Leading a business is challenging enough for any chief executive (CEO), but taking the reins of an organisation during the coronavirus pandemic makes it more difficult than most business challenges.
“At that level, you’ve already had a significant amount of pressure on you,” says Jane Walsh, CEO of SEEN Group, a specialist beauty agency, since November 2020. “But you usually go into a CEO role wanting to tell the business how you want to run it. Here, with furlough and other things, society was telling us how to run the business.”
Stan Pavlovsky, who became CEO of media library Shutterstock in April 2020, agrees. “Immediately we had to prepare for some seismic shifts,” he says. “You look at your business, and travel and advertising go away just overnight. Everything was cancelled, impacting our editorial coverage. Companies were scrambling and reducing their marketing budgets.” Pavlovsky recognised they needed to adjust the business.