Leadership and COVID-19

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Hi there,

What a week: six-hour bottlenecks at airports, toilet paper outages, billions of dollars erased in the markets, and over 6,500 lives lost around the world.

It felt weird to send an email about moving to Los Angeles with COVID-19 touching the entire surface area of our lives.

I'm pausing your regularly scheduled email for this week. We'll resume next week. Today, let’s talk about one trait that’s crucial during these times: leadership.

During times of crisis, we look for guidance. We want a steady hand to navigate choppy waters. Leadership isn’t about winning an election or job titles. Leadership is about your behavior.

Some behaviors of good leadership:

Overreact. “Panic is bad, overreaction is good.” This is a good framework, from Ramit Sethi. It’s the leader’s job to overreact. An overreaction is simply preparing for if/when things go from bad to worse.

Be extra cautious. Spend extra money on food, supplies, (sure, even toilet paper). If the worse thing that happens is people say you overreacted, that means you did a good job.

Overcommunicate. At Reforge, here’s what CEO Brian Balfour had to say (I’m paraphrasing):

Leadership at work and home is having hard conversations: what happens if business continues to suffer? When do we consider layoffs? How do our personal finances look today? How will they look 6 months from now? If one partner loses their job, what’s the plan?

When communicating, be kind to one another.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary grace.

Look for tailwinds. Another one from Brian:

In times of crisis, one strategy is going into a defensive shell. But there’s another: going on the offense. We all know the Warren Buffet quote; it’s a good one if you have the free cash. But even if you don’t, you can take a step back and evaluate: what opportunities will arise? When it all clears, how can we be ahead?

Journal. From Morgan Housel:

As a leader, your job is to get through this crisis. After that, the job becomes making your life and business more robust, so you’re better prepared next time (the game is long; there will be a next time).

Document today so you can learn tomorrow.

That’s it for this week.

Be healthy, be safe, be kind.

With gratitude and affection,

- Chris Ming