Dr Terri Simpkin, Programme Director of the University’s Executive MBA Senior Leadership Degree Apprenticeship, is chairing a free webinar on Leadership: Toward a post-pandemic ‘business as usual’ on Tuesday 5th May. She will be joined by representatives from a wide range of industry sectors and business sizes to explore emerging thinking on how leaders might begin to leverage plans for the future while responding to immediate, unpredictable and possibly transformative business circumstances. 

“While the desperate human consequences of this catastrophe unfold across world borders, the business community must reimagine the economic, leadership and organisational landscape of a new ‘business as usual’,” Dr Simpkin said. “For those at the heart of the UK business landscape – and especially those working in leadership roles, managing people and processes through the current pandemic and beyond – there is actually very little support to help business leaders understand how they can leverage capacity, learning and insight from the past and imagine it for a post-pandemic epoch.”

Dr Simpkin will highlight McKinsey’s ‘5Rs’ or stages toward the new normal: resolve, resilience, return, re-imagination and reform. “The Covid-19 pandemic provides us with one of those rare moments in time to shift focus and view leadership differently, to see how the prevailing character of leadership of the past will not serve us through this crisis nor, indeed, into a different ‘normal’,” she said. “Much like looking into a kaleidoscope, leadership at first looks like any number of disparate bits of colour and shape that shift about in relation to each other. Then, almost by magic, the context shifts, and they coalesce into a totally new complex pattern that exists only because all the component parts drop into alignment. Our webinar will give leaders some practical tools for leading in the current crisis, making sense of the uncertainty and taking a proactive role in response.”

To register for the free Leadership: Toward a post-pandemic ‘business as usual’ webinar on Tuesday 5th May (2-3pm) visit here.