The Wall Street Journal - 28.03.2020 - 29.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 |C5

When

theoffice

moves

home,

thelines

between

thetwo

blur,

asdo

standard

ideasof

hierarchy

and

control.

tinue to commute will face less

traffic and more often get a

seat on the train or bus.

Everyone will remember

how their boss responded dur-

ing this time. Did they check

in frequently? Did they focus

on you at a human level? Did

they communicate directly and

honestly and give people time

to voice their concerns? Did

they share information or try

to hide it?

Ultimately, it may be our

ability to upend hierarchical re-

sponsibility that gets us

through this crisis. It’s not only

leaders who need to step up

with compassion and candor. If

the boss is letting stress get

the best of them, take a mo-

ment to see them as a human

being, stressed like you. Check

in, show that you care and then

push yourself to take a risk: Ex-

plain why their behavior is

counterproductive.

We all need to take respon-

sibility as leaders. If we con-

duct every interaction during

this crisis with all the compas-

sion and honesty we can mus-

ter, our work lives can emerge

from it changed for the better.

Ms. Scott is a workplace con-

sultant and the author of “Rad-

ical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss

Without Losing Your Humanity.” JAMES YANG

WARREN BUFFETT ONCE NOTEDthat

“only when the tide goes out do you dis-

cover who’s been swimming naked.”

When it comes to emergency manage-

ment and public health, the tide is out,

and the federal government has been

caught with its pants down. For decades,

we’ve failed to invest sufficiently in the

nation’s public health system, but the cri-

sis we face today will not be one-of-a-

kind. If we’re going to make sure that fu-

ture pandemics do not automatically

precipitate an economic depression,

Washington is going to have to step up.

In recent weeks, state and local author-

ities have filled some of the void in the

face of federal dysfunction. Beyond the

first responders, doctors, nurses and

other hospital employees

on the front lines, the he-

roes of this crisis have been

focused, energetic execu-

tives such as Mayor Eric

Garcetti of Los Angeles and

Governors Andrew Cuomo

(New York), Mike DeWine

(Ohio), J.B. Pritzker (Illi-

nois) and Gretchen Whit-

mer (Michigan).

But there’s no substitute

for federal leadership, as we’ve seen in

past crises. FEMA’s botched response to

Hurricane Andrew in 1992 spurred change

in Washington. A year later, President Bill

Clinton appointed James Lee Witt as

FEMA director, and he led quick and ef-

fective responses to disasters time and

again. And in 2010, in dealing with the

Deepwater Horizon disaster, President Ba-

rack Obama was determined to provide a

counterpoint to the inept federal response

to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Though mayors and governors can do

a lot, national crises and challenges ulti-

mately need national solutions. States

shouldn’t be bidding against one another

for masks and ventilators as they are to-

day—the federal government should be

the clearing house. State bureaucracies

should not be forced to keep an eye on

diseases spreading from China or other

parts of the world—that should be up to

the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-

vention and the National Security Council.

States can’t fund research for medical

treatments at the scale made possible by

the National Institutes of Health. And on

and on.

Washington’s failure today is just a

more extreme example of the dynamic

that has emerged as a feature of life in

the nation’s cities and states: Too often,

the federal government simply doesn’t

show up.

In Chicago, we made community college

free without any help from Washington, but

that wasn’t because we didn’t want to work

with the federal Department of Education.

They just had nothing to offer. We would

have gladly accepted the fed-

eral Department of Trans-

portation’s help in expanding

O’Hare, our largest airport,

but we couldn’t wait for the

federal bureaucracy to get its

act together.

Partisanship aside, the

frustration with Washington

is substantive, persistent and

real. State and local leaders

have taken the lead out of

necessity, not just opportunity. We’d rather

have a federal partner on any initiative.

No matter who takes the oath of office

next January, I expect the next administra-

tion will invest more money and attention

in the agencies that partner with state and

local government to address a host of cri-

ses. H1N1, SARS, Ebola—health challenges

have become a steady drumbeat that, with

climate change and globalization, will accel-

erate. Good on state and local leaders for

stepping up, but Washington’s role remains

indispensable in meeting the challenges of

tomorrow.

Mr. Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago

from 2011 to 2019, is the author of “The

Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Run-

ning the World.”

National

challenges

ultimately

need

national

solutions.

It’sTimefor

WashingtontoStepUp

Connect and Connect

And Connect

REVIEW | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

ANDY MARTIN JR./ZUMA PRESS WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

THOSE OF US LUCKYenough

to be able to work from home

during the Covid-19 crisis are

getting a crash course in how

we can come together to do

our jobs while remaining physi-

cally distant. The experience is

giving us a glimpse of the work

life of the future, which may be

one of the more positive devel-

opments to emerge from to-

day’s trauma.

On a videoconference while

sheltering in place, we can no

longer pretend that there are

sharp boundaries between

home and work. Kids, pets, im-

possibly messy or neat rooms,

and other clues emerge in the

margins of our screens. Manag-

ers are now seeing their em-

ployees with a fullness they’ve

never experienced before. Em-

ployees are seeing their bosses’

living rooms. This new visibil-

BYKIMSCOTT

BYRAHMEMANUEL

There’s no substitute for federal leadership and

resources in dealing with disasters.

ity will change the way that we

manage and are managed.

A check-in on how people

are doing at the beginning of a

staff meeting reveals a lot.

Some people are struggling to

educate and entertain their

children, others are caring for

aging parents in distant cities,

others are feeling isolated,

stuck at home alone. It’s hard

not to care more about people

when you know these things.

That compassion can help us to

get through this crisis and

should last beyond it.

But love is not all we need;

we also need truth. As the

economy falters, teams that

are honest with each other

about what they can and can’t

do, what the priorities and

limits must be, are most likely

communication tools: If you

want your team to learn some-

thing from an informational

video, email it around. But if

fostering social connection is

your primary goal, use syn-

chronous communication:

Stream that video to the team,

ask everyone to watch it to-

gether and then chat about it.

What we are learning about

remote work will open up new

opportunities for work-life bal-

ance. Most parents are discov-

ering that their work produc-

tivity has dropped, but they’re

getting a dramatic boost in in-

timacy. When the virus is van-

quished, many will want to

keep working remotely, enjoy-

ing the better use to which

they’re putting time once spent

on commuting. Those who con-

to endure the crisis and pre-

vail. Successful management

will focus more on compassion

and candor, less on command

and control.

By the time we emerge from

our homes, we also will have

learned which technologies are

best for different purposes.

Many tasks can be done most

efficiently using asynchronous

Successful

management

will

focus more

on candor

and

compassion.

Workplaces

Attuned to

The Humanity

Of Workers

I WENT FOR A LONG BIKE RIDEthe other

day. Social distancing, of course. I needed to

get out and clear my head. The sun was out,

daffodils were emerging along the riverside

bike path, dogwood trees were in bloom,

and at one point I thought to myself, “Yeah,

life goes on.”

Pretty corny, and maybe even a bit self-

ish given what so many people are going

through. But maintaining the basic rhythms

of life that remain available can give one a

sense of resilience.

I ask myself, is there something we can

learn from this, something that will allow us

to better weather the next crisis, some dif-

ferent way of being that

might make us stronger? Is

this an opportunity to change

our thinking, our behavior?

Are we capable of doing that?

My show “American Uto-

pia” finished its initial Broad-

way run, as it turned out, just

a few weeks before the the-

ater and all the theaters on

Broadway were ordered to

close. The idea behind the

show had been to present my band and me

coming together as one, as evidence—to

both myself and the audience—that we hu-

mans can forge similar connections in ev-

eryday life. My hope was that seeing our

collaboration take shape, even on a modest

scale, would help the audience to imagine a

world in which these kinds of connections

take shape just as naturally.

In its own terrible way, the virus is show-

ing us something similar about how intri-

cately we are connected. It’s revealing the

many ways that our lives intersect almost

without our noticing. It’s also showing us

just how tenuous our existence becomes

when we try to abandon those connections

and distance ourselves from one another.

Health care, housing, race, inequality, the

climate—we’re all in the same leaky boat.

When I look around, however, I

see places showing us how the

same connections that allow a vi-

rus to spread across the world can

also be used to help us survive it.

Vò, the Italian city which had that country’s

first coronavirus death, did something re-

markable. Absolutely everyone in the town

of 3,300 people was tested, and 89 of the

tests came back positive. Then, after a nine-

day period of town-wide isolation, only a

handful of people tested positive, and since

then, the town has become virus-free. In

Singapore and Taiwan, if you test positive,

everyone you’ve been in contact with re-

cently can be tracked and quarantined.

These interventions have been effective,

but there was a price. Freedoms were cur-

tailed, as they have been, to some degree, in

virtually every place that has contained the

virus. In some of these places, surveillance

cameras and contact-tracking teams were

used, and people have shown

a willingness to share infor-

mation with authorities and

do what is necessary for the

greater good.

Some might find these

measures intrusive. But the

outcome they led to—thatis

freedom. To be able to return

to one’s life, with a job,

healthy and safe—thatis na-

tional security. When you’re

stuck in your house, as I am, you realize

that surrendering some individual freedoms

so that others might remain healthy and

safe is another way of connecting. You see

that we’re not a bucket of crabs, we’re a

community.

During the Depression, new policies to

protect the public were introduced, and it

was accepted that these were necessary to

stabilize society and get life back on track.

What is happening now is a similar oppor-

tunity to change our behavior.

For many of us, our belief in the value of

the collective good has eroded in recent de-

cades. But in an emergency, entrenched be-

liefs can change. Citizens cooperate and col-

laborate. Here is an opportunity to see that

we really are all connected—and adjust our

behavior accordingly.

Mr. Byrne, a former member of

the bandTalking Heads,isthe

founder of the online magazine

‘’Reasons to Be Cheerful.”

I ask myself,

is this an

opportunity

to change

our

thinking?

The virus is showing us just how tenuous our existence

becomes when we distance ourselves from one another.

BYDAVIDBYRNE

David Byrne

on his

‘American

Utopia’ tour.