you’d do differently next time. Prove to them (and to yourself) that you’ve learned from your experience and you’re better for it. It’s not easy to do, but it’s one of the hallmarks of a good leader.

I’m hoping that many of these points have resonated with those of you that are leading teams right now during the COVID-19 situation. Leadership is always challenging, but it’s during a crisis that leadership is truly tested.

Here’s a parting thought: Quickly read through the headings above. Are there any of these principles that you couldn’t apply when there’s no crisis?

All of these principles can be applied on any given day, to great effect. The principles of leadership during a crisis don’t really change from the normal day-to-day. What does change?

The stakes are higher, and your people need you more.

Grant is the founder of Spartan 9, a security and crisis management consultancy that focuses on human-centred solutions to complex problems.

In a former life, Grant was a commissioned officer in the military, graduating at the top of his class. After a little over 13 years in the military, he left to do similar things but with significantly less support and for only slightly more money. For the last 18 years he has worked across Asia and the Middle East as a security and crisis management consultant. He’s currently in Seoul supporting clients to navigate through the COVID-19 situation, and is likely to be here until he can get a flight back to his home in Singapore.

If your organisation needs support during the COVID-19 pandemic, please feel free to reach out to us for advice and assistance. We can help you to implement mitigation measures, establish best practice for case management, or implement back to work plans that won’t place your employees at risk. You can learn more about what we do here.