COVID delivers clarity on skills

THE COVID-19 pandemic has helped company leaders recognise it is acceptable not to have all the answers, business innovation leader Barry O’Reilly says.

“COVID has been good for many leaders,” the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise, and founder of ExecCamp said last week.

“It was OK for leaders to say, ‘I don’t know how to do this, what do you think?’ ”

Speaking on the Redesigning the

Organisations of Tomorrow webinar co-hosted by Geelong Neu21 director Sian Jones, Mr O’Reilly said some companies were now looking to “bottle” the natural agility they had shown in dealing with the pandemic.

“(Traditionally) in the corporate world we start layering on the bureaucracy, these governances, these steering committees and these sign-offs, and it sort of all gets in the way,” he said.

“Then the ego kicks in. ‘Look, I am the CXO, I have to know the answer; there’s pressure on me to have the answer.’ It drives perverse behaviour.”

Mr O’Reilly said there were many great stores of leaders who had said they didn’t have the answers but who were very clear on the direction and what success looked like.

He said when the pandemic started, he was contacted by Steve Franchetti, CIO of business communication platform Slack, about how to handle the pandemic as “nobody knew how to handle this”.

They worked in partnership to engage more than 200 Fortune 1000 technology executives on a Slack channel.

Mr O’Reilly said leaders were coached on pivoting to a remote working world and on adapting their product portfolio to changing circumstances, with people sharing what they were trying, what was working and what was not working.

“We built up this whole community where nobody knew all the answers but what these leaders were doing were sharing with one another,” he said. “It encouraged people to try things, and there is something massively powerful about that.”