Coronavirus: Leadership & Recovery: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review
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CORONAVIRUS:
LEADERSHIP
AND RECOVERY
Harvard Business Review Press
Boston, Mas sa chu setts
Insights You Need from
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Contents
Introduction
Broadening Your Perspective on Crisis Leadership ix
Thinking holistically about the pandemic and recovery.
y Martin Reeves
Section 1
Leading Your Business
1. Four Be hav iors That Help Leaders Manage a Crisis 3
Start by coaching your team to decide
with speed over precision.
y Chris Nichols, Shoma Chatterjee Hayden, and Chris Trendle
2. What Are Companies’ Legal Obligations 13
Around Coronavirus?
Eight factors leaders should know.
y Peter Susser and Tahl Tyson
3. Real Leaders Are Forged in Crisis 25
Lessons from Lincoln, Churchill, MLK, and others.
y Nancy Koehn
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vi
Contents
Section 2
Managing Your Workforce
4. Fifteen Questions About Remote Work, Answered 39
How leaders, man ag ers, and employees
can make the sudden shift.
y Tsedal Neeley
5. How to Manage Coronavirus Layoffs with Compassion 53
Especially if you have to deliver the news remotely.
y Rebecca Knight
6. Your Employee Tested Positive for Covid XXXXXXXXXX
What Do You Do?
Be compassionate— but act quickly.
y Alisa Cohn
7. How Can’t- Close Retailers Are Keeping Workers Safe 71
Six lessons from grocery stores and other
essential businesses.
y Sarah Kalloch and Zeynep Ton
Section 3
Managing Yourself
8. How to Manage Your Stress when the Sky Is Falling 83
Control your physical and mental arousal like an athlete.
y Michael Gervais
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vii
Contents
9. Three Tips to Avoid Working- from- Home Burnout 93
How to leave work at work when you don’t
leave the house.
y Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa K. Bohns
10. That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief 101
The classic five stages of grief can help us find
meaning in this moment.
y Scott Berinato
Section 4
Seeing Beyond the Crisis
11. Ensure That Your Customer Relationships 113
Outlast Coronavirus
Five strategies for communicating with
customers during a crisis.
y Ted Waldron and James Wethe
e
12. Understanding the Economic Shock of Coronavirus 123
What paths could recovery take?
y Philipp Carlsson- Szlezak, Martin Reeves, and Paul Swartz
13. What Will U.S. Labor Protections Look Like 137
After Coronavirus?
Move beyond short- term needs to long- term reform.
y Megan Tobias Neely
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viii
Contents
14. We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever 147
It’s crucial for creating new opportunities
and finding new ways to grow.
y Martin Reeves and Jack Fulle
About the Contributors 161
Index 165
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ix
Introduction
BROADENING YOUR
PERSPECTIVE ON
CRISIS LEADERSHIP
y 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 imme-
diate crisis is understandable and useful in the short
term—it enables us to focus on the immediate, high-
stakes issues we are all facing. But with constant urgency
and stress comes a na
owing of perspectives and time
horizons. This inhibits deeper and
oader reflection,
which is necessary in responding effectively to the crisis,
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x
Introduction
ebounding from it, and reinventing our businesses after
it passes. A return to long- term and
oader thinking
won’t happen by default. One of the key roles for leaders,
now that the initial shock is behind us, is to legitimize
and foster a re
oadening of perspectives.
In my role as Chairman of the BCG Henderson Insti-
tute, I’ve interacted with hundreds of companies in client
oundtables 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 mul-
tistage game. The urge to minimize damage will never,
for example, result in designing creative strategies to ad-
dress 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 Strat-
egy Needs a Strategy, which proposed that diff er ent situa-
tions call not only for diff er ent strategies but for diff er ent
approaches to strategy and prob lem solving. Specifically,
we proposed a strategy palette, comprising five distinct
styles of prob lem solving: classical (plan driven), adap-
tive (iterative experimentation and adjustment), shaping
(coevolution and collaboration), visionary (creative), and
enewal (turnaround). Each style requires adopting the
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xi
Introduction
ight model, tools, metrics, be hav iors, 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 diff er ent 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 mea sures to manage cash burn in the now inevi-
table economic downturn, using a classical style. As the
disease and the economic aftermath develop unpredict-
ably, we need to learn rapidly about the latest develop-
ments and flex our tactics accordingly, using an adaptive
style. Every crisis contains opportunity, and once the