Covid-19 is the greatest leadership challenge of our lifetime. For many organisations, their very existence depends on the skills and resilience of their leaders in the weeks and months ahead. Fortunately, leaders did not go into the pandemic completely unprepared. An entire industry of leadership development existed to train them for “disruption”, and there is nothing more disruptive than Covid-19. In recent years, this industry has grown massively — US companies alone spend more than $166 billion annually on leadership development.
But every industry, no matter how big, has its blind spots. Leadership development emphasises what I call “frontstage” leadership — the spotlight performances that help leaders influence and motivate others both within and outside their organisation. Relatively neglected, but no less important for the success of a strategy, is “backstage” leadership — steering organisational processes behind the scenes.
In Covid-19 times, frontstage leadership is indeed essential. Especially now, leaders need to communicate a strategy for recovery, project a strong sense of empathy, and so on. But without at least equal emphasis on the backstage half, no Covid-19 strategy will take hold smoothly.
In my new book, Backstage Leadership: The Invisible Work of Highly Effective Leaders, I break down what goes on backstage into five core processes:
Scanning and sense-making allows leaders to reality-check their strategy. I call this “seeing the storms before they become hurricanes”. Ideally, one would forecast trouble coming well in advance. In a pinch, however, one needs only enough time to get ready, or evacuate. In any case, the best leadership meteorology requires an acute radar aimed beyond the horizon and the humility to live with a degree of uncertainty as you explore solutions with your team.
Building and locking in commitment to a strategy requires more than a dynamite PowerPoint presentation. First and foremost, generating consensus, or at least a good-faith acceptance, hinges on the level of openness involved in the process. Will you pull in ideas and feedback from the whole organisation, or concentrate on pushing key stakeholders into alignment with your intentions? There’s no one right answer; every strategic context demands an individual approach. The key is for leaders to recognise that “pulling” and “pushing” are very different stances that require a distinct series of steps.
Handling contradictions consists of trade-offs to help leaders cope with contrasting mandates, for example, the need for hierarchy versus the comparative agility of decentralised decision-making, the wisdom of thinking long-term versus the imperative to deliver quarterly shareholder returns. To honour these seemingly irreconcilable opposites, leaders must master the art of ambidexterity. This may include building harmony among the senior management team and manipulating the plumbing of organisational design so that each side of a conflict has a dedicated unit.
Harnessing culture occurs through shaping of the context. Rather than issuing edicts about what the organisation’s values and norms are to be, leaders should first immerse themselves in the culture as it stands. Allow for the possibility of a large disparity between what top leaders say the company stands for and what actually goes on. The TV show
Undercover Boss has wrung hours and hours of entertainment out of leaders discovering just how big that disparity can be. Cultural change is not like an hour-long TV programme — it demands patience and constant care from all concerned. But leaders can start the shift with decisions under their control, from hiring to meeting protocols to the tone and content of corporate communications.
Developing talent and capabilities encompasses more than spotting superstars in the making and giving them opportunities to shine. Leaders can help talent succeed through shaping the context. Guiding how work gets done can support employee performance on the whole, which may sometimes be smarter than lavishing resources and rewards on a few superstars who may burn out or leave the organisation. Above all else, leaders must invest their time in the human resource arena, particularly the three key pillars of talent detection, talent development and performance management.
Though I wrote my book before the pandemic, I do not think leadership has changed so fundamentally in the last six months as to topple any of the above five pillars. Each is still important for leaders to know. However, a few are particularly relevant in light of the pandemic.
Sense-making, for example, is pivotal. With so many doubts in the air, people need leaders who provide meaning, depth of understanding, better questions and some inspiring directions. In other words, leaders must supply hope that is grounded in reality. You may be thinking, “Giving people hope sounds like frontstage work rather than backstage.” Actually, it is both. One leader who displays this admirably is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In equal measure, her public pronouncements radiate authentic humanity and a reassuring command of the resources at her disposal. Her hope-restoring combination of empathy and expertise would not be possible without an unflinching willingness to get her hands dirty doing the backstage work.
Building and locking in commitment is another key process for Covid-19 recovery. The seriousness of the crisis may seem to require a rapid response. To achieve agility, organisations may gravitate more towards the “pulling” or top-down approach to decision-
making. Depending on the context, this may be the best option. It’s dangerous, however, to charge headlong in this direction without carefully considering the consequences. If your organisation prizes its culture of consensus, you should not dismantle it without a plan for restoring it later.
Managing contradictions can be a useful lens for viewing post-Covid strategy. Take the classic binary of exploration versus exploitation (or innovation versus efficiency). Again, the emergency situation imposed by the pandemic may impel leaders towards conservative choices, as budgets dry up and performance stalls. But if innovation goes unsupported for too long, capacities may dry up entirely, curtailing future growth potential. Having survived the crisis at great cost, organisations that pivot too strongly towards efficiency may find themselves irrelevant in the aftermath.
When Covid-19 is finally behind us, we may look back at the pandemic as a testing ground for leadership. It will test a leader’s capacity to engage upfront, in the spotlight, but equally it will test a leader’s capacity to tighten and improve the backstage, the “reality” in the organisation and how well that collective effort allows coping strategies to emerge and be effectively executed. To perform effectively from now on, therefore, leaders will have to acquire better diagnostic and action tools for managing their context and organisational environment. Visionary speeches amount to nothing if there is no organisation behind them to make them happen successfully.
Leadership development has already done a great job teaching leaders how to use what they see in the mirror. To succeed during Covid-19 and beyond, leaders will need to spend more time looking out of their office windows.
Charles Galunic is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Aviva Chaired Professor of Leadership and Responsibility at Insead.
