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From Last to Leading: How Communication Changed a State's Response to the Global Pandemic

October 22, 2025

Two hours before the doors were scheduled to open to the public, a line had already wrapped around the building.

To a passerby, it might have looked like a holiday sale at Macy’s, but this was not a shopping rush—it was the opening day of a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination site at the Military Circle Mall, housed in the shuttered Macy’s storefront, in Norfolk, Virginia.

This was Virginia’s pandemic response reimagined. What had once been a symbol of retail decline became, almost overnight, a beacon of community resilience and public health execution. But this was not just about logistics or ingenuity, it was the product of something far less visible but infinitely more powerful: structured communication.

Only weeks earlier, Virginia had been struggling. Ranked 49th in national vaccine distribution, the state faced mounting public frustration and internal confusion. Silos dominated agency coordination. Decision-making was slow. And while every team worked hard, they rarely worked together.

What changed was not a massive influx of resources or a new software platform, it was a shift in how leaders across agencies talked, decided, and aligned.

By creating cross-functional communication forums, establishing clear cadences, and flattening hierarchies, Virginia broke down existing silos, realigned operations, and climbed from the bottom of the list to 11th place.

While the health department and emergency management already had a solid working relationship, the broader challenge was the number of disconnected initiatives across various levels of government, each trying to independently “solve” the problem without cross-agency coordination.

To move forward, Virginia had to fundamentally shift how it shared information. Everyone needed access to the same updates simultaneously to drive timely and effective decision-making. In a crisis, the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time is essential to execution.

This is the story of how structured communication became the catalyst for one of the most dramatic public health turnarounds in the U.S. and why it offers enduring lessons for senior executives managing a Team of Teams today.

How Silos Stalled Virginia’s Response

Early in the pandemic, Virginia’s public health and emergency management systems defaulted to a traditional command-and-control model. Agencies operated in parallel but rarely in sync. The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) managed vaccine logistics, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) managed support, and the Governor’s Office tried to coordinate strategy from above. But the coordination mechanisms were slow and often duplicative.

“Everyone had their own meetings, but we weren’t communicating in a shared space,” said Dr. Norm Oliver, a McChrystal Group Senior Advisor and then Health Commissioner for the state. “We had data-flow issues, policy misalignment, and frontline teams waiting on approvals.”

Curtis Brown, then State Coordinator for Emergency Management, recalled how the lack of alignment led to confusion in the field.

“We had localities unsure who was in charge, delayed logistics, and multiple truths circulating,” he said. “That eroded trust.”

Virginia’s struggles were public. Media scrutiny grew. The Governor, a physician himself, was frustrated. Behind the scenes, Chief of Staff Clark Mercer was tracking national performance data.

“We were being beaten by states that didn’t have our resources,” he said. “That was unacceptable.”

This was especially disheartening, given the commonwealth’s earlier successes in distributing personal protective equipment and streamlining COVID-19 testing statewide.

Traditional emergency management structures, designed for single-agency or incident operations, can become obstacles when crises span multiple jurisdictions, organizations, or operational domains.

Virginia’s COVID-19 response revealed a different path forward. One that prioritizes communication design over command restructuring and demonstrates that thoughtful organizational coordination can outperform additional resources or technology.

Building the Forum

The governor’s office held coordination meetings, the Virginia Emergency Operations Center (VEOC) had its scheduled meetings, and VDEM, VDH, and the local jurisdictions held internal meetings with their leadership teams. The challenge was ensuring that the right people attended the various meetings to facilitate basic coordination. The team discovered they were all working with pieces of information rather than the whole picture, and priorities varied depending on the moment, the agency, or the needs of a particular jurisdiction.

“We realized that everyone was operating from their own partial picture,” said Mercer. “So, we built a policy group that brought VDH, VDEM, the Governor’s Office, and local representatives into one room, virtually, every day.”

The state’s revised approach reveals three critical principles for effective multi-agency crisis management:

creating lateral coordination channels that enable information sharing and decision-making,
matching communication cadence to crisis demands,
and aligning decision-making to enable decentralized execution through shared priorities and frameworks.

This structure allows organizations to act quickly and independently while maintaining alignment at the enterprise level.

These principles challenge the conventional wisdom that speed and coordination are competing priorities, instead demonstrating how strategic alignment creates the foundation for both unified direction and distributed action in complex emergencies.

The Right People

The team’s next biggest hurdle was building the trust required to share the right information with the right people at the right time. This challenge surfaced almost immediately during a multi-stakeholder discussion about the timing of the data used to publish state-by-state vaccine distribution rates.

At the time, Virginia was reporting data two hours after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control pulled it for national impact statistics, meaning the commonwealth’s numbers were outdated by the time they were published.

After identifying that discrepancy, changes were quickly implemented at all levels of the Virginia COVID-19 response to improve the cadence of reporting, and the commonwealth’s ranking jumped from 49th to the high 30s.

It became clear how timely and transparent communication can impact overall operations.

The next challenge was one familiar to all organizations: the pressure to move faster. But history has shown that speed alone often leads to burnout and only marginal gains. To make meaningful and lasting change, the team needed more than urgency; it needed alignment, trust, and a shared commitment to working differently.

To enable this shift, Virginia’s leadership made a pivotal decision: they streamlined the decision-making process by consolidating fragmented efforts into one unified Policy Group.

“We identified that we needed to have one meeting with policy-level decision-makers and streamline the process for them to have the information necessary at one time to make the decisions needed for the team to move and execute,” said Mercer. “Initially, decisions were made when one or two groups approached various leaders without the full picture, or when decisions came from the Governor’s Office without the most up-to-date information.”

The Policy Group included cabinet secretaries, representatives from the Governor’s Office, external communications, and agency leaders involved in vaccine distribution. It established clear standards for how information had to be presented, ensuring leaders had what they needed to make timely, coordinated decisions.

To extend this alignment, Virginia launched a daily “communications forum” that briefed the broader operational enterprise, including representatives from all 139 health districts and emergency management offices, executive leadership, and key agencies responsible for logistics. The forum began with updates from the Policy Group, ensuring everyone had a shared understanding, before progressing to key briefings and a tightly focused Q&A.

“This required some education early on,” said Oliver. “We had to be disciplined about making the conversation productive: right information, right people, right time. But once we hit our rhythm, it unlocked everything.”

Leaders realized their people in the field had the most critical information about what wasn’t working and why. Initially, Virginia had approached vaccine distribution with a one-size-fits-all model.

“Everything was a nail, and we were the hammer,” said Brown. “But the forum changed that.”

Rural areas needed mobile vaccine clinics. Urban centers needed large mass-vax sites. Suburban communities ultimately preferred trusted providers, such as primary care doctors. The forum became the mechanism for surfacing those insights and adapting in real time.

It also exposed gaps in reaching vulnerable populations; those most likely to suffer or die from COVID-19.

“We weren’t tailoring messaging or making the vaccine accessible enough,” Oliver noted.

Through the forum, health departments and local leaders in places like Hampton Roads highlighted these disparities. That led to a new approach: door-to-door outreach and hyper-local education paired with pop-up vaccine sites.

“We didn’t win by making better plans,” said Mercer. “We won by opening up communication to the entire enterprise. We stopped asking ‘Who needs to know?’ and started asking ‘Who haven’t we told?’”

The idea for converting the shuttered Macy’s into a mass vaccination site came directly out of these structured conversations. Local officials in Hampton Roads raised the issue of vaccine access disparities in their communities. The forum enabled that insight to reach the top immediately, where decision-makers could approve and resource a solution. What might have taken weeks to navigate in the old model happened in days.

“Once that structure was in place, you could feel the change,” said Oliver. “Decisions didn’t need to go up and down five layers. The right people were in the room. The alignment was happening in real time.”

The Right Information

With data flowing from local, state, federal, private, and non-profit sources, filtering the noise was critical. Structured communication made it possible to prioritize what truly mattered. Virginia’s approach centered on:

Identifying decisions that required executive input: High-stakes decisions with political, operational, or legal implications surfaced early and were routed to the right leaders with the full context necessary to act.
Delegating operational decisions with clear guardrails: Once strategy was aligned, agencies and field teams were trusted to execute rapidly, with autonomy, but within clearly defined bounds.
Empowering teams to act quickly and confidently: By giving local leaders access to the same information as central leadership, the state reduced bottlenecks and encouraged initiative where it mattered most.

This level of coordination was only possible because communication was synchronized across the entire stakeholder group. Rather than burying data in siloed reports or filtering it through a need-to-know mindset, Virginia embraced radical transparency. Everyone in the system had access to the same intelligence and a clear understanding of the priorities, increasing not only the speed of decisions but also the precision.

“We weren’t sending orders. We were sharing priorities,” said Brown. “That’s how decentralized execution works.”

The Right Time

“The speed of relevance is faster than any command-and-control system can handle,” wrote General Stanley McChrystal in Team of Teams. “The only way to keep pace is to increase the frequency and transparency of interaction.”

Virginia’s leaders learned this lesson firsthand.

One of the most overlooked variables in organizational performance is cadence: the frequency at which teams come together to share information, make decisions, and realign.

Virginia’s leaders quickly realized that frequency had to match the volatility of the environment. Too few meetings, and the picture blurred; too many, and people drowned in updates.

“When we were in the early stages, we needed daily touchpoints. The information was moving too fast to wait a week,” said Brown. “But as things stabilized, we adjusted. Weekly forums gave space for field teams to operate.”

At the height of the crisis, daily 8:30 a.m. calls became the heartbeat of the operation, focused sessions where leaders from across agencies synchronized, flagged emerging issues, and aligned priorities. This rhythm built shared consciousness across the system, creating confidence that decisions made in one lane were understood and supported by others.

As vaccine distribution matured and operations stabilized, leadership deliberately reduced the frequency of meetings. This was not a retreat from coordination; it was a sign of maturity. The cadence evolved with input from all stakeholders, ensuring communication stayed efficient without losing momentum.

By continuously calibrating the tempo of coordination to the tempo of the environment, Virginia’s leaders preserved both speed and focus, a hallmark of an adaptive organization.

Leadership Lessons for Complex Environments

What happened in Virginia is not unique to public health. It is a microcosm of what every senior executive faces today: complexity, uncertainty, and interdependent teams.

Structured communication is the bridge between strategy and execution. It flattens hierarchies without creating chaos. It empowers teams without sacrificing alignment.

From Virginia’s experience, three design principles stand out:

Flatten for Speed: Do not wait for organizational charts to change. Build communication forums that cut across silos.
Match Cadence to Crisis: Increase tempo during volatility; reduce as stability returns. Let communication rhythm reflect operational reality.
Push Decisions Out and Down: Equip field leaders with context. Do not make them wait for permission. Make them confident in the mission.

The Forum is the Strategy

Strategy is no longer a static plan, but a living conversation. And the forum where that conversation happens is the difference between coordination and chaos.

Virginia still uses this forum today not only for emergencies but also for day-to-day operations, ensuring the organization drives strategy to execution through transparency.

Virginia learned the hard way. But once it did, the state went from last to leading the COVID-19 response. Not because it had more resources, but because it restructured how people talked, decided, and acted.

That is the lesson for the modern C-suite: Build the forum. Set the cadence. Share the mission. And let your teams lead.

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