The following behaviors characterize a good leader in a downturn:
1. Honesty and credibility. Nobody can be certain about the business environment and its direction. The only viable options are intellectual honesty and humility. Your authority depends on your ability to facilitate understanding and solutions—not from omniscience.
2. Ability to inspire. Many people are extremely anxious. The recession descended as suddenly as a tsunami, destroying hard-earned savings and putting jobs at risk. You and your team must inspire employees by toughening their resolve and developing realistically optimistic pictures of what can lie ahead.
3. Real-time connection to reality. Reality is a moving target. You have to keep updating your picture of it, continuously monitoring change with ground-level intelligence. The same applies to your team, whose members must put all concrete information on the table, however bad it may be.
4. Realism tempered with optimism. Understand and accept a problem’s magnitude. Then, focus your people on a vision of what’s possible.
5. Managing with intensity. Dig into the right details more frequently than before. Hands-on participation is essential.
6. Boldness in building for the future. The need to conserve cash and survive may pressure you to shortchange the future. You must resist. It takes imagination and guts to place strategic bets with no guaranteed payoffs when there’s little money and great uncertainly; however, it’s critical to aim for long-term payoffs.
