How has the pandemic affected leadership skills around the world?
It’s a question that I asked myself recently and I was not talking about the political parties either!
Here at MTD Training we not only offer paid for Management Training assessments like 360 Feedback and DISC Assessments but we also run an ongoing and free leadership assessment that is open to managers from all different countries, backgrounds and industries.
96 different leadership skills are benchmarked within the assessment and all managers receive a personalised report of their findings.
So I asked my team to access our database and to separate out the leadership assessments taken during the COVID months of 1st March 2020 to 31st August 2021.
I also asked them to take any data that we had prior to the pandemic to compare and contrast leadership skills pre COVID and today.
Highlights
Survey Results Menu
During the pandemic months 4,762 managers completed the leadership assessment and the year before that, 1,442 managers had completed the same. Below are the overall average scores out of 100 for both groups.
You’ll notice that there was a decrease in leadership scores of 1.3%.
Below illustrates the reduction of 1.3% in scores pre-pandemic and during the pandemic months measured.
Observations
Within each leadership assessment were several questions around what the manager was doing during the past 4 weeks. We drill home in our Leadership Development Training programmes the need to be consistent and that it’s what the leader does daily that counts.
We wanted to know whether they were demonstrating successful leadership behaviours in that moment. All of these questions were related to the previous 4 weeks.
?
Have you been acting
as a role model?
?
Have you been
coaching not telling?
?
Have you been seeking the views
from your people?
?
Have you been
communicating regularly?
?
Have you offered support
to your people?
?
Have you held regular
121’s with your staff?
?
Have you praised your
people regularly?
?
Have your meetings been
focused and productive?
Were managers foregoing their management and leadership duties due to the pandemic?
Did they even have the opportunity to lead effectively with so much furlough, redundancies, mental health, home working, staffing level challenges and so on?
A reduction of 2.9% is significant in scores.
If you couple that with the observations from the section above where managers also had a reduction in the quality of their decision-making skills of -2.4% you could potentially look at the fact that a lot of managers were probably “doing the do” and moving into crisis mode.
One alternative is that they did not have clear leadership and guidance themselves. After all, we were all making it up during the pandemic, weren’t we?
How did COVID impact leadership skills in different industries?
We know that the hospitality industry got hit massively in terms of the lockdown restrictions but did the managers working in this sector see a dip in their leadership skills or did they improve because of the circumstances?
Below is an analysis of the various industries of the leaders that took the leadership assessment.
Observations
Minimum leaders surveyed = 80.
Observations
During the pandemic months 938 managers from the UK completed the leadership assessment and the year before that, 742 managers had completed the same. Below are the overall average scores out of 100 for both groups.
You’ll notice that there was a decrease in leadership scores of 1.5%.
Below illustrates the reduction of 1.5% in scores pre-pandemic and during the pandemic months measured.
Observations
Observations
Observations
Which industries came out on top in terms of scores during the pandemic months?
Below is an analysis of the various industries of the leaders that took the leadership assessment.
Minimum assessments taken = 20
Observations
We took the difference in scores pre v during pandemic for the UK and the rest of the world to see if the UK had taken a bigger hit.
The answer was yes!
In 9 of the 11 areas benchmarked the leadership skills within the UK took the biggest hit during COVID
Within each leadership assessment were a number of questions around what the manager was doing during the past 4 weeks.
We wanted to know whether they were demonstrating successful leadership behaviours in that moment. All of these questions were related to the previous 4 weeks.
?
Have you been acting
as a role model?
?
Have you been
coaching not telling?
?
Have you been seeking the views
from your people?
?
Have you been
communicating regularly?
?
Have you offered
support to your people?
?
Have you held regular
121’s with your staff?
?
Have you praised
your people regularly?
?
Have your meetings been
focused and productive?
DURING THE PANDEMIC
We all love a Brexit comparison, don’t we?
So how did the UK’s managers fair against their European counterparts?
Overall, Europe outscored the UK in 10 of the 11 areas measured and had an overall higher score of +1.5%
Observations
Let’s compare how the UK & Europe combined, faired against the USA in our very own Ryder Cup!
Overall the USA had a higher score of +1.9%
Observations
Additional Information
Please feel free to use any of the research gathered within this survey. You do not need to seek permission to use any of the tables or images contained within this research. All we ask is that you cite the source and link back to this article for completeness and context. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask us.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your management and leadership skills then please check out our article on what makes a good team leader and also the top management skills you need to be successful. Our Management Skills Training and Management Development Programmes can also help you. Each will provide you with the skills and behaviours you need to take your game to the next level.
Thanks again,
Sean
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Training
Updated on: 22 September, 2021
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