The world is getting smaller due to technology involvement. It makes life easier than before. Nowadays each organisation needs proper technology support to be stable in the market. Due to the high need for technology, ICT companies are at the top of the profit-making companies in the world. To make more profit for their organisation, most of the western ICT companies are outsourcing their services to the Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. In these countries, western organisations can easily hire very innovative and freshers with comparatively low salary packages.
Sri Lanka is a well-known country for ICT Professionals. The ICT industry is the 4th largest export earners of Sri Lanka. There are more than 300 companies all around the country to deliver the service. In 2019 ICT sectors contributed more than $1000m to the country’s economy (srilankabusiness,2020).
Zone24x7 is a well-known ICT based company in Sri Lanka, more than 300 plus employees are working here. The zone is the 1st company that combines hardware and software and creates unique products with an affordable price. It became the 1st five most willing ICT companies to work in Sri Lanka. Most of their products are based on fashion retail technology. Most parts of their product and services were created to the leading USA fashion retailer Kohl’s. Due to the COVID pandemic, Kohl’s and other fashion retailers got massively affected. 44% of Kohl’s sales were dropped and almost every store was closed during the pandemic (Hauer, 2020). Recently they have cut down 15% of their workforce (The Wall Street Journal, 2020). In the USA fashion retail industry dropped by 16.4%. It was much higher than expected (CNBC, 2020). Due to the instability of fashion retail, Kohl’s has paused investing in Zone’s product and services.
Due to its main client drop, Zone started to face new challenges. Most of the teams stopped functioning. Employees got frustrated and demotivated by this situation. Suddenly the Sri Lankan government locked down the country for two months. This sudden lockdown created the new working from the home culture. It created a gap between employees’ bonds. Because no one in Sri Lanka has never faced this kind of change before. Employee demotivation became the biggest challenge for the leaders of the Zone. As leaders of Zone24x7, now it’s their responsibility to overcome this pandemic and build up their team and bring Zone as same as before. 1st leaders need to identify that the current organisational culture of Zone will support to overcome this pandemic?
“Lead without a title” is one of Zone’s values. Anyone of the team can lead others without a title if they have a better solution for a problem. Their value clearly shows us that they already have a strong basement. From the management, they have given permission to their employees to lead them whenever they feel strong. This culture has given space for the new leaders. But Being a leader in this situation is hard.
What qualities do leaders need to overcome this pandemic?
Positive mindset
A positive mindset will always help to see over the barriers. If a leader faces these critical barriers with a negative mindset, it will create another huge barrier to the organisation. Now it’s time for leaders to find out what are the new opportunities created by this pandemic? How technology can help to overcome this? Can Zone develop an innovative product that prevents humans from covid? As I said before Zone has experts of electronic engineers and software engineers. most of the employees are free due to their main client drop. Leaders can easily use this situation to create a product or service to capture the new normal.
Visionary thinking
To implement these ideas Leader needs to be a visionary leader. Visionary thinking is another quality that leaders need to acquire. All their thinking needs to be matched with the organisation vision as well as need to compete with the new normal. The leader needs to see the bigger picture and need to think beyond their followers. Positive attitude and visionary thinking will create strong leaders, but do they have risk-taking and decision-making abilities?
Risk-taking and decision making
As I mentioned earlier COVID has created so many opportunities which are not tested before. So each and every decision that leaders are going to make has a huge risk. As leaders now they have to make the decisions that are they going to take the risk or are they going to be the same until this pandemic is over. To take the risk, leaders need decision-making abilities. Before taking the decision leaders need to identify that these decisions can be implemented with the current situation or do they need additional resources.
Techniques that can help for decision making
To limit the risk of decision-making leaders can use “design thinking” technique. Design thinking is a technique that helps to understand the problem from a customer point of view (Tim Brown, 2008). If leaders decided to introduce a new product to the market this technique will help them to make great decisions in a human-centric way. Design thinking is a non linear process. There are five steps involved. Empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. After the prototype stage, learn what can be improved and go back to ideate and repeat the process. This process will take time,but if leaders try this technique, it will create a great product. Other than design thinking, IDEAL Creative problem-solving process (D. Bransford and S. Stein, 1993) and Mind gym process (Parnes 1992) (Espy, 2020) will also help to creative decision making.
Learning agility
By doing these processes leaders need to acquire another quality called Learning agility. A leader needs to learn much faster than their followers. Leaders always need to keep an eye on the external changes, learn quickly and react before the problem rises.
Communication
All these qualities will enhance with another leadership quality called communication. There are two types of communication. Lateral and Vertical communication. Lateral communication is communicating with the same level (Eg. leaders to leaders). Communication between the leader and followers called Vertical communication. Both communications are very important for leaders. With lateral communication, leaders can get help from other team members, and from vertical communication, a leader can buildup a strong team of followers.
All these qualities will enhance the leader’s ability. But the leader can’t fight this battle alone. A leader needs a team of followers who has the same vision as a leader. Converting an employee to a follower is not an easy task. If a leader wants this team to be his followers, leaders need to implement some leadership theories in practice. In an organisation like Zone24x7, there are different leaders in different levels (small team leader to the company’s leader). Leaders need to understand which leadership approach will enhance their capabilities. For example, the CEO and COO don’t have to follow the same leadership approaches. This approach can change according to the working environment and the followers as well.
Behavioural approach
These category leaders are called effective leaders. They are target-oriented as well as people-oriented. So these leaders can easily achieve the target with the same visionary followers. If a leader is looking after his followers they will work hard to achieve the leader’s vision. At this pandemic, this is the most effective way of leadership. Most of the employees are fed up with the current situation. They were looking for a leader who understands their needs and motivates them to achieve their own vision as well as the company’s vision. Motivation is one of the key elements in this approach. Without the motivation of the followers, an effective leader can’t achieve their target. To motivate followers, leaders can follow the below methods.
Goal-setting theory — create smart, specific, realistic and challenging goals. Make sure all followers participate. Appreciate and correct them then and there (Edwin Locke 1968,1975).
Equity (Fairness) theory — Leaders need to make sure that each of their followers is treated equally fair (Adams 1963,1965). Inequality will create corporate politics and it will demotivate the followers who are working hard.
The behavioural approach is one of the best approaches for leaders to implement to overcome this pandemic.
Transformational leadership approach
Transformational leadership will help to motivate employees to achieve their higher needs such as their vision, team building and their moral values. This approach should need the “Fantastic 4” aspects (Bass and Avolio 1990).
01. Intellectual stimulation: Stretch, develop, challenge and encourage their followers to progress in their career
02. Idealised influence: Role model(inspiration), provide direction, and examples to follow the leader’s path.
03. Individualised consideration: being a mentor and individually considering their needs to perform well in their career.
04. Inspirational motivation: encourage and inspire them to achieve higher.
This approach is totally based on the employee’s perspective. Combination of Behavioural approach and transformational leadership approach will lead to success. By creating a motivated follower’s Zone can easily achieve their goals and targets.
As a conclusion, COVID has changed the world. After COVID human’s thoughts and behaviours changed. Employees were demotivated and frustrated. As an organisation, it’s their responsibility to bring them back to normal. To bring them back real leadership is important. To be a good leader they need some unique qualities such as a positive attitude, visionary thinking, risk-taking abilities, decision making, learning agility and communication. These qualities will enhance leadership. Being a leader at this time is much harder. Leaders need to be effective. They have to focus on the organisation targets as well as need to motivate their followers. To do both simultaneously behavioural approaches will give them a structure. Transformational leadership will encourage employees engagement. Happy employees will keep your customers happy. Motivate and encourage them they will take care of the clients.
Do you'll think that combination of transformational leadership and behavioural leadership will help to overcome this pandemic?