Business Resilience and Continuity: Covid-19 Disruption
Before February 2020 you were probably thinking about the meaning of ‘Leadership in the Digital Age’ (LITDA) and reflecting on your digital transformation strategy (DTS) and its implementation. With the advent of Covid-19 (C-19), you have probably added business resilience, continuity and more effective virtual organization and remote working to your list of immediate challenges to address.
Happily, the people aspects of the solution to LITDA and DTS —leadership agility and structural agility, connected leadership and dynamic capability— are also the enablers of resilience, business continuity and effective virtual organization and remote teamworking.
What is paramount is 'creating clarity'. This involves the face to face and 'remote' leadership practices and behaviours for decision-making, planning, briefing and information flow, facilitating dialogue, and the clarification of roles and role-relationships described in various parts of this website.
Of particular importance are the ABCDs of communication: Accuracy, Brevity, Clarity and (collaborative) Dialogue. It is the effective communication of and engagement in a plausible plan that helps to build confidence, confidence which is strengthened with being trusted by one's boss and working in conditions of 'psychological safety'.
Careless or imprecise use of language can cause confusion which is infinitely harder to correct when people are working remotely. Meetings over wifi must also avoid of deviation and repetition if it leads to circular discussion; video calls are more tiring and need to be shorter than F2F meetings.
We can assist with your reactions to business interruption and future preparations for business resilience.