From Crisis to Accelerated Innovation
“We really focused a lot of our efforts to ensure we could support our customers and partners and employees through these changes,” she said. “Thereafter, it was trying to figure out how we really make this more sustainable, because we soon understood this was going to continue for some time.”
The disruptions of the past year were widely characterized as unprecedented, but many countries have endured similar economic paralysis on account of war and civil unrest over the years. The uprising in Egypt a decade ago, for example, prompted many organizations in the country to devise contingency plans, according to Ghada Howaidy, Associate Dean, Executive Education and External Relations at the American University in Cairo.
“We had a reference point in our institution for how to act, and this helped a lot. We had the digital infrastructure and we had the agility and the mechanisms to retrain and change course,” she said. The school of business trained its instructors and moved 2,000 participants online within two weeks, Howaidy said.
“We got proof that participants are comfortable with doing online executive education, but also, we understood that our product will change into being more modular and personalized; people are going to be more in control,” Howaidy said. “What was going to happen over a few years happened in six months.”
Resilient Leadership
Leadership competencies that have stood business managers in good stead historically have proven their worth over the past year, said Kumar. These include a digital-first mindset, a quick pace and an embrace of differences of all sorts, which results in strong engagement, he said. Empathy is also critical, especially in troubled times, he added. “Leaders who put the success of others and customers first, and then take decisions with that framework in mind, have had the best impact.”
Certain qualities and skills have definitely stood out, Lindberg agreed, including digital fluency, adaptability and humanness, in addition to self-leadership. “We need leaders who can adapt well to significant changes and stay cool, understand how to zoom out, navigate, understand what's happening, and then quickly prioritize and accelerate the activities that need to happen. The ability to identify problems that are not creating noise is also an important skill,” Lindberg said.
Ericsson fast-tracked its leadership development efforts to build coaching skills among its leaders to contend with increased stress. “We had already been investing a lot to train our leaders in coaching, and that became something we further accelerated to equip our leaders to manage this situation, especially self-leadership. Self-leadership is critical to keep team members motivated, on the one hand, and rein in those who become consumed by work on the other,” she added.
Diversity and Inclusion Fuel GrowthDespite the growing momentum around diversity and inclusion, many organizations are lagging. It starts with setting clear goals and ambitions, said Lindberg. Ericsson has derived great benefit from establishing a talent board to review senior hires, she noted. This peer review helps articulate the capabilities and gaps each candidate has, and serves to filter out bias, she said.