“Rethinking leadership for a post-COVID-19 world”, by Isabelle Rouhan (EDHEC Master 1997)

Isabelle Rouhan (EDHEC Master 1997), Founder and President of Colibri Talent, Co-Founder of the Observatoire des Métiers du Futur, lecturer and author of Les Métiers du futur (Éditions First, 2019), has recently published an article on the EDHEC Alumni official group on LinkedIn to share her vision of employability after the lockdown. Her new analysis is about post-coronavirus leadership.

"The world will never be the same again. This global health crisis, exacerbated by the worst recession since 1945, raises many challenges for society. In response to the Cassandras who seize every opportunity to predict mass unemployment and irrevocable social divides, the aim of this article is to inspire positive changes in organizational governance, with a view to making the post-lockdown period an opportunity to build a more meaningful, inclusive and sustainable economy 3.0.

It is up to today’s leaders and top executives in the aftermath of this crisis to build a world in which these changes will be opportunities for large-scale transformation. Circumstances like those we are going through reveal the capacity of leaders for vision, thought, discourse and support.

To document this vision of a new type of leadership, I spoke to three experts with complementary views on this subject:

- Guy Mamou-Mani, joint Chairman of ESN Open and author of L’apocalypse numérique n’aura pas lieu (Editions de l’Observatoire)
- Vice-Admiral Loïc Finaz, Director of the Ecole de Guerre, due to publish La liberté du commandement : l’esprit d’équipage in June (Editions des Equateurs)
- Viviane de Beaufort, professor at ESSEC Business School and a specialist in governance

Rethinking the leader’s role

“A top executive or leader is someone who has understood that his actions fall within four cardinal points: a mission, meaning, circumstances and men,” says Vice-Admiral Finaz. “He must develop the autonomy and solidarity of his ‘crew’, his teams, virtues which, in an increasingly individual world reliant on assistance, lead to cohesion and performance. He must then help them understand that beyond our different functions, we all share the same responsibility. This forms a remarkable social bond and is once again a source of performance. He must also understand, and make others understand, that hierarchical systems are only effective if based on mutual trust, and that can only be achieved if everyone takes part.”

This definition of the leader’s role, emphasising cohesion with an eye on performance, is a good starting point for addressing leadership as a facilitator of our exit from this crisis and as an accelerator of future transformations.

Towards more digital governance

Crises sometimes create significant and lasting disparities between companies when it comes to performance. Research has shown that digital technologies can have the same effect, particularly during a recession. Businesses that have neglected to work on their digital transformation may now realise that the COVID-19 crisis will make these disparities insurmountable.

This will necessarily have an impact on governance as we leave the crisis behind. Companies that were too slow to digitalise will have some explaining to do to their shareholders.

Digital technology offers solutions in every business sector. As Guy Mamou-Mani points out, “7 million children are now attending school from home. Teachers, sometimes (wrongly) seen as reluctant to embrace the digital transformation, have stepped up and displayed great creativity. We are also seeing an incredible acceleration in the use of telemedicine. And OPEN’s clients have all embraced this. Digital technology is creating a new type of link within our governance model. Our Executive committee now meets every two days by videoconference, and the shift to teleworking has led to new and strengthened links. This is a far cry from the dehumanisation predicted by some.” It is also worth noting that executive and steering committees lead the way when it comes to such digital transformations, a point emphasised by Viviane de Beaufort.

But those who sometimes suffer the most are small and medium-sized enterprises, who have not sufficiently embraced digital technology, as France’s Minister for the Economy Bruno Le Maire warned back in 2018: “if our micro-businesses and SMEs don’t become more digitalised, they will be wiped out.”

Towards necessarily more diverse governance

“First of all, there is not one governance model for all companies. There is, or at least there should be, a governance model for each company”, says Loïc Finaz. But there are certain constants in this transformation that have been in play for a decade and are now set to accelerate. The diversity of board members should be affected. This movement, although already underway in France with the Copé-Zimmerman legislation which significantly increased the presence of women on boards across the country, remains slow in France in other areas of diversity (generation, social and cultural background, disability, etc.). The conviction held by Viviane de Beaufort and Guy Mamou-Mani is that the health crisis will serve to accelerate the increasing awareness at the highest level of the need to strengthen diversity in governance in the interest of performance. As noted in the 2018 Spencer Stuart Board Index: “technological and digital skills continue to be sought after to offer boards the insights they need to navigate the transformations companies face. This explains the arrival of new and often younger directors who bring experience of the new economy”.

A company’s mission is built on meaning and growth

The Pacte legislation in France identifies 3 levels where the traditional purpose of a company can be revised: first, CSR needs to be integrated into the purpose of every company; second, companies can choose to identify a raison d’être in their articles of association to specify their collective long-term goal; lastly, companies have the option of identifying as mission-based organizations with a view to resolving a given societal or environmental problem.

Viviane de Beaufort notes that the “current crisis is a lever with which to address with greater urgency the questions of shareholders and society about the personal ethics of top executives, beyond their ability to lead a company. We are seeing a dividing line emerge between on the one hand companies run by enlightened leaders with a vision and who prioritise the general interest of their business and society as a whole over their personal agenda, and on the other, businesses with an old-school ‘boss’ who continues to lead, especially in times of crisis, without including staff and whose primary aim is to return to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible. This second category is now being challenged at AGMs, by trade unions, NGOs and society as a whole”.

This view is also reflected in the comments made by Vice-Admiral Loïc Finaz: “it is clearly to be hoped that ‘finance’, whether real or imagined, is not the only governance criterion. We won’t be able to eliminate it, but meaningfulness and the human dimension must count just as much.”

“The crisis will bring to the fore issues surrounding ethics and responsibility even more so than before,” Guy Mamou-Mani confirms. “It is essential for awareness to increase, but as part of a responsible mindset. It is necessary but not sufficient in itself. That search for meaning is important to employees, like all stakeholders.”

Rethinking the manager’s role as a team leader

“Good managers reveal themselves to be leaders in times of crisis, and the health threat we face is no exception,” says Guy Mamou-Mani. This observation is shared by Viviane de Beaufort, who emphasises the idea of “employees playing an increasingly collaborative role: the increased autonomy forced upon us by the crisis has triggered stronger levels of commitment and given everyone a voice in coming up with new solutions”.

Hierarchical organizations with multiple levels and an extreme pyramid structure are now beginning to appear outdated in the tertiary sector. To increase staff loyalty, agile companies have flattened their organization chart and restructured their staff teams as cross-departmental tribes. Each tribal chief (or “squad” leader to use the vocabulary developed in 1995 as part of the agile scrum methodology) is a leader with recognised expertise. This form of leadership is a “response to the expectations of staff looking for ever-more meaning”, explains Guy Mamou-Mani. It also brings an end to the stacking of intermediary hierarchical levels that create futile distances within organizations and make for multi-layered and perplexing organization charts.

The crisis is an opportunity to change for the better

“We will have to face other crises in the future”, says Guy Mamou-Mani. “They’re part of humanity; the right response is not to suffer passively but to prepare for them, in particular through education and training and by making digital technology accessible to the greatest number”. Loïc Finaz expands: “Nothing is ever certain, but it is good to be aware that everything can crumble. As a mariner might put it, you should always be ready to set sail”.

Viviane de Beaufort suggests this period, which she refuses to call a crisis, “is an upheaval of our entire system of thought, our relationship with others, our professional and even personal priorities and the economy. It is an opportunity to be dealt a new hand and reallocate public and private funds to priority sectors: digital technology, climate change and the fundamental services we scaled back like health and education"."

More about Colibri Talent : www.colibri-talent.com.