Leadership in crisis
As described in an earlier post, Leadership has an ethereal quality. It’s a little like love. You can't make someone love you and you can't make someone follow you. If you want someone to love you, you'll look at the things are important to them and to the best of your ability, you'll embody those qualities. You might not get it all right and some of your efforts might be pretty amateurish and off-key, but amazingly, you don't have to be perfect to be loved and you don't have to be perfect to be a leader.
What people look for in their lovers and their leaders is authenticity. Not perfection. Just an honesty and a vulnerability and a willingness to be wrong, to be uncertain and to be willing to change.
Leadership in a time of crisis just makes it more important that leaders are hyper-conscious about how we behave and respond. The temptation is to do some version of fake it till you make it. We don’t have the answers and nor should we expect to. We certainly shouldn’t pretend to.
What provides comfort and security for a team in troubled times is knowing that there is someone who is looking out for them and providing the best quality information they have in a way that is both true and tailored to the audience. Sharing grim financial information is fine, but if it’s done in technical accounting terms it becomes meaningless.
In a business in some form of trouble, there is a balance to be found between keeping people appropriately informed and freaking them out. For instance, if there are financial issues that could potentially put the future of the company at risk, we need to work out how to disseminate this information.
The factors are many and varied. We can’t just tell the team that the company is in trouble and may not make it. This will be terrifying for them and cause productivity to nosedive as they focus more on watercooler chatter about how awful it all is. The best people will start to drift away because they can get other jobs and we can be left with the rump of people who produce little and only want to cling to the security of what they know.
What we can do is be an evolved and grown up human being. Remember the job is to enrol the team in the job at hand. If the job at hand is saving the business, then don't shy away from the subject but don't dwell on the dark side. Talk in terms of how "we the team” can pull together and focus on what's important. People are accustomed to being told what's going to happen, but they are much less accustomed to being asked to provide part of the solution.
I have been in this situation on a few occasions and I have never told a lie to a single team member. I have been judicious with what I do say and have been up front about what I can't say, but have always steered the conversation towards an exploration of people's own journey. Whatever role a person plays in a business, if they own the outcome personally, they can find ways of supporting the outcome.
When people feel they are respected, informed and honoured for what they contribute, they will move mountains. Not because they have to but because they want to.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
John Quincy Adams