Chris Lowe, Senior Director of Corporate Affairs at Asda talks to Daisy about what happens at a supermarket when a global pandemic hits, how Covid has changed his relationships with MPs, and the innovations he'll be keeping when the pandemic is over.

Key takeaways include: 

• First, be realistic. In many situations the chances of your organization pleasing 100% of your stakeholders may be zero. So how else can you judge success? Are there better indicators that you can use to understand performance?  
• Second, be wary of the signals you are sending. As Asda improved its Covid security, MPs and civil servants began to assume that they were relaxing the rules. This shows how important it is to look out for hints of the proxy measures that your stakeholders use to assess your performance – something that you should be picking up in stakeholder audits but you will also need to be attentive to in your everyday conversations.
• Third: Be thoughtful about how you deploy your team. Chris told us that if he could repeat 2020 he would be faster to draft in support from other areas of the business in order to safeguard the wellbeing of his team. 
• Finally, we could all do with remembering Chris’ exhortation to pick up the phone – it really can make all of the difference.

Find all of our episodes - and full transcripts for each one - at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1121639