Year in, year out, when asked about their role, respondents to The Association of Corporate Treasurers’ Business of Treasury survey identify emphatically with the core principles of cash, liquidity and financial management.
Under current conditions, the collective treasury mind is more thoroughly concentrated around those issues than ever – and even more resolutely than we could have imagined at the turn of the year.
So, how do we operate under such circumstances – and how do we keep going?
In a pre-COVID-19 world, we might have expected a cash management objective to remain in place for our first quarter or half year. With the pace of change accelerating, that particular goal might become the focus of the whole team and priority number one for the coming week.
Leaders must be visible with their plans, honest with their words and adaptable with their actions
How do you keep your team focused when moving targets become the norm? How do you facilitate at arm’s length and help team members change pace, not for the second time this month, but the third or fourth?
How do you stay in touch, not just with a dispersed team but with your collective purpose?
Many of our leadership and organisational models are militaristic in their origins. It’s easy to see the appeal – and the applicability.
Distinctive cultures, clear reporting lines and clear messages: these principles hold good for many organisations and are aspired to by many a business leader. They are also highly relevant in crisis situations.
“Leaders must be visible with their plans, honest with their words and adaptable with their actions – all while maintaining compassion for the situation and the impact it is having on their team,” argue Stanley McChrystal, founder, and Chris Fussell, president, of leadership development firm McChrystal Group, in a letter to The New York Times.
A former army general and Navy SEAL respectively, McChrystal and Fussell draw parallels between their experiences following 9/11 and the current crisis.
In today’s situation, the business leaders McChrystal and Fussell interact with are already fatigued – faced with constant decision-making, employee and customer questions and radical changes within their businesses.
Nevertheless, they cannot afford to wait the situation out and must tackle both operational issues in the business along with the human issues – the risk of social isolation among staff and the impact of COVID-19 on them personally.
Now is not the time to hunker down, they contend. Candour and frequent contact are the order of the day.
McChrystal and Fussell embraced regular videoconferencing in the field and say business leaders and managers must do likewise.
They concede it might not come naturally – it is harder to pick up non-verbal signals or deliver nuanced messages – but these are skills that must be honed and regular contact via these means must become habitual. “You can and must learn these skills, but it will take focus and effort. If you embrace it, you can form a new and stronger culture.”
Effective delegation is also crucial – and there is good news to be derived from Harvard Business School research into businesses that recovered well following past recessions.
Researchers found that dispersed, decentralised organisations actually performed better in a crisis because when decision-making is delegated away from a central hierarchy, managers and team members are better able to adapt to changing conditions and information on the ground.
Clear communication on overarching goals will be crucial – as will trust.
And what about the potential for shortened time spans on projects and targets? In the current climate, businesses must prioritise agility over detail.
Leaders and managers redrawing the parameters will need a pragmatic approach. If your operational reality is a drastically shorter time frame, there may be parts of normal procedure that will have to be set aside.
In treasury language, dynamic balance – the sharing of responsibility between the centre and subsidiaries via continuous dialogue – will be important here.
By the time this article appears online, a cohort new to remote working will be growing acclimatised, adjusting to the reporting lines and dynamics you have established. But the learning journey will be far from over.
Many colleagues will increasingly miss the social interaction that work brings. Finding ways to humanise contact and restore that social interaction as far as possible will be important.
To be blunt, leaders and managers should make time to chat – and will need to bear in mind as well that some colleagues will adjust to the new way of working better than others. Silence from a remote co-worker may not be a sign of industry. It might indicate a personal crisis.
Research demonstrates that over time, individuals who spend more and more time online can show signs of diminishing levels of inhibition. Social conventions online are different to day-to-day and face-to-face interactions.
It is possible for people to become increasingly informal and potentially unkind. Teams should set their standards on these issues from the outset, stick to those standards and be ready to weed out less courteous communication.
And the human element of home working amid potentially worsening conditions should not be underestimated.
Colleagues may be grappling with anxiety about vulnerable relatives or dealing with the practicalities of having school-age children at home.
The pandemic is a situation that hits us personally as well as professionally, something all of us need to bear in mind.
Another hallmark of today’s situation is that it is very hard to quantify how long the pandemic will take to run its course and what the long-term impacts will be. The COVID-19 recession is already here.
The expression ‘behavioural fatigue’ surfaced recently as the UK government’s rationale for not introducing social distancing too early and it is a notion that does have a basis in psychology. Research shows that the longer we have to maintain new more rigorous patterns of behaviour, the more difficult that becomes.
It’s an idea that can be applied to persisting and maintaining high standards while remote working as well.
Once again, leaders will find themselves in the frame. The longer they can visibly meet and even exceed their commitments, the more their teams will be encouraged to do their best also.
Nevertheless, we’d do well to remember that if everyone is to operate well and exist as human beings under these conditions, it will take more than grit and a few good role models.
Making space for colleagues to step back and restore themselves will be crucial as will understanding the realities of team workers’ home lives.
We are currently living Kahler’s ‘be strong’ behavioural driver.
Being strong, however, can’t be maintained 24/7 and doesn’t mean we won’t need to take time out.
Liz Loxton is editor of The Treasurer
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Amanda Bradley and Doug Williamson for their contributions
This article was taken from the April/May 2020 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership