There are wartime leaders and peacetime leaders.
A Curtin versus a Whitlam. A Julius Caesar versus an Augustus.
Wartime leaders appear to need a high degree of organisation, cooperation and appeasement. Peacetime leaders appear to need mildness and a sense of clemency. (Source: Sapiens by Yuval Harari)
During the pandemic, organisations needed their equivalent of wartime leaders. These were leaders who knew how to appease, how to manipulate and to see things from different perspectives. (Despite common belief, the brutish personae rarely win wars.)
With the pandemic subsiding and (nervously) ignoring the invasion of Ukraine, your company is probably now in peacetime recovery mode. It’s time for the wartime leader to withdraw; allow the new leader to establish the protocols that were violated and redistribute the detailed decision-making back to the base. They will re-establish the culture and seek buy-in to the agreed strategies of growth.
Consensus wasn’t part of fighting a war, now it is again.