Over the past decade, British business has had to contend with Brexit, six different prime ministers, a global pandemic, several major geopolitical conflicts, a significant increase in the cost of living and the worsening effects of climate change. Crisis has become an inescapable part of corporate life.
For Kathryn Jacob, CEO of cinema advertisers Pearl & Dean, and Radha Vyas, CEO and founder of group travel company Flash Pack, the pandemic brought operations to a sudden halt. As cinemas across the globe shut their doors, Jacob and her leadership team decided to make use of the furlough scheme and took a 40% pay cut to protect jobs.
For travel company Flash Pack, the measures had to be even more drastic. With international borders closed for the foreseeable future, the business eventually went into administration. Considerable hard work and smart strategising on the part of Vyas – and her business partner and husband Lee Thompson – meant the couple could eventually reopen in 2021, but the experience changed how she leads forever.
Gumtree’s CEO, Hugh Hurley, faced a different set of challenges, when the classified ads company was sold by previous owners eBay and Adevinta ASA. Within 18 months, the organisation had to work out how to build new departments (such as HR, data analytics and finance) from scratch and, most importantly, how to keep staff motivated and believing in Gumtree’s new future.
To understand how modern leaders can navigate business crises, we held a webinar discussion with these three CEOs, and you can listen to their insights in full above or head here to meet the other members of the Raconteur 50.
How to communicate through a crisis
When a crisis hits, you can suddenly feel the burden where everyone in the room looks at you and goes: ‘Well? What’s the answer?’ I think the best thing is to say, ‘I’m trying to find an answer, but I don’t have it yet’.
We’re all brought up to think that CEOs are handed down special powers and that we know everything – but we don’t. You’ve got to be realistic coupled with optimistic. You’ve got to take the approach that we don’t know what the answer is but we’ll work it through together.
One of the things that we found the most interesting [about the pandemic] was that we had so much more time to look at all the things we could do when we came back and that we could do differently. So we used people to do brainstorms that they’d never normally have time for, which meant everyone really felt involved. That was the key thing: for people not to feel they’d been let adrift and that no one was really bothered.
We still had a meeting every Monday where people could turn up or not turn up. Mostly we just chatted rubbish to each other. But at least people felt they could be together.
What we always tried to focus on was balancing our comms between the here and now and the longer term. Of course, we’re in this moment, but let’s not let that consume us. And yes, it’s difficult. Yes, we’re asking people to work incredibly hard, but it’s not the norm. There is an end point and afterwards there are huge opportunities for us.
Being honest is super important. Being honest and listening for feedback, which is something we pushed as part of our new culture.
Of course, you need the maturity in the organisation to understand that not everything will be acted on, but leaders need to show we’re genuinely listening and trying to react to what people are saying about what’s working or not. Doing that really helped us to get the support from the teams. It can be done through groups, feedback forms or one-on-ones, but ultimately, it’s about approachable leadership, which comes from honesty and people knowing that they can talk to us and we will listen and take them on board.
I created a war room immediately, where I was communicating with my leadership teams every hour on the hour, giving instructions about what to do.
Before the crisis, I was a very collaborative leader – everyone always had an opinion and we did things by consensus. Suddenly, within half an hour, I realised I had to take control because that’s what the team wanted. They just wanted to be told what to do.
We were very transparent with our team, but I was also conscious of protecting them somewhat from the rollercoaster. I was completely attached to the news every day, so my mental health was very up and down and I knew that I had to protect my team from that – that’s your duty as a leader.
We also took the approach of being very transparent with all of our stakeholders, so we didn’t bury our heads. We got on a video call with all of our suppliers and said: “We’re going into administration. You will lose money with us. We’re really, really, really sorry.” And we just faced it. We dealt with a lot of anger, a lot of emotion. Everyone was in self-protection mode, but we faced it head on, which really helped us. When we relaunched, all of our partners continued working with us, because we had been super transparent and owned up to what was happening.
