Coronavirus: Leadership and Recovery: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

 

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REAL LEADERS ARE FORGED IN CRISIS

by Nancy Koehn

We are living through a global health crisis with no modern-day precedent. What governments, corporations, hospitals, schools, and other organizations need now, more than ever, are what the writer David Foster Wallace called “real leaders”—people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

I have studied courageous crisis leaders for two decades, and through this work I know that real leaders are not born; the ability to help others triumph over adversity is not written into their genetic code. They are, instead, made. They are forged in crisis. ...