Personal, work and large-scale: How to cope with crisis
All the cliches and song lyrics are true: into each life some rain must fall; you have to take the rough with the smooth; joy and pain like sunshine and rain.
No one wants bad things to happen, but happen they do. Denial or wishing disaster away simply isn’t an effective strategy. The mature leader hopes for and expects the best but accepts that all manner of things can and will go wrong at some stage.
Cultivating the ability to manage the bad times calmly and effectively is therefore a fundamental leadership skill.
The good news is that the more experience you have of coping when things go wrong, the more confident you become in your own ability and the more intuition you develop about managing in the moment. The other benefit of becoming more proficient in managing a work crisis is that you find that far fewer crises actually arise. This is because your personal threshold for what constitutes a crisis is raised in proportion to your experience, capability and willingness to respond instinctively and appropriately.
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In a leader’s life, there are many types of crises that can arise including work, personal and large-scale disasters. Some of these crises are predictable; some are unexpected. Some take ages to resolve, while others are blissfully short-lived. There are broadly three types of disasters you are likely to encounter: work disasters, personal disasters and large-scale disasters.
Work disasters
There are some typical work crises that always crop up at some point. For newer leaders, experiencing a contract or an important performance goal teetering on the edge of failure can trigger feelings of panic. Similarly, the first time you implement change resulting in job losses can feel utterly overwhelming.
I have total recall of the first time I had to deal with both situations. The parts that I handled well I attribute to working with a great mentor who had shown me by example how to cope calmly and constructively with performance problems. Having observed this good practice, I was able to be calm, reassuring and curious to understand all aspects of the problem from others before starting the process of identifying solutions. On the latter issue, I did some things well, but I also made the mistake of giving into feelings of upset and overwhelm at moments of intense pressure.
I learned a lot from the mistakes I made and from the things I did well. Reflecting on both aspects provided valuable insights and increased confidence in the ability to meet future problems.
One of these occurred just a few weeks after I had taken up a role as chairman of a large teaching hospital. I received a summons from the regulator requiring me, the chief executive and the finance director to travel to London to account for the organisation’s poor financial performance. To read the full article, click here!
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