Being positive can facilitate transformational leadership but taken to extremes it can become insincere and manipulative. Excessive positivity constitutes a significant barrier to reflection and learning. By silencing critical voices, Prozac leadership has hindered our leaders’ response to the pandemic.
An enduring issue for leadership is the emotional effect of leaders’ presence and absence on those who look to them for direction, guidance, and reassurance. If leaders fail to show up, it sends a signal that they don’t really care. In times of crisis, care becomes a highly salient marker of effective leadership.
As we deal with the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on women, minorities and the poor, much has been written about the effectiveness of the leadership traits exhibited by women. What has been different in women’s leadership?
Is this the beginning of the end of leadership education and development as we know it? If so, perhaps it is also an opportunity to forge a new agenda that addresses the challenges of the past and reimagines the value of our work for a future that may look quite different from that which came before us.
We long to return to our old lives. But, at the end of this crisis, it would be a shame to simply go back to normal. If leaders do not learn from the global pandemic, they are likely to be unprepared when new problems arise. Here are five critical lessons that we and our leaders need to learn from this crisis.
What are the lessons we can learn from New Zealand’s remarkable success in responding to COVID-19? This cogent analysis points to their clarity of purpose in minimizing harm to lives and livelihoods and three key leadership practices – being led by expertise, mobilizing collective effort, and enabling coping.
Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman asserted that the social responsibility of business was only to increase its profits, within the law. This mantra, with its focus on the short term, gained a strong hold on much of business practice and continues to guide leadership decision-making in response to COVID-19.
The Center for Creative Leadership (an ILA group member) shares resources on crisis leadership from their library.
Papers. [In partnership with the Australia New Zealand School of Government, top international crisis experts have mined the crisis management literature to create a new series of short, practical briefing papers with cutting-edge knowledge accessible to practitioners.
In this article, leadership expert Theo H. Veldsman provides a framework for understanding effective crisis leadership, the core competencies needed, and the “10 commandments” of crisis leadership excellence.
ILA 2020 featured speaker Otto Scharmer shares eight emerging lessons from the global COVID-19 crisis.
Report. ICMA Research Report sharing reflections from city leaders who lived through crisis. The report analyzes effective leadership skills and techniques, providing lessons learned and best practices.