Success Impulse: Leadership Learning Points from COVID-19
Switzerland is back on the road to normality. Now it's time to learn the right lessons from the pandemic. Our author has put together a few leadership learning points.
Much has been written about the effects of the Corona Challenges on leadership and on how we work together in organizations. One question keeps coming up: What will be the lasting positive change in our leadership and culture?
5 Leadership Learning Points
Here are a few points I take away from my coaching and projects with my clients over the past few weeks:
- Personal responsibility. Nothing will change for the better if we do not change ourselves. In a few weeks and months, many things will be more or less the same as before. Unless we as leaders have seized the opportunity and started to sustainably change some of our behaviors in leadership to seize opportunities. That is a conscious decision.
- There is another way. You've probably also been surprised that many things that would have taken months or years to decide in normal times can now be done in a matter of days. Meetings by video? No problem! The CEO's weekly video to the team? Finally! Eliminating unproductive meetings? We should have done that a long time ago! Serving customers remotely? And customers even like it! Coaching via video session? Just as effective as on-site. And so on.
- Opportunities are everywhere. We humans are strange: Most of us only really move when we HAVE to (in our perception). Anyone who is an entrepreneur can tell you a thing or two about the fact that you HAVE to win customers. When we can no longer be on-site with customers, we HAVE to find opportunities via video. And suddenly we see opportunities where before there was only unpleasant work and risks.
- Emotion is (almost) everything. Whether a company emerges from the crisis as a winner is 10 percent external influence and 90 percent its own decision as a reaction. And this decision is almost exclusively emotionally influenced. This is just as true for the CEO as it is for every single member of the organization: Some are now more than ever getting involved, while others prefer to go underground. Everything is a decision!
- Speed becomes more important. Anyone who wants to be extraordinarily successful in the future would do well to increase the speed of decisions and actions. Waiting too long in times of crisis is extremely dangerous. In good times, it sets us back.
Supplement opportunities
Conclusion: We can all learn a lot from this crisis. The extent to which you use these leadership learning points to score points over the competition (and your customers) is entirely up to you. The most successful companies are characterized above all by the fact that they see and seize more opportunities than others. In principle, anyone can do this. Only very few do it.
To the author:
Volkmar Völzke is a success maximizer. Book author. Consultant. Coach. Speaker. www.volkmarvoelzke.ch
