Abstract:

This article examines the role of strategic leadership in crisis management. Unfortunately, no enterprise is 100% immune to crisis. Each is vulnerable and at risk of shutting down if left without prompt and quick reaction to change. Currently, the first thing that comes to mind when discussing crisis is the Covid 19 pandemic. While all surviving enterprises are still trying to cope with the pandemic effects, Lebanon is facing another type of crisis, a non-anticipated financial calamity. It blew up in October 2019 and which after-effects are still popping out a day after another, riskier and more disastrous. This article was feasible because it was based on two types of data. In the first part, the concept of crisis, strategic leadership, and crisis management were briefly explained depending on secondary data, mainly extracted from articles and research papers online. In order to detect the strategic leaders’ acts in crisis time, primary data was needed. The selected approach was quantitative. Data was collected through a survey conducted with a sample of twenty-seven Lebanese managers of skin care and cosmetic product physical and online shops during March 2021. The results of this study were evaluated using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). This sector was specifically selected due to many reasons. First, it is based on selling non-necessity products, which are not clients’ primary needs. Therefore, in time of lockdown and financial crisis, one can assume that this range of products would not sell. However, the contrary was observed: somehow, in the heart of the crisis, these enterprises are still operating and surviving. This raised the importance of the strategic leadership’s effect on containing the crisis. They were asked about their strategic role in this hard time, notably when instilling a long term organization vision of growth, identifying, conserving, and diversifying the firm’s core competencies, improving and developing human capital, and supervising the strategy execution process, adjusting and improving it.