Introduction
With the rising incidence of COVID burden, all professional leaders have been facing a huge crisis in managing the team and overall business operations. To be more specific, the global impact of the pandemic has been incited on all aspects of business operations. While it becomes crucial for the management to work on operative measures, it is equally important that leaders take on these situations and ameliorate the business operations to the best of their abilities (Ball 2020). Sustainability leadership is the most predominant demand of any organisation amidst such a global pandemic. With the changes in the work patterns, team coordination, operational activities, it is becoming increasingly challenging for business management to organize and supervise the remote teams (Norrlöf 2020). Therein lays the importance of effective leadership and their crucial role in managing the business activities and team members. The subsequent actions of the behavioral changes of a leader govern the impact it will have on organisational changes and the outcomes it generates.
Leadership challenges and uncertainties
With the implementation of changed processes, the earlier work patterns have significantly changed in a professional business environment (Spalluto et al. 2020). Most people are working remotely which imposes serious issues on the management team to deal with. But a business organisation that evolves adapts, and above all turns new challenges into prodigious opportunities will be able to thrive in the convoluted environment. As the world is suffering from such a humongous crisis, leadership challenges are increasing with all the practical resources of a business. Under these circumstances, taking advantage of these intricacies and utilizing them effectively would help an eroding business to navigate the uncertainties and prepare better approaches for the times ahead (Wardman 2020). Managing so many workers from remote locations is a huge task that impacts daily activities to a large extent. But to lead the business ahead, a leader is supposed to question the business’ long-held beliefs and clear norms to generate stifling growth even during the most critical phases (Giustiniano et al. 2020). This is where leadership agility is solicited to make structured decisions that ignite commitment and diligence from all working members of the business.
Resources and significance
During the earlier times, the concept of social responsibility or CSR has attracted humongous business attention for its never-ending implications (Maqbool and Zameer 2018). However, as the post-pandemic business environment essentially calls for the strongest leadership that is flexible and inclusive, all companies must align their vision proposition to develop mitigation strategies based on value-mediated business resources. To be more specific, the pandemic situation drives business leaders to emphasize CSR strategies more strongly than never before. The approaches can only be mediated by those leaders whose virtue is anchored in their strength of values (Dhanani and Franz 2020). Strategic values of leadership essentially keep the team grounded and united. Also, it provides the fuel needed to outperform challenges and provide organisational stability. CSR strategies have the potential to supersede many of these existing intricacies and attract various stakeholders to add value that facilitates business growth and its subsequent development (John et al. 2019). Ideally, a COVID-19 business environment should only prioritize business operations alone, but also integrates developmental actions that generate abundant social impacts. This would foster a high performing work environment amidst the uncertain phases and facilitate sustainability as demanded. In other words, all organisations need potent and versatile leader/leaders that can develop a striking balance between science, technology, commerce, and social responsibility. All these business resources call for a strategic leadership vision that most organisations need earlier in order to recover from the progressive losses and economic downturns.
Leadership during a crisis: Lessons learned
While the challenges help a business and individual to emancipate better strategic vision, the enormous lessons learned from the crisis period is crucial. Leaders need to be calm and stress-free to be able to guide a stressed team ahead. A leader essentially needs to be empathetic and compassionate about his workers if he intends his work to be going in favour the business. Therefore, a leader needs to have his strategic blueprint and alternative approaches ready even before the onset of a challenging phase. This shows the ability and enormous potential of leadership to anticipate and pre-prioritize measures that work when all other resources fail. As a result, this is a testing time for leadership styles as well that ensure which business would demonstrate better sustainability and which ones would go with the subsequent flow of the global economic crisis.
Conclusion
At the same time, this requires a leader to be accountable, interactive, responsible, and above all supportive with all his virtues to boost employee morale. An ineffective leader is directly reflective of a derogatory organisational culture that is more likely to suffer downturns during such an uncertain period. Personal growth and organisational development slow down when incorrect leadership attitudes impact an organisation and worsen the situation. This also makes the business model more challenging to revive and re-build its lost image. Therefore, a post-pandemic business environment essentially warrants deeper engagement and greater activism.