CSAC Institute COVID-19 Pandemic Leadership Resources

• Tip Sheet: Leadership Practices in a Crisis  Collection of best practices from Institute classes summarized into one page as reminders for day-to-day action. (April, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Building Around  Purpose: Coaching Employees through Ambiguity   Coaching and regrounding employees in the purpose of their work and the value they are contributing to the community can help people get through these trying times. Here are some proven methods.  (Bill Chiat, May, 2020)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Compassionate Leadership: A crucial power in a crisis   Employees are experiencing a range of physiological and psychological responses from the lost sense of security and normalcy in both their personal and professional lives. Compassionate leadership is proving to be a crucial power to shepherd organizations into a post-crisis next normal. Here are some practices. (May, 2020. Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Effective Holding Environments to Foster Adaptive Change  Addressing adaptive challenges requires people to make adaptive change. This provides tips for facilitating courageous conversations with people facing changes to their work and lives. (April, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Balancing Leadership and Management Through a Crisis   We often emphasize leadership practices in Institute courses, but with the complexity and change required in a crisis, leadership practices alone are insufficient. Here are some tips for balancing management and leadership. (April, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: The Right Words for Tough Conversations and Questions   People are feeling deeply unsettled today, and our anxieties drive us to ask new questions of, and listen to every word from, authority figures. These best practices help build trust and bring clarity and hope to your communications. (April 30, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Engage Employees in Their Rapid Learning of New Skills   As counties move through the COVID-19 response and recovery, many employees are being called upon to take on new tasks which require skill building. Adults learn differently than children, and there are techniques that will make your skill-building sessions effective and build employee confidence in their ability to perform the new skill. (May, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Taking Risks in a Risky World: Encourage and Support Innovation   Two consistent attributes of resilient people and organizations are their uncanny ability to innovate and a bias for speed and action. Both are new capacities in the public sector and take the courage to face fears and act. Some practices can create an environment that builds courage, faces fears and supports innovation.  (June, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• The Toughest Leadership Test   A must-read for CEO/CAOs and Department Heads.  Once the crisis is over, everyone is likely to remember how county senior executives acted during the pandemic. To pass this toughest leadership test, senior executives are paying even more attention to what they say and do. Executives from across the globe report on daily routines and ways of working to help them and their organizations weather this crisis and emerge stronger from it. (May, 2020, McKinsey & Company)
  
  
• Ideals from Lincoln  President Lincoln exhibited the ideals of transformational leadership in another turbulent time in our nation’s history. This is a list of those ideals as interpreted by Doris Kerns Goodwin in "Leadership in Turbulent Times." (2018, Simon & Schuster)
  
  
• Executives are facing the enormous challenge of guiding people through a crisis that has upended the lives of every single person. History can serve as a model for how leaders inspire others and manage their own anxieties. Two recent articles highlight how history's best leaders responded in uncertain worlds. In "How History's Great Leaders Managed Ambiguity " Harvard professor Nancy Koehn explains how some very best leaders understood how to provide stability, a steady hand, and hope, even when they themselves were uncertain about the road ahead. A McKinsey & Company report, "Lessons from the Generals: Decisive action amid the chaos of crisis " explores ideas drawn from the experience of crisis-management professionals—and county officials struggling to respond to this pandemic can learn a great deal from military generals.
  
  
• Podcast: How Organizations Are Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic  Institute Dean Bill Chiat discusses leadership practices local governments are or should be considering, and some silver linings. (CPS HR Consulting)
  
  
• Podcast:  A Time for Women Leaders to Shine   Lessons in leading through a crisis from a woman who started her career as a nurse and is now the CEO of a global nonprofit. (May, 2020, Sheila Davis, CEO of Partners In Health)
  
  
• Career Compass - We Need Adaptive Leaders Now   There is great uncertainty about when and how to act. Yet the leaders and followers must act anyway. Here are some suggestions to promote adaptive leadership.  (April, 2020, Frank Benest)
  
  
• Career Compass – Leading by Living Your Values  In times of uncertainty and change people look to leaders for calm and reassurance. While you can’t protect people, you can let your values guide your decisions and actions. And it will get noticed by others. (2017, Frank Benest)
  
  
• Career Compass – Overcoming Deep Seated Fears  Exercising leadership compels one to exert positive influence and act with others to make things better. Fears get in the way and we are immobilized. We then cannot fulfill our leadership role. Here are strategies for overcoming fears. (2017, Frank Benest)
  
  
• How to Demonstrate Calm and Optimism in a Crisis   Six practices can help leaders build their self-awareness and guide their organizations through the challenges ahead. (April, 2020, McKinsey & Company)
  
  
• COVID-19: What Employees Need From Leaders Right Now  Gallup studied past crises to learn what leaders can do during COVID-19. Use five survey items to audit your leadership approach. (March, 2020, Gallup, Inc.)
  
  
• A Leader’s Guide: Communicating with teams, stakeholders, and communities during COVID-19  COVID-19’s speed and scale breed uncertainty and emotional disruption. How organizations communicate about it can create clarity, build resilience and catalyze positive change. Superior crisis communicators tend to do these five things well.  (April, 2020, McKinsey & Company)
  
  
• Don’t Let Uncertainty Paralyze You    When confronting a situation freighted with anxiety and ambiguity most of us can imagine no upside. We become paralyzed. This article offers three habits that can help develop your “uncertainty capability.”  (April, 2020, Nathan Fur, Harvard Business Review)
  
  
• Crisis Communication: How Great Leaders Stop Rumors Before They Start  Leaders can stop misinformation from damaging engagement and culture. Communication should be transparent, realistic and relationship-building b y following these tips. (April, 2020, Gallup Inc.)
  
  
• Managing the Human Side of Change  A classic article that examines of the ten most common reasons managers encounter resistance to change, and tactics for dealing with each. (1985, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School)
  
  
• Implementing Your Vision When Times are Tough  These are times to reinforce, not let go of your vision. Here are some strategies for facing and managing change in the most extreme environments, (2019, Joanne Murphy, Queen’s University)

SHAPING THE NEXT NORMAL

• Tip Sheet: Imagining the New Future: Think about possibilities   No one has the crystal ball, but there are certainly some emerging trends which may offer clues for some attributes of the next normal. We have been tracking research and commentaries from a range of sources and summarize some of these trends most likely to influence county operations and strategy  (May, 2020. Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Build a Network of Teams to Respond and Plan-Ahead for Recovery   Most counties have created crisis-response teams to deal with immediate public health and fiscal challenges. Now is also the time to consider creating a “Plan-Ahead Team” to support executives and the Board on recovery phase decisions, looking ahead in months and years.  (April, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  

• Tip Sheet: Reimagining and Reengineering County Business Practices   Now is the time to harness the creativity and innovation of staff throughout the county to find – and sustain – reimagined ways to provide county services. This sheet provides a model.  (April, 2020, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• Tip Sheet: Lessons from the 2009 Recovery Act   The Recovery Act required unprecedented adaptive change in the Federal government, with few models. Nine common actions taken by agency executives could be applied today to achieve large-scale results under tight deadlines. (April, 2020, Richard Callahan)
  
  
• The Pandemic Has Exposed the Fallacy of the “Ideal Worker”   If there was ever a time to put to rest the old-fashioned notion of the ideal worker, it’s now. Post-pandemic, let’s resculpt workplace ideals so they reflect people’s lives today—not half a century ago. If you are focused on employee engagement, this is the path forward. (May, 2020. Joan C. Williams, Professor, UC Hastings School of Law)
  
  
• Government’s Innovation Surge Shouldn’t End with the Pandemic   Service improvements that used to take years are now being accomplished in days. The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated that permanent transformation is possible.  (April 29, 2020, Governing)
  
  
• Field Guide to Problem Solving and Process Improvement   A detailed guide to problem solving, including a number of tools to use in problem solving, process improvement and reimagining county business practices. (2017, Bill Chiat)
  
  
• To Weather a Crisis, Build a Network of Teams   This dynamic and collaborative team structure can tackle an organization’s most pressing problems quickly. Here are four steps to make it happen. (April, 2020, McKinsey & Company)
  
  
• How Data Governments Already Have Can Guide the Pandemic Response   The information counties collect for operational purposes can be leveraged in numerous ways to help them deal more effectively with the economic devastation of the coronavirus. (April 2020, Governing)
  
  
• Cash is King: Short-Term Strategies to Slow the Flow of Money Out the Door and Keep the Budget Balanced  While we don’t endorse all of these ideas, this paper presents a number of tried-and-true techniques that can improve cash flow during difficult times and provide time and resources for governments to develop strategies to deal with the financial crisis. (April, 2020, Government Finance Officers Association)
  
  
• How to be Right 95% of the Time   These times provide opportunities to experiment with new ideas and processes. Avoid planning paralysis. For most of what counties do, 95% right be might be just right! (1994, The Conference Board)

COMMUNITY BUILDING

• How to Encourage Community Building During the COVID-19 Crisis   Several ways that healthy residents can help their community while continuing to practice safe habits (March 2020, ICMA) 

CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME

We welcome your contributions of resources others might find of value. We will post them here and share with the Institute community. Please send contributions to [email protected].