Has COVID-19 changed responsible business and leadership forever?
Will the leadership lessons learnt during the pandemic help with new challenges?
Will the leadership lessons learnt during the pandemic help with new challenges?
There’s no doubt that the pandemic changed the way organisations were led. In 2020, leaders found themselves having to respond to the crisis at pace, without data or previous experience to draw on, balancing the safety of frontline workers with the need to enable swathes of the UK workforce to work from home.
They also learned how to be visibly more empathetic and humble in their leadership approach, while technological innovation and magnified visibility made them more accessible within their organisations. Leaders were also more exposed to the social problems faced by their workforces and social justice issues such as Black Lives Matter.
However, by the middle of 2021, the context had changed. While the uncertainty continued, fractures, differences and divisions within society had resurfaced. The brief sense of national unity that had been fostered during the first few months of the pandemic started to decline, as the varied experience of COVID-19 – across sectors, generations, geographies and socio-economic groups – became painfully clear.
This article asks a simple question: has the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of responsible leadership for good?
To answer it, we need to consider three things: how we describe what it takes to be a responsible leader; the evidence for a new approach to responsible leadership; and the expectations of responsibility placed on leaders by their various stakeholders.
Much has been written over the last 30 years about what constitutes responsible leadership. A literature review uncovers the main characteristics, listed below (Maak and Pless, 2006; 2009), many of which held true during the pandemic:
Three levels of responsible leadership became apparent during the pandemic:
However, in 2021, the intense communication with external stakeholders and peers seemed to be decreasing as leaders turned their attention inwards. While ambitions for sustainability, mental health and wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, and community and levelling up remained, the response to community and broader economic or social agendas had changed. The need to keep the business afloat while transitioning out of lockdown meant that internal ‘responsible’ issues still received attention, but engagement with the community beyond the organisation’s boundary was often not as overt.
The pandemic has changed the expectations of our various stakeholders, which influences how we now define responsible leadership. These include:
Many senior leaders impressed through their acceptance of broader societal and organisational responsibilities during COVID-19. This has raised stakeholder expectations of what these individuals can deliver on an ongoing basis.
There is every reason to believe that the leadership lessons from the pandemic should be applied in our present and future challenges. The war in Ukraine has created a situation which one CEO described as meaning: ‘Uncertainty is the new norm’. There is a need for responsible leadership to support fairness and justice, to mitigate public fear on geo-political levels and to address the social and economic fallout of the cost of living crisis.
Yet, despite the triumph of good stewardship during COVID-19, and the expanding list of ‘responsibilities’ that leaders now address, there are signs that many are ‘returning to normal’. Reporting on DAVOS 2022, the journalist Rana Foroohar reported that she came away feeling that the 0.1% was more out of touch with the state of the world than ever, concluding: ‘If the rich don’t give a bit more today, they may have to give a lot more tomorrow.’ (2022) Financial Times. 30 May.
As for levelling up income levels, the Financial Times reported on the same day: ‘UK CEO pay recovers to pre-COVID levels despite cost of living crisis’. It reports that Deloitte has found that the median employee to FTSE 100 CEO pay ratio was 1:81, compared with 1:59 in 2020 and 1:75 in 2019.
Maybe gold-plated responsible leadership was just for COVID-19 after all?
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Professor Veronica Hope Hailey is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and inaugural Dean of the University of Bristol Business School.
Veronica is mainly known for her research on trust and trustworthy leadership. For the last 30 years, Veronica has worked all over the world to deliver leadership development at the most senior levels in the private, public and third sector. Her latest research, conducted in collaboration with the CIPD, focused on responsible business and leadership through crisis.
Joe Carter is the Organisational Change, Research and Policy Coordinator at the Forward Institute. He articulates the Forward Institute's voice on issues in Responsible Leadership and supports the facilitation of cross sector research in the field. These initiatives are aimed at helping the leadership of legacy institutions create and sustain positive change for their employees, society and the planet.
Katie Jacobs was senior stakeholder lead at the CIPD, where she rans the CIPD’s HR leader network for HRDs/CPOs. She is also a business journalist and writer specialising in business, workplace/HR and management/leadership issues.
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