Top 5 CEO Mistakes During COVID-19

1. Acting crazy. You can under react by taking a long trip down that river in Egypt, DENIAL. While some minority of leaders have not seen a significant impact from the crisis, most of us are dealing with big changes and stress. You can also over react by panicking and catastrophizing about every bad thing that could possibly happen. Use your support system of advisors to avoid getting stuck in either of these "crazy" thinking patterns.

2. Ignoring the 4 major sources of happiness and motivation. If you fall prey to the mistake of underestimating the huge impact happiness and motivation play in your mental health and in business performance, now is a really good time to remedy that because they're more important than ever in a stressful situation such as this one. Refresher: a caring relationship with yourself (good physical and mental health), caring relationships with others, work you love doing, and enough money to pay your bills with some left over for fun.

3. Using hope as a plan. My mentor Stephen Haines said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." Gather your team and use the steps in your strategic planning process to gather the best data you can, evaluate the pros and cons of potential options, and then create a focused and realistic action plan. It doesn't get any better than that.

4. Disregarding communication and teamwork. In the absence of real data people inevitably will insert their worst fears. Gather the best data available and update your team, your customers, and your vendors regularly. Don't leave the situation ambiguous for fears to thrive, create bad decisions, and derail business performance.

5. Not worrying about money. No brainer, right? While it's true that you can't save yourself to success in the long run, it's even more true in the short run that if you run out of cash your business is done. Keep a closer eye than usual on cash flow and cash reserves. If you have to cut staff, keep a smaller team of A Players rather than a larger team of mixed performers. Those A Players will be instrumental in growing your business when the economy opens up again.

Copyright Terry "Doc" Dockery, Ph.D. All rights reserved.