COVID-19 – A decision approach for your teams

Being in Asia Pacific, the Coronavirus brought learning opportunities to us sooner and wanted to share my experience to help leaders around the world. Our challenge in following a traditional processes was creating too may decision check points or people voicing their perspective when it may not culturally fit the working of a country. COVID-19 is triggering continuity of business (COB) plans for organizations, but many of these plans were designed for an event occurring (i.e. a natural disaster), to assess the impact, and then put that a plan into action. COVID-19 is an emerging situation evolving at different rates across many geographies. COB plans are helpful, but decision making can be tricky. 

In the spirit of Jim Collins (Author of Good to Great), how do you make one decision which makes other decisions easier (or eliminate the need for you to be involved). We developed a simple framework for decision based on geographic impact:

This same framework could be redesigned for other areas of the business to make decisions flow. For example, in logistics, changing from: ‘Country/Regional/Global’ To: ‘Route/Zone (Multiple routes)/Region (Multiple zones)’ for deliveries, then applying the same logic. 

• Decision – Who is making the decision on the approach for this part of routing? Route, Zone or Region Owner.
• Input – Who has input into the decision?
• Awareness – Who else needs to be informed of the path forward?

This approach is not sophisticated, but simply putting it down and transparently communicating it to all employees will empower your teams and make a difference.  COVID-19 is a unique situation, but the one key thing we can do is make it feel closer to normal. This creates confidence in our teams (and other stakeholders) to Keep Calm and Carry On.

Good luck and feel free to share tips your team has developed while leading through COVID-19.  

Thanks to Brendan and Nic for their help in refining the framework!