Wow how our world has changed so this originally was going to be a theoretical session on leadership and challenging times and now it's a very practical session on how on earth do we lead in this extreme crisis first of all I want to say my heart goes out to you because I know that there are many members here who have been severely impacted and I really hope you're getting the support that you need and I hope that this video gives you more support on how we can lead in a practical way at this time my name is Sharon Baker I run a leadership consultancy called fly don't walk we work almost exclusively with creative agencies on their leadership development so we work with leadership teams we work with board CEOs and we offer one-to-one coaching and team coaching and training for leadership and management so I want to put some context here from a survey that came out last week on all creative agencies and it found that the film and event agencies are the worst hit with an average of seven plus projects being pulled due to coronavirus so that's not great news but it might help to know that we're all in the same boat so obviously leadership at this time is crucial to get us all through this so I have given you some very practical concrete tips here but you can hopefully apply tomorrow I'm using a model called VUCA which stands for volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous and it was a term coined at the end of the Cold War to describe the world as it was then and obviously it's perfect for the world we find ourselves in today and the leadership skills that have been identified to combat VUCA our vision understanding clarity and agility and I'm going to go through these in turn and give you very concrete illustrations of what these look like vision is knowing where you're going and how you're going to get there it's using your vision values as a guide for decisions and communicating this to motivate employees how you communicate is key to how the team responds how positive they are how they work together how they will pull through this so they want to hear from you they want to be reassured they want you to provide hope for the future Harvard Business Review has outlined that your communication should be based on four pillars of honesty transparency accountability and consistency and I think this is a fantastic opportunity to praise your team to make sure they feel valued so use the five to one rule which is five praise to one criticism this came from a guy called John Gottman who's a marriage counselor in the States he did research with thousands of couples and found out that if they prays five times more than they criticize they had a ninety four percent chance of staying together and it's been researched in teams and found that that is the key aspect to them being high-performing understanding is the next leadership skill and this is the ability of a leader to stop look and listen it requires leaders to understand themselves to understand their team employees clients and reflect on the context basically it's about joining up the dots the first thing about leadership in a crisis is that you are leading yourself first and so self-care taking care of your own well-being comes before anything else let me tell you the science about this so when we're stressed or anxious we go into fight/flight mode and what happens there is that your muscles are getting ready to flee and your blood gets diverted from your brain to your body so when we are stressed it means we don't think clearly and we can't focus and right now is the time when you definitely need to be able to do that so I advise all my clients to just identify one or two things that you know keep you well that keep you grounded and centered and durai's them do them every day every hour if you need to but you must look after your own well-being understanding others is putting yourself in their shoes and knowing that everyone has different responses to things that will be different from yours so for instance you may have Millennials who are sitting in their bedroom all day at the moment every day or people who have three kids running around and find it very difficult to focus on work having clarity is about making sense of the chaos so within everything that's going on identify what's actually important being able to prioritize those things knowing what information you need to make those constructive decisions of course it's very difficult to make decisions when you have no information and things are shifting minute by minute around you but making sure you get information from employees and those around you can help and prioritizing so knowing what's important so I want to give you a tool for prioritizing this is from Stephen Covey's and it's called the severe of influence tool and it basically helps you see what's in your control and what's not in your control so I've attached that for you agility is the skill to be able to pivot to be creative and act quickly when things change around you and I honestly think there's a great opportunity in this situation not only for us to really rethink what we deliver to clients but also rethink how the whole business runs I do think this is a great opportunity for everyone in the company to get involved your teams to get involved there's a great story about Oliver burrows who's the chief data officer at the Bank of England he wanted to increase productivity so he put out an experiment and asked everyone in the business to come up with ideas and he said he was amazed at what came back their ideas that the management would never have thought of so the coders came up with new ways of doing things people came up with new ways of recruiting of onboarding so this is an opportunity for the team to step up agility is about mindset it's how you reframe situations and your thoughts around them and I have outlined four ways that you can learn to be more agile see what opportunities are present so what can we learn from this situation question your assumptions and test them out invite and appreciate feedback this is a great time to practice humility everyone is in this together allow failure so we are having to respond so quickly at the moment we can't think things through some things will work others won't make time for reflection and self-development now and I want to share with you a wonderful tool for reflection called what so what now what it's very simple you describe the situation you then ask so what what does it mean and then you ask now what what are we going to do we often say we don't have time we don't have time to sit back and reflect we don't have time for development we don't have time to look at our strategy plan but the next few months may give us some time and no one knows what it's going to look like but nearly everyone agrees that there will be a new normal and there's going to be more change so I do think this is a valuable opportunity to take to equip ourselves with the leadership skills that we need for the next few months and beyond you