In an exclusive interview, Sarah Wild spoke to Dustin Seale, managing partner of Heidrick Consulting in EMEA, about the impact of the pandemic on organisational culture, working practices and leadership.
There are three ‘capacities’ – which turn into behaviours – that differentiate leaders; they always have done, but more so in the midst of a crisis and in its aftermath.
1. The first is what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called “extreme compassion”. The leaders who took people through the COVID-19 crisis and got them ready for the future took on almost a ‘mothering’ style of leadership: “We’re going to be ok; we’re here together; stay safe.” That was critical in terms of keeping people engaged and focused.
Historically, I wouldn’t say that has been the first go-to for most leaders, but I watched leaders unlock that capacity in themselves, and I think it’s going to be a big – and healthy – part of leadership going forward.
2. Second, agility has to move from a buzzword to a way of thinking and behaving. During the pandemic, nobody could see the future as clearly as we wanted to. We just knew that no matter what we thought the future was going to look like, it wasn’t going to look exactly that way.
Our focus as a firm is helping CEOs to tap into the ability to think in an agile way; to take decisions, but then adjust. We’ve been moving through fog for a while, so we’re going to bump into stuff and have to change direction. The five-year plan, three-year plan, even the one-year plan has gone. Now, we need to move with agility; it’s not going to be a direct route. That requires a different set of behaviours, a different thinking from leaders.
3. Third is foresight, or what used to be called ‘ripple intelligence’. One of the key differentiators between leaders is how far out they can see. Human beings are generally terrible at it. Our response to COVID-19 was dramatic and immediate and necessary because we were saving lives, and because the virus was right in our face. Something that’s right square in our face, most human beings can react to.
By contrast, take global warming: the risk to life is many, many magnitudes greater. But it’s further out. The action being taken is weak. If something’s too far out, people don’t know how to make sense of it today. Great leaders will be able to.
Where compassion comes to life is in paying attention to the individual. Big companies, where standard policies apply to everyone, are relatively inflexible.
If you look at how we handled lockdown, and how we approached going back to work post-pandemic, each individual’s needs should have been the starting point. Does this person have kids at home? Is this person at home alone? Do they have underlying health issues? The plan post-COVID-19 should have been to do with them, and meeting those specific needs. For example, within our firm, no one, anywhere in the world, was told that they had to go back into the office.
That’s almost the complete opposite of most corporate environments. Care for the individual, for their health and wellbeing, and flexibility in creating scenarios that work for them, is at the core of compassion in this new world. And I think it resonates heavily with our largest generation in the workforce: millennials.
It does depend on the context. Some companies were on life support during the pandemic and if they didn’t do something drastic at that time that felt ‘not compassionate’, they wouldn’t have survived. So I couldn’t have said “you should just keep all these people on the books, and you should take care of them”, because they were left with no choice.
But those companies that are responsible about their balance sheets and create a buffer for periods such as the pandemic have that freedom to do what’s right by people.
I fundamentally believe that have come out of this better and our employees have an entirely different relationship with us, with a different level of commitment and affiliation. With the clients I saw acting compassionately, loyalty scores went up in a way they’d never seen before.
People in the organisation have to know that their leaders have their back and believe in and support them. Going forward, I’d like to see the business sector return to health in a way that generates jobs, while creating better companies (that can pay their taxes, because treasuries are bare) and better places to work.
It’s leadership that will make that happen, or not happen. During the pandemic, we all saw examples of abysmal leadership and great leadership.
During the pandemic, a lot of clients said to us “many of the behaviours we’ve always wanted are showing up now”. People were caring for each other, collaborating, looking for new ways forward, being more agile. Their question now is “how do I keep that momentum going?” We must try to keep those elements of compassion, collaboration, communication and inventiveness.
Work now is more flexible and there are more virtual teams. We’re doing a lot less business travel. Historically, managers haven’t trusted the people working for them. “Will they do what they’re supposed to do? They have to be in the office so I can watch them.”
What they found during COVID-19 is that most people do the right stuff, even when they’re not being watched. Trust is incredibly important, empowering those people to make decisions and to do things remotely.
Many clients are asking “how do I manage a remote or virtual team?”, and that is going to be a growing skill set. But I think there are a few key things that bind virtual teams. One is a sense of purpose and being truly aligned at a purpose level. Like agility, purpose is no longer going to be a buzzword, but something tangible that will help glue virtual teams together.
I’ve never loved the word ‘community’, but it makes sense to me that we’re going to have to create a sense of community even when we’re not together.
These are things anyone can learn. We have developed ALP (Agile Leader Potential), which is AI driven. You do a gamified assessment on a digital device and it gives you a report on where you are agile and where you have gaps. We then train people around the capacities that allow you to become more agile.
I also think digital dexterity is going to be critical going forward; organisations will probably be dominated in the future by digital platforms and channels.
On-the-job training will be a part of things going forward and learning will need to be ongoing. We’re in a BANI world and it will be like this for ever. You are going to have to be changing and improving as quickly as your environment and you also have to have a culture that is able to adapt over time. Culture always was emergent, malleable and changing, but now you have to do it intentionally.
This is a big one for me; it has been within my top three priorities for years now. That’s not just gender diversity or racial diversity, but also diversity of thought, generation, country of origin.
There was a book about Abe Lincoln (Team of Rivals). He started his presidency in the midst of the biggest crisis the US had ever faced. He could have picked his friends, but he picked his rivals; people who thought very differently from him. He knew the task ahead was so complex that one perspective wasn’t going to solve it. The book goes into how that team of rivals raised each other’s game because members saw things differently.
I think the same thing’s true for companies’ top teams and right through the business. If you have a sound shared purpose, being able to look at every problem from different perspectives is going to make you more agile. Diverse teams are going to navigate these things better.