What a week: six-hour bottlenecks at airports, toilet paper outages, billions of dollars erased in the markets, and over 6,500 lives lost around the world.
Let’s talk about one trait that’s crucial during these times: leadership.
During times of crisis, we look for guidance. We want a steady hand to navigate choppy waters. Leadership isn’t about winning an election or job titles. Leadership is about your behavior.
Some behaviors of good leadership:
Overreact
“Panic is bad, overreaction is good.” This is a good framework, from Ramit Sethi. It’s the leader’s job to overreact. An overreaction is simply preparing for if/when things go from bad to worse.
Be extra cautious. Spend extra money on food, supplies, (sure, even toilet paper). If the worse thing that happens is people say you overreacted, that means you did a good job.
Overcommunicate
At Reforge, here’s what CEO Brian Balfour had to say (I’m paraphrasing):
“These are extraordinary times. If you’re not going to be available because of illness or child care issues, that’s totally fine. We 100% support you, we’ll figure out the coverage. Take whatever time you need. But you have to overcommunicate your schedule. You can’t just disappear for hours during the day. There is no excuse for not communicating.”
Leadership at work and home is having hard conversations: what happens if business continues to suffer? When do we consider layoffs? How do our personal finances look today? How will they look 6 months from now? If one partner loses their job, what’s the plan?
When communicating, be kind to one another.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary grace.
Look for tailwinds
Another one from Brian:
“How do we come out of this with tailwinds?”
In times of crisis, one strategy is going into a defensive shell. But there’s another: going on the offense. We all know the Warren Buffet quote; it’s a good one if you have the free cash. But even if you don’t, you can take a step back and evaluate: what opportunities will arise? When it all clears, how can we be ahead?
Journal
From Morgan Housel:
It’s hard to un-remember what you know about the past when looking back on it, so it’s good to document your thoughts in real-time before they’re distorted by the changes of what’s to come – whatever they may be.
As a leader, your job is to get through this crisis. After that, the job becomes making your life and business more robust, so you’re better prepared next time (the game is long; there will be a next time).
Document today so you can learn tomorrow.
Be healthy, be safe, be kind.
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