Cherono is a student of our Business School, studying cyber security and data governance. She and Professor Elizabeth Moore, Director of MBA and Leadership at the Business School, sat down to discuss how businesses can stay positive during uncertain times.
Elizabeth
"I teach a module in Professional Development which is leadership oriented. Cherono was one of my students in my leadership class so I'm very, very happy to be having this conversation with you today, thanks for coming.”
Cherono
“Thank you for doing it. Let's kick this off and ask the question: how do businesses stay positive in uncertain times?”
Elizabeth
“So, this is the big question of the day, right? For businesses, I think nobody questions that we're in uncertain times, not only are we going through an extraordinary global pandemic. But you know, the political upheavals of all kinds that we've been observing around the world, some very, very surprising in different places I can say. So, this is a time of great uncertainty for most. Organisations, businesses, families, you know, societies in general.
"And so how do you stay positive? Because uncertainty is this interesting tension that we have as human beings, that partially we want freedom. Yes, we want freedom to explore and to do things and to try new things, and we love that. But we also want security. We want to know that things are safe, that it's going to be okay and the intention between those two things, right? So, in periods of great certainty, you often find people trying to be disruptive, right? They're trying to create something that's unusual and making an effort to do that in contrast to the more security they have. But in very, very uncertain times, we long for security, we want to create more safety, we want to know what's going to happen next.
"Very understandably, one of the things about staying positive when things are very, very uncertain is trying to strike that balance within companies, organisations by creating a kind of a strong sense of security in terms of the sense that the people that you're interacting with in the organisation that you're part of has very high levels of trust, and very good levels of communication and very much a sense that you're valuing the employee as of parts of that organisation. So even though you can't control the environment outside, you can't make the world safe, you can still provide a great sense of at least I can trust the people that I'm with. At least we're working together to try to come up with a solution. So, one of the things I think it would emphasise more than anything else about staying positive, and you'll see this in a lot of the literature, but staying positive in a business in very uncertain times, a key element, I would say this all in capital letters is TRUST. How do you create trust in your work environment? you can only do that in a healthy work environment. Toxic work environments are ones where there isn't trust. Because people feel they're being sabotaged. They feel they are not being listened to, they feel they're being taken advantage of or exploited. They feel that there's a lot of competition within the organisation against each other, so part of what businesses need to do in order to not only weather this storm of the global pandemic, but all the uncertainty that we're facing ahead, nobody knows what the business climate is really going to be like. We just know it's going to be different, right? We know we're going to have challenges. So, trying to create that internal sense of trust, of communication, of showing real value in your employees, I think it's really one of the very important elements and there are a number of different ways in which you can do that. One of the things you can do is to help by giving them more education and training in different areas so that they can develop themselves to adapt more to the different needs that there will be in the new business environment. That's really important.
"Also I think real transparency on the part of the upper levels of leadership who take responsibility and acknowledge it’s difficult what's going on, who say, “you know what, this is tough, this is not going to be all roses and candy were really facing difficult times” and leaders who do things like take on parts of the work themselves that they wouldn't have before in order to help the business survive. Those types of actions on the part of leaders really help establish trust when people see okay, the leader of the organisation, is willing to do the nitty gritty. They're willing to say, I think Cherono, you may have even said this at one point in one of our classes, something about seeing that. And so those types of leaders really get a lot of admiration and create more positive environments. So those are just a couple of the things that I would say.”
Cherono
“I was thinking about this question, and I was reading quite a bit about it effect is having on women specifically. Yeah. And because of having children and mothering in general was all sort of like an obstacle to women's trajectory because they often have set time out with that career to go and raise children and do the work that comes with that.
"But now that we have remote working, and we can see that is successful and we see that as possible. Now all of a sudden mothers specifically they can now do the work of looking after the kids and being able to do all those things but also be as efficient and productive. And do you think that's going to help or that is going to become a fixture in the administration. So, the way companies run, especially when they're thinking about women now, do you think they're going to be giving a little bit more leeway to mothers and for parents specifically?”
Elizabeth
“Well, I'm so glad you asked this question too, because I think, you know, this is one of the questions we've really been battling for generations about how do you use the talent of women in the workplace where women so often get blocked at a certain point? In their careers, because they have families and women are still the main, certainly in the early years with breastfeeding and with taking care of the small children, women typically are the ones doing most of that work. And that, may start to change more too. But one of the things, one of the very interesting statistics as an academic that I am highly aware of, is that during the pandemic, female academics, their publishing rates dropped by 70%. Because they were the ones when the children were home had to home school, the mothers were the ones that were doing all the home schooling. The fathers, the academics were male. Their publishing records did not decline at all, because it was the women who are the ones taking on most of that. So interestingly, everybody was working remotely. But for the women, still the publishing dropped because they were the ones still bearing most of the responsibility in the home. So, I think remote working has great opportunities to give more flexibility to women, to mothers and lots of people with disabilities, people who are, you know, simply in different parts of the world.”
Cherono
“I graduated with a law degree last year in January, almost exactly a year ago actually. And then the pandemic hit, and I was like, it's a bit too competitive for me to be able to thrive in the Law field right now. So, I need to be able to diversify. I want to be able to diversify myself, so I don't want to just do one thing. So, I’m like OK, let me do a master’s in cyber security, something completely unrelated to what I've studied. But when I move forward now into the workforce, I'll be able to have as many options as possible and I can take from both degrees moving forward too. So, I think there is definitely a generational shift. I think being agile is something that a lot of my generation is incorporating almost subconsciously.”
Elizabeth
“I think I hope that anybody who's listening will really feel encouraged that there are reasons to stay positive. And one of the things you said that I thought was really important was that when you got your law degree and then you saw I'm not sure really how easy it's going to be. You adapted and you were agile because you then look for another opportunity to do your masters and learn another whole area not only of knowledge but also of, you know, the way that you approach things, methodology. You just broadened your skill set again with that. So, I think, you know, I would encourage people to try to look for those kinds of opportunities. Of, you know, just broadening to broaden their way of approaching experience rather than thinking I have to follow this one narrow path. One narrow path is going to be harder to hold onto cause the paths role being moved and shifted and obliterated. So, thank you so much for having this conversation. It’s a total pleasure, so. I don't know if you want to add anything else.”
Cherono
“I don't really have anything else that I feel like you just said everything so well. And yeah, I hope everybody who is listening definitely takes the professional development course because it is fantastic and it was very, very useful for me personally and I think it be useful for anybody, especially if you're trying to figure out released kind of go find a focus on how you move forward especially in uncertain times.”
Did you find this question interesting?
If you enjoyed this topic, these are the courses we think would be best suited for you.
Explore other topics within Business or go back to our Real World hub.