Optimising your Leadership Team – Upskilling for the Crisis

Across the globe, organisations are facing unprecedented and unimagined disruption due to the coronavirus pandemic, creating a range of challenges that require immediate attention.

How best should businesses look to address these additional challenges?  Whilst it is possible that leadership teams already in place have the skills required to manage the situation, adding further to the workload of such teams can put significant stress on an already overstretched resource.  Placing executive team members at the helm of a crisis response project can solve the problem in the short term, but long term creates the need for backfilling of their existing role.

So what is the solution to managing crisis-related projects in order to secure the survival of the business in which you operate, without overstretching your current executive team?

The coronavirus crisis is on a scale unlike anything many leaders have dealt with in their careers, and can rapidly overwhelm those used to operating in more ‘business-as-usual’ situations.  Additional skills are likely to be required in order to deal with reduced supply and demand, workforce challenges, and vastly reduced income.

At Livingston James, we regularly second senior interim executives into businesses to manage additional project workload.  This approach is ideally suited to increasing the capacity and skills portfolio of an organisation’s executive team in a crisis situation.

Introducing senior interim professionals can assist businesses with situations such as:

• Managing increases in remote working by providing additional support to the CIO
• Reducing pressures on HR and protecting internal relationships by taking ownership of downsizing/furloughing of staff, and assisting with the support of the virtual workforce, including virtually on-boarding new hires
• Supporting the CEO/CFO with business remodelling and cashflow/liquidity management
• Supporting the CEO/CFO with management of supply chain and procurement issues

Livingston James has a network of senior interim finance, technology, procurement and supply chain, and HR professionals available to strengthen your existing team during the crisis.

For a confidential discussion on how we can support your business at this time, please contact [email protected].