Organization Practice

Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and

future challenges

For many executives, the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis unlike any other
in recent times. Five leadership practices can help you respond effectively.

by Gemma D’Auria and Aaron De Smet

© Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

March 2020
 The coronavirus pandemic has placed extraordinary demands on leaders in
business and beyond. The humanitarian toll is taken by
COVID-19 creates fear among employees and other stakeholders. The massive scale
of the outbreak and its sheer unpredictability makes it challenging for executives to
respond. Indeed, the outbreak has the hallmarks of a “landscape-scale” crisis:
an unexpected event or sequence of events of enormous scale and overwhelming speed,
resulting in a high degree of uncertainty that gives rise to disorientation, a feeling of
lost control, and strong emotional disturbance.1

Recognizing that a company faces a crisis is the first thing leaders must do. It is a
difficult step, especially during the onset of crises that do not arrive suddenly but grow
out of familiar circumstances that mask their nature.2 Examples of such crises include
the SARS outbreak of 2002–03 and now the coronavirus pandemic. Seeing a slow-
developing crisis for what it might become requires leaders to overcome the normalcy
bias, which can cause them to underestimate both the possibility of a crisis and the
impact that it could have.3

Once leaders recognize a crisis as such, they can begin to mount a response. But they
cannot respond as they would in a routine emergency, by following plans that had been
drawn up in advance. During a crisis, which is ruled by unfamiliarity and uncertainty,

2 Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

effective responses are largely improvised.4 They might span a wide range of actions: not just
temporary moves (for example, instituting work-
from-home policies) but also adjustments to ongoing business practices (such as the adoption of new
tools to aid collaboration), which can be beneficial to maintain even after the crisis has passed.

What leaders need during a crisis is not a predefined response plan but behaviors and mindsets that
will prevent them from overreacting to yesterday’s developments and help them
look ahead. In this article, we explore five such behaviors and accompanying mindsets that can help
leaders navigate the coronavirus pandemic and future crises.

Organizing to respond to crises: The network of teams

During a crisis, leaders must relinquish the belief that a top-down response will engender stability.
In routine emergencies, the typical company can rely on its command-and-control structure to
manage operations well by carrying out a scripted response. But in crises characterized by
uncertainty, leaders face problems that are unfamiliar and poorly understood. A small group of
executives at an organization’s highest level cannot collect information or make decisions quickly
enough to respond effectively. Leaders

What leaders need during a crisis is not a predefined response plan but
behaviors and mindsets that will prevent them from overreacting to yesterday’s
developments and help them look ahead.

1 Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. Leonard, “Against desperate peril: High

performance in emergency preparation and response,” in Deborah
E. Gibbons, ed, Communicable Crises: Prevention, Response, and Recovery in the Global
Arena, first edition, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2007.
2 Arnold Howitt and Herman B. Leonard, eds, Managing Crises: Responses to
Large-Scale Emergencies, first edition, Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2009.
3 Nahman Alon and Haim Omer, “The continuity principle: A unified approach
to disaster and trauma,” American Journal of Community Psychology, 1994,
Volume 22, Number 2, pp. 273–87.
4 Howitt and Leonard, Managing Crises.

Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges 3

can better mobilize their organizations by setting clear priorities for the response and
empowering others to discover and implement solutions that serve those priorities.

To promote rapid problem solving and execution under high-stress, chaotic conditions,
leaders can organize a network of teams. Although the network of teams is a widely
known construct, it is worth highlighting because relatively few companies have
experience in implementing one. A network of teams consists of a highly adaptable
assembly of groups, which are united by a common purpose and work together in much
the same way that the individuals on a single team collaborate (exhibit).5
Some parts of the network pursue actions that take place outside regular business operations.
Other parts identify the crisis’s implications for routine business activities and make
adjustments, such as helping employees adapt to new working norms.
In many cases, the network of teams will include an integrated nerve center covering four
domains: workforce protection, supply-chain stabilization, customer engagement, and financial
stress testing (for more, see “Responding to coronavirus: The minimum viable nerve center,” on
McKinsey.com).

Regardless of their functional scope, effective networks of teams display several qualities.
They are multidisciplinary: experience shows that

Exhibit
During a crisis, a network of teams carries out responses outside of normal
operations, as well as adjustments to routine business activities.
The illustrative network
of teams for a pandemic
response

Response- t h e leadership team

A B
Executive team
C
External communications
Action teams

E
G
Technology
Medical advisory
Response- team lead
Network project management
D
Financial
 Supply chain

F
Colleague outreach
H
Real estate

A Medical advisory
● Overall guidelines and policies
● Guides for frontline managers

B Network project management

● Scenarios
● “Issue map”
● Operational cadence
C External communications
● Regulatory alignment (eg, dispensations)
● 3rd-party communications (eg, to partners)

D Financial
● Financial stress testing

E Supply chain
● Disruption and restart support (eg, loans)
● Exposure across tiers
● Inventory management
F Colleague outreach
● Communication across employee channels
● 2-way feedback (eg, ombudsperson, survey, email, call)

G Technology
● Work-from-home execution and infrastructure
● Support for special employee segments (eg, those who cannot work from home)

H Real estate
● Building management
● Factory management

5 Tantum Collins, Chris Fussell, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and David Silverman,
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, first edition, New
York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015.
crises present a degree of complexity that makes it necessary to engage experts from
different fields. They are designed to act. Merely soliciting experts’ ideas is not
enough; experts must gather
information, devise solutions, put them into practice, and refine them as they go. And
they are adaptable, reorganizing, expanding, or contracting as teams learn more about
the crisis and as conditions change.

Leaders should foster collaboration and transparency across the network of teams.
One way they do this is by distributing authority and sharing information: in other
words, demonstrating how the teams themselves should operate. In crisis
situations, a leader’s instinct might be to consolidate decision-making authority and
control information, providing it on a strictly need-to-know basis. Doing the opposite
will encourage teams to follow suit.

Another crucial part of the leader’s role, especially in the emotional, tense environment
that characterizes a crisis, is promoting psychological safety so people can openly
discuss ideas, questions, and concerns without fear of repercussions. This allows the
network of teams to make sense of the situation, and how to handle it, through healthy
debate.

Elevating leaders during a crisis: The value of ‘deliberate calm’ and ‘bounded
optimism’
Just as an organization’s senior executives must be prepared to temporarily shift some
responsibilities from their command-and-control hierarchy to a network of teams, they
must also empower others to direct many aspects of the organization’s crisis response.
This involves granting them the authority to make and implement decisions without
having to gain approval. One important function of senior executives is to quickly
establish an architecture for decision making so that accountability is clear and
decisions are made by appropriate people at different levels.

Senior leaders must also make sure that they empower the right people to make
crisis-response decisions across the network of teams. Since
decision-makers will probably make some mistakes, they must be able to learn quickly and make
corrections without overreacting or paralyzing the organization. At the start of a crisis, senior leaders
will have to appoint decision-makers to direct the crisis response. But as the crisis evolves, new crisis-
response leaders will naturally emerge in a network- of-teams construct, and those crisis-response
leaders won’t always be senior executives.

In routine emergencies, the experience is perhaps the most valuable quality that leaders bring. But in
novel, landscape-scale crises, a character is of the utmost importance. Crisis-response leaders must be
able to unify teams behind a single purpose and frame questions for them to investigate. The best will
display several qualities. One is “deliberate calm,” the ability to detach from a fraught situation and
think clearly about how one will navigate
it.6 Deliberate calm is most often found in well-g r o u n d e d individuals who possess humility but
not helplessness.

Another important quality is “bounded optimism,” or confidence combined with realism. Early in a
crisis, if leaders display excessive confidence in spite of obviously difficult conditions, they can lose
credibility. It is more effective for leaders to project confidence that the organization will find a way
through its tough situation but also show that they
recognize the crisis’s uncertainty and have begun to grapple with it by collecting more information.
When the crisis has passed, then optimism will be more beneficial (and can be far less bounded).

Making decisions amid uncertainty: Pause to assess and anticipate, then act
Waiting for a full set of facts to emerge before determining what to do is another common mistake that
leaders make during crises. Because a crisis involves many unknowns and surprises, facts may not
become clear within the necessary decision- making time frame. But leaders should not resort to using
their intuition alone. Leaders can better cope with uncertainty and the feeling of jamais vu (déjà vu’s
opposite) by continually collecting information
as the crisis unfolds and observing how well their responses work.

In practice, this means frequently pausing from crisis management, assessing the
situation from multiple vantage points, anticipating what may happen next, and then
acting. The pause-assess-anticipate-act cycle should be ongoing, for it helps leaders
maintain a state of deliberate calm and avoid overreacting to new information as it
comes in. While some moments during the crisis will call for immediate action, with
no time to assess or anticipate, leaders will eventually find occasions to stop, reflect,
and think ahead before making further moves.

Two cognitive behaviors can aid leaders as they assess and anticipate. One, called
updating, involves revising ideas based on new information teams collect and
knowledge they develop. The second, doubting, helps leaders consider ongoing and
potential actions critically and decide whether they need to be modified, adapted, or
discarded. Updating and doubting help leaders mediate their dueling impulses to
conceive solutions based on what they’ve done previously and to make up new
solutions without drawing on past lessons. Instead, leaders bring their experiences to
bear while accepting new insights as they emerge.

Once leaders decide what to do, they must act with resolve. Visible decisiveness not
only builds the organization’s confidence in leaders; it also motivates the network of
teams to sustain its search for solutions to the challenges that the organization faces.

Demonstrating empathy: Deal with the human tragedy as a first priority

In a landscape-scale crisis, people’s minds turn first to their own survival and other
basic needs. Will I
be sickened or hurt? Will my family? What happens then? Who will care for us?
Leaders shouldn’t assign communications or legal staff to address these questions. A
crisis is when it is most important for leaders to uphold a vital aspect of their role:
making a positive difference in people’s lives.
Doing this requires leaders to acknowledge the personal and professional challenges that
employees and their loved ones experience during a crisis. By mid-March 2020, COVID-19
had visited tragedy on countless people by claiming thousands of lives. More than 100,000
cases had been confirmed; many more were being projected.
The pandemic had also triggered powerful second-order effects. Governments instituted
travel bans and quarantine requirements, which are important for safeguarding public health
but can also keep people from aiding relatives and friends or seeking comfort in community
groups or places of worship. School closures in many jurisdictions put a strain on working
parents. Since each crisis will affect people in particular ways,
leaders should pay careful attention to how people are struggling and take corresponding
measures to support them.

Lastly, it is vital that leaders not only demonstrate empathy but open themselves to empathy from
others and remain attentive to their own well-being.
As stress, fatigue, and uncertainty build up during a crisis, leaders might find that their abilities
to process information, to remain levelheaded, and to exercise good judgment diminish. They
will stand
a better chance of countering functional declines if they encourage colleagues to express
concern—
and heed the warnings they are given. Investing time in their well-being will enable leaders to
sustain their effectiveness over the weeks and months that a crisis can entail.

Communicating effectively: Maintain transparency and provide frequent updates

Crisis communications from leaders often hit the wrong notes. Time and again, we see leaders
taking an overconfident, upbeat tone in the early stages
of a crisis—and raising stakeholders’ suspicions about what leaders know and how well they are
handling the crisis. Authority figures are also prone to suspend announcements for long stretches
while they wait for more facts to emerge and decisions to be made.
 Neither approach is reassuring. As Amy Edmondson recently wrote, “Transparency is
‘job one’ for leaders in a crisis. Be clear what you know, what you don’t know, and
what you are doing to learn more.”7 Thoughtful, frequent communication shows that
leaders are following the situation and adjusting their responses as they learn more. This
helps them reassure stakeholders that they are confronting the crisis. Leaders should
take special care to see that each audience’s concerns, questions, and interests are
addressed. Having members of the crisis- response team speak firsthand about what
they are doing can be particularly effective.

Communications shouldn’t stop once the crisis has passed. Offering an optimistic,
realistic outlook can have a powerful effect on employees and

7
Amy C. Edmondson, “Don’t hide bad news in times of crisis”, Harvard Business Review, March 6, 2020,
hbr.org.

6 Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges

other stakeholders, inspiring them to support the company’s recovery.

The coronavirus pandemic is testing the leaders of companies and organizations in every sector
around the world. Its consequences could last for longer and present greater difficulties than
anyone anticipates. The prolonged uncertainty is all the more reason for leaders to embrace the
practices described in this article. Those who do will help establish or reinforce behaviors and
values that can support their organizations and communities during this crisis, however long it
continues, and prepare them well for the next large-scale challenge.

Gemma D’Auria is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Dubai office, and Aaron De Smet is
a senior partner in the Houston office.

The authors wish to thank Ruth Imose, Ana Mendy, Monica Murarka, Mihir Mysore,
and Ophelia Usher for their contributions to this article.

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