Leading During And Through The Time Of Crisis

Shailendra Jha
Selection & Recruitment Director,
Teach for Nepal
This session was conducted on Friday, 10th April from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Shailendra Ji is the recruitment officer at Teach For Nepal (TFN). The topic of discussion was ‘Leading during and through the time of Crisis’. There were around 80 participants at the peak.

Shailendra Ji started the session interactively by asking people their view on a panic situation depicted by the image of ‘titanic’ tragedy and elaborated how people would respond during crisis situations. He shared his opinion that limited resources and uncertainty creates panic situations.

He mainly focused on discussing three types of personality during a crisis. There were people who would help others out of humanity, people who would learn something new and improve themselves, people who search for benefits and business opportunities and people who panic and create more crises in their lives. These traits were collectively assorted to three personality types:

Proactive- People who were ready for the crisis and were actively working to mitigate its effects even before the crisis happened. The example of Gates and Melinda Foundation was shown about how they predicted a contagious disease outbreak.
Active- People who during the crisis are actively looking for ways to mitigate the damages and to improve themselves.
Reactive- People who react only after the severe situation occurred and are now trying to downplay its effects.
The speaker shared various information and ideas about how people are dealing with the crisis all around the world. Some of his sharings were:

Online learning opportunity.
Government initiation for COVID-19 Monitor website and food and supply management.
Teach for Nepal initiation for reaching remote students virtually.
Leading personal and professional life.
Likewise, at the end of his presentation he shared some of the good practices to be followed to keep us active such as leveraging technology, adapting to the new working culture of work from home, bringing personal dimension in professional engagements and so on.

The audience were very responsive and provided their feedback sharing how they are utilizing this pandemic situation. There were some queries as well and the discussion was highly interactive. This session provided the audience a great learning opportunity and ideas to be active rather than reactive.

By Niraj Aryal & Sumina Pradhan
Niraj is the Program Associate of Skill Lab and a BBA 7th Semester student at Boston International College.

Sumina is the Program Assistant at BIC Startups, and a MBA 3rd Trimester at Boston International College.