Five Leadership Lessons from COVID-19

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Mike Armour is a featured headliner on C-Suite Radio

A wholesale crisis like the current pandemic is a telling time for leaders. It quickly separates those who are truly leaders from those who merely wear the title. In protracted crisis, it soon becomes apparent which leaders are strong, which ones are weak; which ones are good, which ones are not so good.

The response to COVID-19 will be the stuff of leadership case studies for generations to come. For both political leadership, business leadership, and even non-profit leadership, our experience of the pandemic is rife with lessons to be learned.

Even though we are weeks away from emerging from the pandemic, we've been through enough of it that some of it's most important leadership lessons are already apparent. In this episode I identify five of these lessons, each of which is equally applicable to any leadership context, whether in the government sector, in the private sector, or the non-profit sector.

The five are:

  1. The importance of giving people a compelling why when you ask them to change
  2. The need to establish clear end-games and stick with them when you ask something extraordinary of your people
  3. The danger to leadership credibility when decision-makers are emotionally detached from their people
  4. The tremendous innovative capability found in people and what that means for leaders who successfully tap into it
  5. The powerful threat which fear poses for clear, rational thought