How do you handle yourself and lead during a professional crisis?
Chaos… Racing thoughts… Rapid Heart Beat… Overwhelming anxiety… These are all the feelings that come up when we are faced with rapidly changing conditions, when crisis is upon us, when we are called to action. Toning down the drama, the feelings are real whether we are facing a real life/death situation or if we are facing an unfolding crisis in our work environments. The stress is particularly hard for those in charge, in addition to all of the external and internal circumstances, all eyes are on the leader to make the right call, to step up and address the calamity. How does one excel in those circumstances? How do you make the right call? How to steady the ship?
Louis Pasteur once said - “Chance Favors the Prepared Mind”. In our case we can rephrase that “Crisis is tamed by the Prepared Mind”. While specific circumstances of the disaster will be different in each case, cumulative elements of preparation will be more than enough in most circumstances to calm the situation down. Where should we start?
Lay of the land.
What is your familiarity with your domain? How about your physical assets? Your team? The intimate knowledge of where your resources are at is crucial to understanding if they will be reachable during a crisis. Do you know what is the schedule and vacation schedule for your critical people? Do they have a proper backup? Are the backup people able to actually perform the duties to the fullest extent? Have they been tested for that ability? What about your servers or your physical assets? What are their stress capabilities? The more you know about your environment the more at ease you will be feeling during the times of stress. For the well-trained the organization becomes the extension of the physical body and brain, it starts feeling as if you are surfing a very dangerous wave while keeping everything under control.
Plans. Templates. Checkboxes.
The best prepared teams are the ones that can recognize the unfolding scenarios from training. They have plans and templates prepared that can be leveraged and integrated into the proper solution. Does your team know what steps they should be taking? Do you have standard procedures ready to be pulled from a shelf? The companies of various sizes will have different preparedness conditions. For smaller companies, it could be just getting into the “situation room” and dynamically addressing the circumstances. For larger companies, thorough crisis checklists need to be deployed to assess, measure and perhaps immediately address the situation. It is surprising how a small number of bullet points on a checklist can seriously impact the stress of the situation and immediately commence the remediation. Our brains, while capable of fantastic achievements, are not always the best at the time of stress. Plans and checklists stabilize them for the optimum performances in the crisis.
Here is a few pointers from Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande on what makes a great checklist:
Restrict to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.
Keep the wording simple, precise, and within the professional vernacular.
Fit the contents to one page, remove clutter, and eliminate unnecessary colors.
Use both uppercase and lowercase text with a Sans Serif font for ease of reading.
Scenario Planning. What is the worst that can happen?
As Andrew Grove wrote in his book - “Only Paranoid Survives”. Have you thought of your worst case scenarios? What needs to be done if your plans don’t unfold in the way that you have thought they would? How often do you think about the what-ifs?
It is very alluring to think that the right solution will arise when you are minutes away from when the crisis hits as most of the information would be available. While time-saving, this line of thinking is extremely risky, while all of the data will be there, there would not be any time to process it. The learning curves are very steep for any new information, and it would be really hard to rope in experts at the last minute.
Make sure to be diligent with this thinking as it will help you prepare for those critical moments when decisions are important to be timely and also previously tested.
Relationships/Contacts
It is important to have a list of contacts on hand who you will call depending on the circumstance. Usually right people are hard to find, but they are especially hard to find when time is hard. Cultivate those relationships ahead of time and collect all of the contact information. It is useful to maintain several people per category as not everyone can be available at a whim’s notice. If possible, it is best to discuss rates and contracts beforehand as unfortunately there are people who take advantage of others’ crises. Another way to prepare with them is to have a test project executed, this way you can ensure that you can rely on the expert in the difficult situation.
Messaging
You and your team will have to write a lot of messages during the emergency for coordination and communication purposes. It is incredibly hard to think through different perspectives when composing messages and time is short. Prepare those message templates ahead of time. Think of positive and negative turns that the scenario can unfold. Review some of the templates with legal, as what you say in the critical moments also has a risk to haunt you later if not phrased properly.
Personal Conditioning
While you are getting your organization prepared for various possible scenarios, it is important not to forget about yourself. What will your body and your mind do when things become uncertain? How are you going to cope? What has worked well for you in the past that you can reuse going forward? Are these instruments available to you at the moment’s need? Conditioning to deal with stress is a life-long journey and few are able to handle it perfectly. It is important to understand your gaps and engineer mitigating approaches, so when the actual crisis hits, you are able to respond with full composure.
Final Thoughts
There are many more things that you can do to prepare yourself and the team. The main point is that you have spent time preparing and have a ready plan to address the potential crisis.
