Maria Howard

How can we rise to the challenge of COVID-19 and mitigate the professional impact of an unprecedented health crisis? It starts with executive action.

Linkage’s Chief Revenue Officer, Maria Howard shares three critical takeaways from her conversation with Sally Helgesen, international best-selling author and women’s leadership expert during a recent webinar on the advancement of women leaders in the age of COVID-19.

Out of crisis comes opportunity, and strong and effective leadership is a cornerstone of our ability to rise to a challenge—within our organizations, communities, and in our world. The commitments of Purposeful Leadership, grounded in inclusion, become even more important as we all strive to lead in a permanently changed world. We must inspire, innovate, achieve, engage and become in order to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

It’s clear that inclusion can be the accelerator to our success. So, what can we do to activate the power of inclusive leadership at our organizations? We need to put an equal emphasis on creating the cultures of inclusion necessary to support a diversified workforce. And, we must put a common behavioral language behind what inclusive leadership is in action if we are to create a new standard of leadership that serves all people in our organizations.

Leaders are thinking creatively and acting swiftly to accommodate the changing needs of their workforce, with the ultimate goal of keeping their employees and teams safe. With a new focus on working from home, leaders have a significant opportunity to quickly and meaningfully enable their teams to continue working with little or no interruption to their schedules and productivity.