Harvard Business Review - Coronavirus: Leadership and Recovery: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (Covid-19)

1. Thinking holistically about the pandemic and recovery.
2. by Martin Reeves
3. Start by coaching your team to decide with speed over precision.
4. by Chris Nichols, Shoma Chatterjee Hayden, and Chris Trendler
5. Eight factors leaders should know.
6. by Peter Susser and Tahl Tyson
7. Lessons from Lincoln, Churchill, MLK, and others.
8. by Nancy Koehn
9. How leaders, managers, and employees can make the sudden shift.
10. by Tsedal Neeley
11. Especially if you have to deliver the news remotely.
12. by Rebecca Knight
13. Be compassionatebut act quickly.
14. by Alisa Cohn
15. Six lessons from grocery stores and other essential businesses.
16. by Sarah Kalloch and Zeynep Ton
17. Control your physical and mental arousal like an athlete.
18. by Michael Gervais
19. How to leave work at work when you dont leave the house.
20. by Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa K. Bohns
21. The classic five stages of grief can help us find meaning in this moment.
22. by Scott Berinato
23. Five strategies for communicating with customers during a crisis.
24. by Ted Waldron and James Wetherbe
25. What paths could recovery take?
26. by Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Martin Reeves, and Paul Swartz
27. Move beyond short-term needs to long-term reform.
28. by Megan Tobias Neely
29. Its crucial for creating new opportunities and finding new ways to grow.
30. by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller

BROADENING YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON CRISIS LEADERSHIP

by Martin Reeves

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the topic of crisis management is at the forefront in business conversations worldwide. This concentration on surviving the immediate crisis is understandable and useful in the short termit enables us to focus on the immediate, high-stakes issues we are all facing. But with constant urgency and stress comes a narrowing of perspectives and time horizons. This inhibits deeper and broader reflection, which is necessary in responding effectively to the crisis, rebounding from it, and reinventing our businesses after it passes. A return to long-term and broader thinking wont happen by default. One of the key roles for leaders, now that the initial shock is behind us, is to legitimize and foster a rebroadening of perspectives.

In my role as Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Ive interacted with hundreds of companies in client roundtables over the past few weeks, and it has struck me that many companies are still stuck in reacting to the immediate crisis. Reaction is only the first stage of a multistage game. The urge to minimize damage will never, for example, result in designing creative strategies to address new needs and shape the emergence of new market segments. To balance crisis management with thinking holistically about the crisis and its aftermath, leaders need to reframe their thinking and action appropriately as each phase unfolds.

A few years ago, I coauthored a book titled Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, which proposed that different situations call not only for different strategies but for different approaches to strategy and problem solving. Specifically, we proposed a strategy palette, comprising five distinct styles of problem solving: classical (plan driven), adaptive (iterative experimentation and adjustment), shaping (coevolution and collaboration), visionary (creative), and renewal (turnaround). Each style requires adopting the right model, tools, metrics, behaviors, and leadership styles to effectively respond to the situation at hand.

In the language of the strategy palette, companies facing Covid-19 need to create temporal ambidexterity: the ability to switch and apply different problem-solving styles over time. First, we need to react urgently and pragmatically to the crisis, using a renewal approach. But after this reactionary phase we need to implement planned measures to manage cash burn in the now inevitable economic downturn, using a classical style. As the disease and the economic aftermath develop unpredictably, we need to learn rapidly about the latest developments and flex our tactics accordingly, using an adaptive style. Every crisis contains opportunity, and once the acute phase of the disease is controlled and the economic aftermath managed, we will need to think about capturing opportunities in the new post-Covid reality, using visionary