Five leadership tips to help you stay afloat in crisis

A person’s true character is always exposed when he or she is under pressure. As a leader, you have to balance stressors with short-term needs and long-term goals. It’s easy to be in the corner office when things are good, but how do you fare when things are rough?

Before I rose up the ranks to become a top executive at a global wealth management firm, I was put through the wringer. Potential executives went through simulations meant to mimic the overwhelming stress of having an entire corporation’s worth of employees all bombarding you at once: over 100 emails filling up your inbox in an hour, people calling and asking you questions, a billion-dollar budget shortfall to cover. If you succeeded, you moved up. Looking back, those moments prepared me for crises better than anything else could have.

I firmly believe there are two types of people in the world: sink types and swim types. You throw someone in the deep end, and they do one or the other. I pride myself on being the latter. Leaders across the world and all sectors are currently in the deep end of the pool, and some are experiencing it for the first time. Here are five things to keep in mind when you’re trying to keep your head above water.

 

Take what you can get

If you’re under the weather but not feeling deathly ill, chances are you want to get in front of a good doctor right away. For many of us, a telehealth appointment is the best we’ll get these days. It’s not ideal, but 20 years ago, that wouldn’t have even been an option. We are lucky to have telemedicine services available.

The idea here is you should accept your circumstances and make the best of them. The same goes with family, friends and work. In most places, people cannot gather in large groups, and many of us cannot be in close proximity to co-workers and family members or have a drink with a friend. But we can see them, talk to them and be with them through the wonders of technology.

 

Establish a routine

I’ve been “working remotely” for decades, and previous roles included overseeing divisions in the southeastern United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, so I’ve had tremendous amounts of experience managing teams in different places. And for remote managers, the single most important advice I can give is to keep a routine. Humans are creatures of habit. The moment I realized we’d be separating from our teams for a while, I put routines in place: standing meetings, calls and check-ins. These kinds of routines help retain normalcy and efficiency.

 

Give a little

My team works 70 hours a week. They are always on. But we have an understanding about this work schedule. And because of that, I don’t need to know where they are or what they are doing every hour of the workday.

As a leader, the pandemic is a defining moment, and how you manage it is going to define your leadership legacy. People won’t always remember what you did when things were good. But everybody will remember what you did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say when times were bad. People are going to be on edge, and they might do things that would normally bother you. But we are not in a “normal” moment.

On Zoom, kids are going to be running around in the background. There’s going to be vacuums, traffic and street noise. This is not the time to fault someone for something out of their control.

 

Stay the course

My team is a well-oiled machine. We have proprietary information we have built over the years to keep us up to date, connected and informed. It’s a KPI dashboard, and to see our portfolio companies’ health, we need to know everything that’s going on. At this moment, I have 131 unread text messages and 3,016 unread emails. I can’t just throw my hands up in the air and give up. I have to do what needs to be done.

What matters most cannot be at mercy of what matters least. We are all human, but don’t lose control of the wheel and skid off-track.

 

Look to the future

Money doesn’t sleep, and neither does this global pandemic. My investors’ expectations of me are also wide awake. The limited partners of my fund today are seeing more clearly than ever the benefits of having allocated some of their net worth to venture capital, as the liquid markets and other segments of their portfolio continue to take hits. Investors have seen how insulated tech companies — especially enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) ones — have been in recent months. I believe the safest place to be right now is in the private markets.

Schools and hospitals have code red drills. When I was a kid we hid under our desks for bomb drills. What’s your drill for the rest of this year? The unexpected is possibly your new code red or nuclear explosion. You don’t know what is coming next. But whatever it is, you need to be ready.

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