In March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, Fergus Williams, CEO of Walking with the Wounded, had to make a critical decision on how to best serve the veterans who relied on the organization’s services. At that point, the organization had assisted more than 15,000 veterans with such services as mental health and self-care, employment, and volunteerism.
Williams worried about how the company would survive, and how it could continue to provide the same level of service. Since he runs Walking with the Wounded with a “clients first” philosophy, he and his board chairman had to develop a way to provide such services – remotely – to thousands of veterans.
“They are going to be in more crisis, more stress, more vulnerable than they were yesterday because of COVID, and we looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t, we must be … focused on our core values client first,’” Williams recalled. “Clearly, it was an online proposition, and we set off to be part of the national solution orbit just supporting our cohort of veterans. But effectively, we told everybody, ‘Get on the telephone [and make] hundred calls a day. Go and speak to our veterans, and just say it’ll be fine.’”
Williams’ team made 10,000 calls a week, which helped Walking with the Wounded provide its greatly needed services. His deeply rooted belief in service helped him lead the organization through those uncertain times. The organization has returned to its in-person services, but also now offers remote services.
“I mean to be fair,” Williams says. “It’s easier online but actually the quality of the impact that you’re having on that individual’s life is less, and that is our experience that actual face-to-face still works for the most vulnerable, [and] we must still engage with them because it’s about buying their loyalty. It’s buying their trust to be able to then deliver the solutions or the support to make their lives better.”
The pivot Williams made during COVID-19 exemplifies his on-going goal as a leader to develop a culture where he can always get the best out of his team members. He takes time to read so that he can find nuggets of inspiration and ideas to lead. When COVID-19 hit, Williams admitted he and his team members would spend too much time watching daytime TV. He realized that “there were elements of a rather luddite management system where people were monitored by their timeliness, and how high they strike their keyboard.”
Williams had a revelation after reading more deeply about “OKRs” – objectives and key results – to better understand how to manage people remotely. “You know it’s basic stuff,” Williams says. “It’s about setting them a goal, and then being able to track that goal and not worrying about all the ancillary stuff. And now, we do it naturally. And for me that was one of those nuggets that I took away and thought, ‘How are we going to manage our people better in this new environment?’ And now we’re pretty much all remote.”
As someone who grew up in a military family and served as well, Williams learned the values of leadership during his early days at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He began to embrace the important value of “serve to lead,” accepting that service is a privilege of leadership. The second most important aspect is “mission command,” a very militaristic term that says you can be told to do anything, and you must learn from failure. “As long as you don’t fail doing the same thing twice,” Williams explains.
One of Williams’ other key elements of leadership is humility. “I think you know humility is important,” Williams says. “It’s not my way or the highway. It’s about listening to other people’s point of view and being able to pull that together.”
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