Finally, be more compassionate than you think you need to be. As your organization disperses to remote-work status, the loss of personal interactions will quickly sink in. It will be easy for leaders to overlook or undervalue the fear and stress their people are feeling because of this isolation. All of us learn by watching our teammates, and we gain confidence through informal feedback from our colleagues or bosses. Your organization has lost that person-to-person contact. You must immediately take your culture online, and learn to reinforce camaraderie, esteem, and compassion, via digital platforms.

We know how hard this is: We’ve been there. Fifteen years ago, in the throes of our fight against Al Qaeda, the Joint Special Operations Command, where both of us served, needed to do this exact thing. We pivoted from being a centrally located, thousands-strong enterprise to a network of small teams spread around the world.

“Digital leadership” was not in the job description for our generation, but it became a critical skill for all of us to learn in the fast-moving and constantly changing fight. At the height of the Iraq war, though units and leaders moved constantly across the battlefield, a vast majority of our interactions were by videoconference. We became the military’s ultimate remote-work force.

The most important of those digital forums among our 25,000-person enterprise was a daily, 90-minute video call where more than 7,000 members of our command across all the time zones “met” to discuss our efforts. The effectiveness of our leaders depended not upon wisdom or charisma, but on a willingness to leverage somewhat awkward video and other digital media to connect, listen, learn and inspire a team, most of whom would never be in the same room with one another.

We lived on that cadence for many years straight, staring into cameras the majority of the day. Now leaders everywhere need to follow suit. In the near term, it will make everything more cumbersome — it’s harder to express sympathy through a computer screen, harder to deliver nuanced criticism when not in person, harder to read tone and body language. You can and must learn these skills, but it will take focus and effort. If you embrace it, you can form a new and stronger culture.

After a year into what we’d been calling “temporary” adjustments, we stopped talking about getting back to the old way of business. That Special Operations Task Force, the world’s best counterterrorism organization, is now on its fifth generation of digital leadership, and it is more capable and cohesive than we would have ever imagined possible. Accept that some of these changes are more than a temporary inconvenience, believe in yourself and your people, show confidence in your organization’s ability to adapt, and you will come through this crisis stronger than might seem possible today.

We are now weathering a once-in-a-hundred-year event, and Americans are hurt — physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Leaders at all levels in society need to embrace the changes this crisis brings rather than struggle against it. Your people need you. This is your moment, and you can rise to it.

Stanley McChrystal is a former Army general and the founder of the McChrystal Group. Chris Fussell is a former Navy SEAL and the president of the McChrystal Group.

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