Articles

Leadership in a Crisis

Monday, 15 June 2009 16:34

This world-wide recession is much worse than any seen in your lifetime and for millions of people globally it's a time of deep personal trials. Truly everyone is being stress-tested.

Turmoil presents the ultimate leadership opportunity, but for every inspiring story there's at least one less heralded tale of a leader who blows it.

So what does true leadership, under unimaginable stress, look like?

It can be boiled down to four actions. They're simple to state and may seem deceptively simple to do, but they aren't. Finding the strength to take these steps will contribute significantly to any leader's growth.

Four Leadership Actions in a Crisis

1. Be seen early and often. This most basic requirement is important for a fundamental reason that is often forgotten: People want to be led. The reasons we crave leadership are deep. We want the leader to be a repository for our fears. Thus, successful leaders in a crisis first make it emphatically clear that they are present and on the job.

2. Act Fast. Leaders in a crisis must not lose their rare opportunity to act. The difficulty is that just when decisions are most easily accepted, they're hardest to make. All business decisions are made with incomplete information and ambiguity, and that's especially true in the heat of a crisis.

3. Show Fearlessness. We want our leaders to show us that they’re not afraid. In business, that means facing bad news head on without cringing. The effective leader announces trouble in unvarnished terms - people can smell evasion a mile away - then explains confidently how it will be defeated.

4. Tell a story that puts the crisis in context. Extensive research has shown that how people are affected by stress depends heavily on the way they see it.

Those who see stressful events as bad, abnormal, and inescapable tend to suffer from them much more seriously than do people who see those same events as normal, interesting elements of life from which they can learn and to which they can respond.

A critical question for leaders is whether they can help everyone in the organisation respond more like members of the second group. The answer seems to be "yes."

These four steps may require you to stretch beyond your comfort zone. And that is the point.

Research has established that what turns average performers into great performers is a process continually pushed just beyond their current abilities, and then responding to the new challenges with focused efforts to overcome them, accompanied by abundant feedback about the results.

This 'technical' recession, by pushing everyone past the limits of his or her current abilities, places us all on the first step of the process. Whether we take the next step is for each of us to decide.

Reference: Coach2Coach newsletter, FORTUNE, June 8, 2009 and Geoff Colvin, “The Upside of the Downturn: The Management Strategy to Prevail in Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath”.

Last Updated ( Monday, 15 June 2009 16:39 )