Since the beginning of September, Turnaround Talk has featured a lnarrative which discusses the actions that a company can take to:
- lead with confidence during times of disruption;
- budget effectively during an uncertain economic climate;
- address the issue of culture transformation; and
- implementing strategy during disruption.
Listening is also becoming important.
These are all key skills for any company to have. However, they are hard skills which can be learned at any University or Business School. One of the biggest challenges that Turnaround Professionals face when trying to rescue a company is not the absence of hard skills, it is the absence of soft skills.
Business leadership is as much about skills such as empathy and listening than it is about budgeting and strategy implementation. I recently read an article by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) which points out that listening may be the skill that companies need during times of crisis.
The Delta story: listening is important
The HBR article points out that how leaders navigate a crisis — big or small — has an enormous influence over the impact that crisis will have on their organization, not to mention the personal impact it will have on the people and leadership of that organization, in its aftermath. The pandemic — a crisis on a global scale — created a series of smaller crises for organizations worldwide. Some floundered at this immediate disruption. Others emerged more resilient than before.
The article added that the airline industry was hit hard in the early days of the pandemic and most companies continue to grapple with the fallout — some more successfully than others. Delta Airlines, for instance, earned kudos for its handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Under the stewardship of CEO Ed Bastian, Delta took proactive measures to prioritize customer safety. In 2020, the airline hired US healthcare and research giant, the Mayo Clinic, to advise on virus-related cleaning and ventilation protocols, and in-flight social distancing. Bastian went on to hire Mayo’s Henry Ting, a celebrated cardiologist, as Delta’s Chief Health Officer in 2021. Ting in turn has continued to lead Delta’s efforts to safeguard the wellbeing of passengers and staff. Among the initiatives he oversees are ending the mandate on mask-wearing as the pandemic recedes, and the provision of 24-hour mental health and counselling services to employees facing exhaustion and burnout in its wake. Delta has been commended by academics and the media as a company that navigated the storm of Covid-19 with acuity; its CEO cited as an example of strong leadership in a crisis.
A slam dunk towards success
The HBR article points out that Delta isn’t the only one that picked up praise for its pandemic-era efforts. Adam Silver of the National Basketball Association made headlines when he stopped play in 2020 — a bold decision that cost the NBA $190 million in lost revenue — and created an exclusion zone or “bubble,” arresting the spread of the virus among players and fans. Silver has been lauded as an example of what good leadership looks like in a crisis.
What do Adam Silver and Ed Bastian have in common? What is it about their leadership that helps their organizations brace for impact, contain damage, drive recovery and build resilience ahead of shocks? The article adds that when crises land, Silver and Bastian do one simple yet powerful thing: they seek out and act on the counsel of other people. And lots of them.
Photo By: Canva
Human nature
The HBR article points out that Human beings are imperfectly equipped to make rational decisions, and even less so when something as unexpected and devastating as a pandemic hits us. We are each of us prone to certain ways of thinking — heuristics and biases that are hard-wired into our behavior — which make it hard for us as individuals to see all the edges of a crisis, to understand its mutability, to chart all the possibilities (the opportunities as well as the risks) and to decide on the best course of action. We tend to downplay or dismiss threats along the lines of “it’ll never happen to me, and even if it does, it won’t be that bad.” And when the chips finally do fall, we can become anchored to one particular plan or solution, even as the crisis shifts or changes direction. We may continue down one path long after it makes sense to do so, because of sunk costs: “we’ve come this far; it’s too late to change course.”
Then there’s the echo chamber. Whether we know it or not, most of us gravitate to people (and information) that confirm things we already think and believe. We’re drawn to individuals and ideas that concur with, and even end up shaping, our worldview. The pandemic era has revealed worrying fault lines in the U.S. and elsewhere. Intensifying political schisms, social unrest, and general divisiveness point to massive-scale confirmation bias — a vast shoring up of beliefs along socio-economic and racial lines that have created a crisis of polarization.
The article adds that breaking out of the echo chamber and correcting for preconceptions isn’t intuitive nor is it easy. But it’s essential in a crisis, because a crisis is hard to predict and understand in all of its dimensions. A crisis seldom plays by your established rulebook or existing structures. Unchecked, a crisis can evolve, expand and engulf in ways we will struggle to imagine or anticipate. For this reason, when a crisis hits, you need your leadership to be as bias-free, elastic, deft and dynamic as the circumstances rapidly unfolding around you and your organization.
Perspective-taking in a crisis
The HBR article points out that a good leader knows that you can’t do it alone. It takes a team to provide the input to forge a vision, create a strategy, and execute that strategy successfully. A good crisis leader knows that when the road gets bumpy, you need a team; but you also need that team to provide or source as many different perspectives on your situation as possible. Perspective-taking is a critical skill in crisis management. The more eyes you have on the situation, the less likely it is that you will remain entrenched in your own thinking or anchored to one solution or plan. And the more people you can turn to for counsel as the crisis develops, the easier it will be to shift course and adapt as exigencies dictate.
Consider this quote from Ed Bastian talking to HBR in January 2022: “We get information from so many people all the time … I only use a single email and people know it, and so I get probably thousands of emails a day of all varieties of something that had happened that went wrong, of something that went great, and please thank that employee, of ideas and opportunities,” he said. “I want to make sure that I’m accessible for anyone who has good ideas.”
Perspective-taking is also about learning.
Learning is about listening
Here’s Walgreen-Boots Alliance CEO, Roz Brewer, talking to HBR about the importance of learning from others, particularly when walking into a new role or organization mid-crisis: “Whenever I take on a new role, I become a real student of the business…I meet people…I really put myself in a learning position and not in a position initially of leadership, and I chose to learn and be an advocate and open-minded about what the opportunities were ahead of me.”
Learning, says Brewer, is about listening — and being purposeful about listening. Here’s what she has to say about it: “I already had the practice of never walking into a retail unit as leader (with my) mobile device out. I never do that. I either leave it in my automobile or put it in my pocket, because I need to be present, I need to listen … And I think that’s the next level of leadership … listening and acting and making people feel included in the environments that we create, as leaders.”
Photo By: Canva
The HBR article adds that, of course, many companies didn’t fare well in 2020. There are scores of firms from multiple sectors who fared poorly, who struggled to stay afloat, or found themselves facing reputational crises as a result of poor decision-making. Think of meat-packer Tyson Foods who hit headlines by failing to protect workers effectively in the first wave of Covid. Or CrossFit, whose CEO’s racist tweets in the wake of George Floyd’s murder ousted him from the top job, and saw the company sold at a loss.
Effective leadership in a crisis can make all the difference to its outcomes and post-crisis outlook. And this is why it’s vital that, as a leader, you do as much as possible to guard against the cognitive traps and pitfalls that impair rational decision-making, bind your understanding or undermine your ability to see the bigger picture.
This is the beginning of this issue and the platform that Turnaround Professionals can use to start the conversation about listening. In my next editorial, I will provide you with some meaningful questions that you can ask your clients regarding this issue. These questions will add value to the narrative.
The Mystery Practitioner is an industry commentator that focuses on the shifting dynamics and innovative thinking that BRPs and turnaround professionals will need to embrace in order to achieve success in their businesses.
