How COVID gave leaders the chance to change

For many managers, changing the fundamental nature of how things are done in their organisation is an impossible nut to crack. Bureaucracy, rules, and a fear of change itself often get in the way, leaving most managers feeling their organisation is so deeply structured that changing how they work is almost impossible.

But the pandemic changed all that, forcing managers to react to unprecedented challenges and fundamentally change how things were done. They had no choice but to find new ways in which to operate, alter relationship roles and be ready to react to the unknown at any moment.

Now, a new study published in the Journal for Management Studies reveals that this shift in how managers perceive change may have a longer-lasting impact than many first thought and may lead to a fundamental change in how leaders deal with both the unexpected AND the everyday in the future.

Researchers interviewed managers at the start of the pandemic, when lockdown measures were first introduced in the winter of 2020, and then again during the second wave when strategies had become more embedded. Final interviews took place in the summer of 2021, when the vaccination campaign had taken effect and things were returning to normal.

At the start of the pandemic, it quickly became clear that normal procedures didn’t work, particularly in highly structured organisations in which managers are trained to manage habitual and day-to-day tasks. How could they make things work when what they had been trained to do simply didn’t apply in the face of this totally alien situation and they could not rely on existing organisational structures?

In the face of this challenge researchers discovered that all leaders had in the locker at this point was their own personal management style, their ability to think on their feet and to learn different approaches quickly – to crack that nut of changing how things were done.

“COVID showed us that leadership involves profound differences in inner behavioural properties,” says the report’s co-author Stefano Tasselli, of the University of Exeter Business School.

“These differences led to a variety of approaches in dealing with the crisis caused by the pandemic, with managers forming new relationships to get through, dropping existing ties that became less useful to them, getting to know existing contacts better and generally getting more creative in problem solving.”

“Essentially the crisis gave leaders the chance to re-examine the purpose of their relationships with others,” he continues. “Interestingly, the combination of these actions generates different network leadership styles and it was from this that we grouped them into three clusters, based on their actions and behaviours.”

These ‘structural’ leaders faced the emergency with a complex mechanism of new ties created and terminated, without spending too much time and attention in using or interpreting existing ties.

These showed high levels of network conflict and low levels of network termination and deepening. For these leaders, the emergency did not call for major changes in the composition of their networks. Rather, they faced the unexpected by activating open confrontation and even conflict with their acquaintances. For them, COVID-19 was an opportunity to reinterpret and re-construe their relationships with others.

These leaders focused mainly on the meaning of their interpersonal interactions with others, showing high levels of network deepening and low levels of network generation. For these leaders, there is a dimension of networking that pertains to seeing others as part of a common destiny, to searching for the meaning of their being-together with team members and co-workers.

This research has wider implications for leaders and organisations, beyond COVID-19. Specifically, it will help organisations to answer an important question: how can CEOs and executives empower their managers to face unexpected crises and emergencies in the future?

“The dilemma companies currently face is that they mainly train their leaders to manage routinely and habitual situations,” says co-author Alessandro Sancino of the Open University. “This results in homogeneity in leaders’ behaviours across situations. However, we showed that leadership also involves profound differences in inner behavioural propensities that characterise the networking styles of leaders.

“We suggest that companies can move into opposite still complementary directions to face this issue.” he continues. “First, they can reduce leaders’ behavioural differences by developing protocols and guidelines that provide managers with clear, ready-to-use instructions on what to do in case of emergency. This is what hospitals do in emergency care: clarity of instruction minimises the risk of mistakes.

“On the other hand, companies can empower leaders to think out of the box, extracting value from these differences in networking styles. Google 20% ruling, internal crowdsourcing, individual-based projects are all ways companies incentivise employees to leverage their idiosyncrasies as a source of creativity. The balance between these two strategies can help companies face the next crisis.”

To arrange interviews with the researchers, contact William Davis at Insight Media: wdavis@insightm.co.uk or call 07875 138 147