What does good Leadership really mean in the current crisis?
Obviously you have to get costs under control, but leadership in turbulent times is much more than that if you want to secure the future.

1. “Face it and communicate” – Being realistic and open but also showing confidence in the future: get out of your offices and speak one-on-one with employees, opportunities for dialogue are lunches, town hall meetings, dialogue tables etc. face it don’t email it is critical!
2. “Crisis is here, manage it” – how to run your organization and manage change professionally. How to nurture flexibility, awareness, and resiliency to survive the crisis, and even to prosper. Opportunities include stakeholder interviews and dialogue, developing own and organization capability in change management, understanding emotional implications not only economical factors.
3. “No room for tolerating underperformance” – how to transform bad performance into learning moments for the individual and organization through inquiry and feedback. A good book is The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance by Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz.
4. “Retain the right people” – how to retain your stars and develop them A strong opportunity is building and using a leadership community – involve colleagues and employees in developing solutions will increase their commitment to the organization. Seek their advice, offer them mentoring and show them they are valuable.
5. “Layoff and release with respect” – how to release people professionally and keep motivation of leaders and the one who stay. The best way is to treat people, so that if new opportunities arise, they definitely would apply again to work for you because they have found the way you released them very professional and respectful even if hurting.
6. “Master the Financial fundamentals to be able to protect them” – understand how revenues, costs, profits, cash flows, risks, and balance sheets will fare under different scenarios. Good Tools are simulations and business games, that attempt to compress these realities into a time frame that can be visualized and allow the participant to experience the complexity. Company employees can reconstruct business processes, can think more broadly and make company-oriented decisions.
7. “Know your personal strengths” – how to grow rapidly your self-awareness and apply your strengths to new situations and circumstances. Helpful tools are 360 feedbacks or just writing down everything that went well the last weeks or months and try to find out what talents did you bring in to those situations.

Common sense but not common practice!