How to manage the unimaginable

As leaders, whether private, public, or nonprofit, we are all being forced to explore dimensions of leadership within ourselves, our organizations, and our industries that none of us could have imagined six months ago. And to be honest, none of us feels adequately trained for this. Quite the contrary. None of the institutions where we trained offered to teach us proficiency in “Managing the Unimaginable.” So how do we proceed?

Changing ‘facts’

COVID-19-19 has introduced a new set of “facts” that fundamentally alter the calculus of how we go about finding the right answers. In fact, COVID-19-19, the “novel” virus, has presented us with one novel over-arching business fact — “Trauma.” Never within living memory has one global event produced such an immediate, pervasive, and traumatic impact on virtually every aspect of life as we have known it.

The impact of this trauma on our individual and collective psyches constitutes a Super X factor that will influence nearly every aspect of how we live, love, work, and pursue our individual and collective activities going forward. The stark reality is that in both subtle and dramatic ways the rules of most of our games will have to change to accommodate the altered perceptions of the post-COVID-19 world.

Trauma leadership

So here we are — leaders in a traumatized world. What do we do?

We have to start by admitting that we ourselves are traumatized — which does not mean we are either weak or paralyzed, but definitely in a greater state of uncertainty than we have been before. We need to personally acknowledge where and how our own foundations have been shaken.

We need to pause, give ourselves a break, and then embrace the four established principles of trauma recovery: Recognize,

Relate, Reframe, and Regenerate.

Starting with ourselves, we must ask how COVID-19 and the ensuing chaos has rocked our worlds. Have we been afraid? Have we gotten angry, frustrated, perplexed, confused, thrown off our daily rhythms, thrown a tantrum, or been surprised to find lethargy where we normally we would have resorted to action?

Once seen in ourselves, we have to recognize these traits in those we lead, and our customers. Not one of us can be expected to behave according to the old scripts which comfortably defined our roles, our characters, and the way the world worked before.

New scripts are already being written with new roles, new props (think: Zoom), new boundaries (“social distancing”) and whole new ways of relating. We need to turn our doubts, fears, confusion, and maybe even grief at things lost into assets that we can share as bridges to empathy with those we lead. We need to find, if we do not already have it, “Empathy” as a primary leadership trait, because we will only know how to lead the people we serve if we know what both we and they are feeling.

Empathy in action

The antidote to trauma is empathy in action. Those enterprises that emerge as winners from the current crisis are going to be those with leaders who establish a new “contract” between management, employees, and the customers and stakeholders they serve. The new contract will be based on transparency and trust starting with recognizing post-COVID-19 facts, relating to their personal and external impacts, reframing our models to reflect posttraumatic effects, and then

regenerating the enterprise to address post-COVID-19 realities.

The bottom line is that we are going to have to potentially change every aspect of our business models in both big and small ways to forge a new social and commercial contract. Those that embrace the requirements, and learn how to operationalize empathy, will be the winners in the postCOVID-19 world and beyond.

New Haven resident Matt Walton is a partner at McCreight Partners, and has served as a senior executive in public, private and non-profit organizations with focus on information technology, health care, national security and emergency management. Walton was involved in the response to SARS, West Nile Virus, pandemic H1N1 and Ebola.