Leadership lessons post-COVID
By Dr Eric Pere
The impacts on society post-COVID will form the basis of writing for decades to come, not a
ground breaking insight but the impacts of the pandemic offers us an opportunity to review
and reflect. For me, the conversation I am most interested in is the impact of COVID on
leader practice, specifically post-COVID.
I believe the conversation is nuanced and could be broken down to changes in leader
practice, changes in team dynamics and changes in how we work. A colleague indicated to
me he was sick of the discussion, and that we simply need to move on. Why keep going
back to a time when leaders were caught off guard and may not have had the knowledge,
skills, and capabilities to deal with the challenges that were raised during the pandemic and
post-pandemic.
Bolino and his colleagues reviewed 69 articles regarding the management implications of the
pandemic between March 2020 and July 2023 noting, ‘significant implications for individuals,
teams, leaders, organizations, and society as a whole. By understanding what happened
during this pandemic, organizations may be better prepared not only for the next pandemic
but also for other extraordinary “black swan” events’. The point from my perspective is
building a knowledge base on how leaders engaged with significant and unexpected change
and on this front the pandemic raises a number of questions:
How do we prepare our leaders to respond to significant workplace change?
How do leaders adapt to change and how do they engage their teams to respond?
How effective were strategic plans during COVID and to what extent could any plan
help respond to a significant socio-cultural and work event?
The term ‘new normal’ was used extensively post pandemic and I like many grew sick of the
term being used but in fairness what term would better encapsulate a changed social and
work environment?
You could argue that the pandemic revealed deficiencies in how we organise our
workplaces, the critical importance of face to face team interactions and leader assumptions
of what teams and leaders value in the work they do. From a research perspective I continue
to think about understanding a leaders ‘why’ but more importantly understanding your teams
‘why’ is as important. We engage in roles for different reasons and perhaps aligning our
purpose is more difficult than we have been led to believe.
The impact of COVID on individual businesses and the responses of leaders provided, in
my estimation, some major insights into how important teams are to the business and
business owner. A previous podcast guest on my Talking Leadership podcast noted he did
everything he could during the height of COVID to ensure there was enough work and an
income stream for his staff. Not for the longevity of the business in the first instance but to
ensure his team had income at a time when many small and medium businesses were at a
breaking point.
COVID was a catastrophic, out of left field situation which tested leaders in the corporate,
not for profit, government and political spheres. How leaders should have acted, and how
they treated their teams was in many respects was a response to a unique public health and
business event. Worrying about and empathising with your teams is again, in my estimation,
the hallmark of adaptive, human cantered leadership. What COVID brought to the forefront
is and will continue to be that investing in our teams, our people particularly during
catastrophic events is the best way to ensure organisational longevity.
References
(1) Bolino, M.C, Whitney, J.M, and Henry, S.E. (2024). Research Roundup: How the
Pandemic Changed Management, https://hbr.org/2024/03/research-roundup-how-the-
pandemic-changed-management
