The COVID-19 crisis, which is affecting us here in India, and across the world, is having a profound and unprecedented impact upon everyday life, organizations, economies and political communities. Crises like this disrupt lives, bring hardship and even tragedy.
In India, and throughout much of the rest of the world, businesses have shut down, schools are closed, and governments have restricted activities to only “essential services”.
Personally, during this crisis the need to distinguish what is “essential” from what is “non-essential” presents us with an opportunity. It allows us to discover, that some of the non-essentials are, in fact, luxuries. They include things we might like to do, or like to have if we already have all the essential bases covered and have time and money to spare.
In good times, we can convince ourselves that luxuries are necessities and we can find ourselves worrying about things that emergencies expose as not being as important as we had thought. Crises give us an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate our lives, to ask ourselves what truly matters and what does not, and to refocus our attention and reorder our lives according to what gives our lives genuine meaning and purpose.
Professionally, a crisis acts as the forcing mechanism to compel speedy innovation, leading to problem solving and advances in technology, policies and procedures. Organizations and employees are compelled to think out of the box, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones which in turn helps to build a culture of long-term sustainability. The measures taken to survive and eventually end a crisis often make an organization stronger and more resilient when it comes to future events. Such a crisis increases resilience for the next event and people are prepared to handle it in a much more structured way. Acceptability of change during a crisis increases as multiple interests have a way of pulling together diverse sections of people to solve the crisis. A crisis has a way of letting the cream rise to the top. During a crisis, those with the right skill sets and talent, even if they are not the identified leaders or top performers, have a way of rising to meet the challenge, creating a dynamic that enables the entire team or group to grow closer and work better together.
In Chinese, the word CRISIS is composed of two characters. One represents “Danger” and one represents “Opportunity”. It is totally up to us how we see it.
I once read an appropriate interpretation of word CRISIS which is food for thought for all of you:
Create opportunity to maintain/strengthen relationships with stakeholders;
Respect and validate stakeholder feelings/sentiment towards the incident and the organization;
Initiate corrective actions and behaviours to right wrongs and ensure such an incident never happens again;
Stay true to words spoken and promises made;
Instil a corporate culture that focuses on trust-building and effective issues management; and
Sustain business and reputation by learning from mistakes made and continuing to put stakeholders first and foremost.
It is up to us how we would like to approach the crisis. When things are tough, we tend to focus on the problems. Focusing on problems, makes them grow, and if we don’t do anything about them, we become unhappy, frustrated and pessimistic. If we maintain a positive attitude, believe that there is a solution, and keep looking for it, we will ultimately find it. It is the positive mindset that will ultimately make the difference.
The views expressed in this article are personal.
The writer is Mr. Vikas Chawla Chief Strategy Officer, Schindler India. Vikas joined Schindler India in the year 1999 in Finance. Until June 2019 he was CFO of Schindler India & South Asia, Prior to joining Schindler India, Vikas worked with Fujitsu ICIM. He is an alumnus of SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.