You Ask, I Answer: Pandemic Lessons for Leaders? (TD Q&A)

How do you think the pandemic has impacted leaders' ability to make effective decisions? What has changed for the better since the pandemic is anything that has set leaders back? Ah, well, without getting on a whole uh rant, the pandemic illustrated two things in stark clarity. First, anytime someone is emotionally invested in a decision, they are incapable of making a data-driven decision. The data around the pandemic from January of 2020, which is when I first started paying attention to it, suggested that you should wear the best mask possible, that this disease was highly contagious, and that you should be reducing and mitigating your exposure to it.

And so wearing N95 or better masks uh everywhere you went. I wear a P100, uh, which is like this. Even today, with uh restrictions being lifted, I still wear this out in public. I still don't dine in restaurants because it's not over. The data suggests that it's not.

Uh as of the time of recording this, the uh Omicron BA2 variant is uh resurgent and is uh showing up in substantial waves in Europe and Asia. And so what we saw, what we continue to see is that people's emotions make them incapable of following the data, of listening to the data. You know, we saw substantial amounts of resistance to wearing masks and to getting vaccinated, even though the data for both cases was unquestionable, unimpeachable. High quality masks reduce transmission spread, high quality masks uh reduce or almost completely eliminate risk of uh catching the disease as long as they're properly worn. Vaccination and boosters uh substantially reduce like to 99% uh reduction in the chance of hospitalization or death.

And yet millions, millions of people were incapable of making a data-driven decision, regardless of what the talking heads in the media and stuff like that. People who have actual expertise, doctors, um, presented data in the form of clinical trials that clearly proved these positions of wearing a mask and getting vaccinated were logical, data-driven, well-founded, and have now have probably the largest uh pool of data ever for a single disease in human history, with you know billions of doses of vaccines administered, and they're highly effective. And yet we still have people who are unable to make effective decisions because their emotional investment in their point of view clouds their ability to make those decisions. And this is something that again, this has always been there, but the pandemic has truly amplified just how vulnerable people are to their emotional ties to illogical positions. What has changed for the better is in many ways you've been able to identify and highlight and see people who can make good decisions with data, even if they personally are not emotionally happy with those decisions.

Like not eating out in restaurants, right? That is something that a lot of people take a lot of joy in. And a number of people, you know, 60 or somewhat percent of the population did make positive data-driven decisions, knowing the the available data was factually true. And so they made those changes. And so as we talk to people, as we um discuss how people handled the pandemic and the decisions that they made, we get a we get insight into how data-driven are they.

Again, we're not talking about politics, we're not talking about um opinion. We're talking about you were presented with clear, unimpeachable data, did you act on it appropriately? Right? And people who did take that data and make appropriate, effective decisions, those are people we should be hiring. Uh, people who didn't, who resisted strongly in the face of very sound data.

I would not put those people in positions where in any kind of an organization which was data-driven, uh, because they're going to make bad decisions. In terms of what has set leaders back, uh, the great resignation is a side consequence of uh the pandemic, when a lot of people who uh through various payroll protection programs and unemployment benefits, particularly in the United States of America, but especially in other nations uh with uh more robust social programs like many social democracies in Europe, a lot of people who had jobs when there were layoffs and stuff, had time and breathing room because of the uh social support, the uh the the financial assistance to look at their lives and go, is this something I really want to be doing? And a lot of people discovered no, it's actually not. Uh, I can count on uh several hands the number of people in my profession in marketing who they were senior executives and now they're like yoga teachers and dance instructors and and herbal medicine folks and all kinds of careers that are would not be on on a a corporate org chart, right? To go from senior vice president of marketing to uh yoga instructor is a big change, but they had the time and the bandwidth to consider this is something that they would rather do instead that makes them more happy, more emotionally fulfilled.

A lot of leaders and a lot of organizations found out the very hard way that their workplace cultures and habits and things aren't particularly happy places, aren't particularly places where people find fulfillment um or joy, and as a result, those organizations have suffered mightily uh in trying to hire people. They've had to increase wages, and even in for organizations that have increased wages sometimes substantially, they're still not seeing as much traction because a lot of people just don't like those jobs, right? So there are opportunities for uh other organizations to come in and do things like add automation and stuff to try and backfill some of the tasks that uh those individuals did. But fundamentally, we're talking about a massive realignment and what people believe makes them happy. Um, and that has set many leaders and many organizations back substantially, a loss of institutional knowledge, uh, way, especially when organizations did layoffs, they did layoffs of people who had, you know, substantial uh paychecks, and those substantial paychecks often come with a lot of institutional knowledge that gets lost along the way uh and can't be reclaimed because those people aren't even in the same profession anymore.

You know, uh you're not gonna call the yoga studio and say, Oh, by the way, on your next break, could you tell us um what the contents of our CDP are? Because nobody on the is left on that team, and the yoga instructor's gonna say, nope. So the pandemic changed society very substantially, and there are, as with any kind of massive dislocation, uh opportunities to be found, there are dangers, and there are things that leaders have not fully recognized have happened um and need to quickly because their businesses will suffer otherwise.