Leadership Will Change Forever After The Coronavirus Pandemic



Crisis has a way of revealing, course-correcting and recalibrating what leadership really means.

We are watching in real time as one submicroscopic virus renders all standards of human hierarchy meaningless.

From British royalty (Prince Charles) to American royalty (Tom Hanks) … anyone is susceptible to COVID-19. The standards that made someone powerful in the past are irrelevant in the present.

The same is true for leaders in an organization.

Inevitably, in a crisis, the leaders who have the biggest impact on the most people are rarely the “official” leaders at the top. Rather, people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, or a nurse pleading on camera for more supplies start to become the de facto leaders of the moment. They may have leadership positions with titles, but their influence extends beyond their official capacity to become the face of courage for many people – because they reveal an authenticity and urgency that reflects what people are feeling.

The same might be true within your organization. Anyone still relying on their title to validate their sense of power or control will find out very soon: that title is meaningless.

We’re witnessing the collapse of the standardization model – the model of leadership based on command and control, hierarchy and silos. The one that defined the measures of success for people, then rewarded only those who met those measures. It was about creating barriers, defining the narrative, putting people in boxes and protecting the establishment.

Standardization creates efficiency, and that was a fine goal in a world where things were predictable. But efficiency is not resilient. Resilience requires adaptability, and adaptability requires the freedom for people to be their most individual selves – to be themselves to the fullest.

We have a powerful visual of this in a literal sense right now. Most of us have been ordered to stay at home. Conjure these two contrasting images in your mind right now:

1. First, a group of 1,000 people all being standardized into “efficiently” moving in one direction and hunkering down together. They can continue to get their work done, because they’re on the same schedule. It’s efficient to keep them sheltered and fed, because they are all doing the same thing, in the same place, following the same rules. And because of that, they are all vulnerable to one small virus

2. Second, that same group of 1,000 people dispersed into their own individual homes across a wide geographic area. They can tap their own resources, tend to their own families, create their own schedules, tackle their assignments at their own pace. Things are chaotic, because no one is on the same schedule, no one is doing the same thing at the same time, no one is in the same place. And because of that, they are resilient.

This is the age of personalization coming into focus.

There are elements of standardization still present, showing us how a balance between standardization and personalization can exist. Certainly, the decision to stay home has been made for us. A standard has been set. Also, people in their individual homes are following similar standardized protocols for washing their hands and sanitizing everything they touch.

But people are also expressing their individuality from their own homes by sharing with the world their humor, their art, their positive messages and, of course, their strong opinions.

It’s easy for us to visualize these contrasts because we have a literal example in COVID-19 and our social distancing orders.

But beyond the literal, this also shows us what I’ve been writing about for years now:

1.Individuality and personalization might appear to be chaotic, and we tend to (mistakenly) think of chaotic as all bad

2. Standardization might appear to be efficient, and we tend to (mistakenly) think of efficient as all good.

We must shift from ruling by standardization to leading with personalization.

We’re All Being Forced into a Massive Reset.

Forbes

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