5 minute read 13 Nov 2020
EY Man standing behind desk looking out the window

The lessons for resilient leaders now, next and beyond COVID-19

By Simon O’Neill

EY UK Managing Partner for the Midlands

Committed to growing the brand name and capabilities of EY in the Midlands. Passionate about inspiring and supporting the next generation of leaders. Keen supporter of mentoring.

5 minute read 13 Nov 2020

We summarise our thoughts on how resilience and new approaches to leadership are key for private businesses to survive the current climate. 

In brief:
  • The now, next and beyond stages detail the importance of business resilience planning and the impact COVID-19 has had on businesses.
  • In a positive light, COVID-19 has led to many leaders developing their tenacity and a resilient culture through learning. 

When we speak with private business leaders, they tell us of the importance of business resilience planning and leaning into transformation in the current climate. 

There have been many success stories of UK businesses demonstrating that they can operate throughout the pandemic, while also benefiting from new approaches to leadership that will likely still be in place long after COVID-19 has gone. We know this is happening right across the country, with an EY survey of private business leaders finding that 72% of respondents are embracing the opportunity to make positive changes in their business and lives.

However, these opportunities are set against a backdrop of challenges – including wide-spread and long-term economic challenges - the likes of which we have not really seen before.

Resilience is the key to safeguarding businesses and allowing positive change to come to fruition in amongst the difficult times many industries face. In the stories shared by the business leaders we interviewed in Episode 1 of Real Insights, navigating lockdown has challenged their resilience and made it more important across their business. Responding to the crisis has meant pivoting as rules change. Ensuring that objectives are communicated to stakeholders clearly has moved to the forefront, and so has safeguarding employee’s mental health and maintaining productivity.  

Leaders must continue to modify their approach to leadership and resilience as the pandemic continues in the short and medium-term, and as we emerge from it in future. To help, EY has developed the Enterprise Resilience Tool that allows businesses and their people to test their resilience. A key element of our framework for modelling the impact of COVID-19 on businesses in the long-term is the “Now, Next, Beyond” approach.

Now

In March 2020, at the start of the UK response to the pandemic, leaders were forced to think only about the “Now”, since very few businesses planned for disruption of the scale of COVID-19. 

Thankfully, many were able to quickly grasp what the immediate challenges were and what the forthcoming obstacles would be. COVID-19 was unlike many other issues that businesses have faced in the recent past. The scale of its disruption required quick thinking and left little room for deliberation.

For many of the private businesses we work with, the immediate issue, after safeguarding their people, was allocating or raising the necessary capital to survive the immediate shock of the pandemic. Meanwhile a host of other businesses - e-commerce and food retailers - saw demand skyrocket and these businesses faced very different types of challenges, such as where to find the personnel to meet rising demand. 

At the same time there were huge infrastructure tests, including working from home and dealing with rapidly changing customer demands. 

The “Now” stage of the pandemic shone a light on leaders’ ability to think quickly. In many ways it brought forward decisions that had previously required months’ worth of rumination.

It is here, in the now, that many privately owned businesses realise that they haven’t thoroughly prepared for a crisis before, recognising that their resilience planning has been too disparate and disconnected to deal with a shock of this scale. 

Next

The initial shock of the pandemic and the immense challenges many businesses faced required a very specific short-term view of resilience. One or two months on, the challenges were different – from issues such as helping staff manage their mental health, communications with staff, maintaining productivity, through to business continuity planning for possible future waves of COVID-19. 

At its heart, the Next stage considered how businesses could move beyond responding to the shock of change and proactively plan for the medium term. It was here that businesses looked to put in place new structures that no longer resulted in erroneous or slow decision-making in times of stress. Meanwhile, questioning supply chain resilience to future multiple waves of COVID-19 was core in assessing operational risk.

Whilst there is a need to maintain a focus on COVID-19, one eye must be kept on the day-to-day challenges and opportunities that were present before the pandemic. These include local investment across the UK regions, the skills shortages many sectors face, technology disrupting ways of working and ever-shifting consumer expectations. Considering these compounded issues, the business community needs to have a loud voice in shaping the future, now more than ever, to safeguard jobs and proactively rebuild the economy.

Beyond

As the Government looks to tighten and relax measures over the coming months, leaders will be looking to what happens in tandem with these rules and how they can start to plan for a new ‘business as usual’ and adapt to other socio-economic factors. Resilience has a key role to play here, in that businesses will need to be confident in their structure and operations to allow them to remain agile to shifting COVID-19 restrictions at a moment’s notice, while keeping an eye on the long-term.

Considering what the future holds is perhaps the key facet of leadership. However, COVID-19 has made doing so more challenging than ever before. Predicting the impact of emerging trends in societal behaviour post-COVID, technology’s disruption and entering new sectors will all increase in importance through 2021. 

It is especially dangerous if businesses assume that life post-lockdown will return to what it once was. Leaders need to be asking themselves how their business can adapt to working in a ‘new normal’ whilst staying true to their company’s purpose. A further consideration is how to train staff in the skills needed in the future at a time when it’s harder to collaborate than ever. Or how they can establish strategic relationships with other businesses effectively, at a time when it’s difficult to build new relationships. It is important that every investment and business development opportunity must be meticulously balanced with considerations around current and future cash availability.

To truly think “Beyond” COVID, leaders must remain alert to the fact that crises of this scale can happen and will require a built-in resilience across their organisation. The difficulty many leaders are facing is the sheer fatigue they and their staff feel when managing this constant change. The good news is that many businesses feel more confident in making major changes now – they’ve proven to themselves that they can act quickly because COVID-19 forced them to. 

Create a resiliency culture through learning

A great deal of economic pain has been felt in the UK, with more still to come. Amid this, a new cohort of resilient business leaders are rising to the challenge. These leaders will have developed a tenacity that equips them, and their businesses, with the ability to survive and even thrive in the “new normal”.

Embedding this resilient approach across organisations will be key. Just as we heard in Episode 2 of Real Insights, this requires a culture that is open to learning from past mistakes and events and it is vital that all employees appreciate the importance of their role because resilience is very much in their hands.

Summary

Our Real Insights series explores four qualities that define the leader of the future: ThinkNavigateConnect and Relate. If these areas are studied, resiliency is developed and there is an approach in place such as Now, Next, Beyond, then leaders of the future have a real opportunity to emerge – just when businesses need them the most.

About this article

By Simon O’Neill

EY UK Managing Partner for the Midlands

Committed to growing the brand name and capabilities of EY in the Midlands. Passionate about inspiring and supporting the next generation of leaders. Keen supporter of mentoring.