Crisis leadership as important as making physical adjustments

By Brice Wallace 

As the impacts of COVID-19 became apparent to business leaders, many had to scramble to address their practical aspects: setting up remote work for employees, meeting state guidelines on social distancing, figuring out how to safely accommodate customers.

But, just as importantly, they also had to tackle some intangibles, including altering their leadership style to fit the situation.

“I’m not going to lie and not admit that initially we felt that immediate rush of fear and concern,” Shauna Smith, president and co-founder of Four Foods Group, said during the ACG Utah “Leading Through Crisis” webinar series.

Smith said she admitted to her team she was concerned and had never seen anything like the virus, but reassured them “we will get through this together.”

“I know that where there is a high amount of fear, there’s also a need for a high amount of courage, and that courage is not necessarily not having any fear at all but it’s being willing to face it. So the team and I set our own concerns and fears aside and kept showing up,” she said.

She and the team established three goals: stay safe, keep customers eating well and keep the employees working.

“For us, we were really strategic,” she said. “We had to switch to that strategic leadership, focusing on solutions and positive thinking, and not necessarily giving in to fear and the negativity, even though it was very present and it existed. We chose to focus on the positive thinking and the solutions.”

Eddie Christensen, general counsel at CHG Healthcare, said CHG emphasized being “more honest and more transparent.”

“It’s not that weren’t before, but we feel that it’s important to make sure that everybody has as many facts as they possibly can, even if it’s bad news. We need to share that,” he said. “We do need to be optimistic in terms of how we deal with problems. But transparency and honesty is at the top of the list. I don’t know that it’s a change or a pivot, but it’s more focused as to those two issues.”

That approach manifested itself in communications straight from leaders “to the masses,” he said, eliminating the normal trickle-down through the organization. “Everybody in the company gets all the information, right from the source, and it’s as honest and transparent as possible,” he said.

Asked about the most surprising elements of tackling the virus situation, Smith said it was the rate of change. “I thought I had whiplash some days” because of how quickly things moved, she said.

She also was reminded quickly that “we have emotions to manage.”

“COVID is scary, and COVID affects humans, and humans have emotions,” Smith said, adding that the company had to accommodate the emotions of both employees and customers — from those “who haven’t left their houses in a long while but also those who are, like, unaware maybe of the severity of COVID.”

In each company, leaders had to deal with employees’ wide range of preferences and personalities. Smith said some were excited to face a challenge and some were not. At CHG, some people liked working from home and some did not. The latter included employees who felt disconnected to the company and missed the close-knit conversations and socialization of the office, Christensen said.

Smith said she tried to lead by example and had to “uplevel” her skills.

“I knew that it would be vital for me to show up in the spirit of ‘cooler heads prevail’ and also the transparency of ‘I’m a little nervous, this is a scary thing, I don’t have all the answers right now, but we will get through this together and we’re in this together,’” she said.

“We’ve always been an optimistic bunch, but optimism is not always about smiling and speaking positively, but meeting challenges and offering words of reassurance to those who aren’t as certain about the future.”