Being a leader in times of crisis can feel completely chaotic and interruption driven. Meetings become nearly continuous and the constant streams of unstructured information are mentally exhausting to parse through. Even when you take some “downtime,” your mind is still whirring to integrate new information in the background.
The most empowering thing you can do for yourself and your team is to move past the powerless feeling that disorientation and random information brings on and get a “sea anchor” out that allows you to get an early grasp on the uncertainty and slow the pace of “drift” in the storm.
Your job is to install a framework that enables progressively better decisions to flow to your team based on how the map has shifted.
If you lead people in the world right now, you are facing a completely new set of circumstances, even though for many of us it’s only been “real” a short time. I wanted to share a model that I’ve needed and refined to get through recessions and other seismic events to help you get your team back on solid footing.
Applying This Model
Getting this model in the hands of your decision making team can help dramatically improve how your team functions. By developing a group awareness of where you are and where you are headed, you can conserve precious resources to work on completing the right work for right now. You can quickly get answers to:
- Which phase are you personally in now?
- Which phase is the team you are part of in?
- What is in scope for our current work?
During the first wave of awareness and initial actions, you and the leaders around you will make the best set of decisions based on the mental map of how the world worked at the time of disruption. These critical first steps should be primarily to secure safety and conservation of resources.
The second step is to put in a focusing tool that allows those on the front lines to flow information to a central point for integration and then return progressively better decision-making insight.
Let’s step through a framework that can help you do that.
A Four-Step Framework to Discover The “New Map”
Phase 0 – The Event
The character of these types of events is they ERUPT – not present, then overwhelming consequences and new realities. They overpower our usual mental frameworks and challenge our mental agility (for more on that, see last week’s article here), causing us to stagger back, then piece it back together collectively. Information comes to us in a very ad hoc way, and the scope, shape, and extent of the interruption are hard to gather in real-time.
You and your leaders will make calls in this moment, and they are crucial – get people out of harm’s way, secure assets and avoid further damage. You may need to put in a temporary leadership structure which will free up you and your team to move into strategic action.
Phase I – Stabilize
The four tasks that need to be completed in Phase I are safety, conservation, central integration and communications.
Job one is always human safety and nothing else should be done until everyone is accounted for and under appropriate care. This is non-negotiable, and needs to be modeled by leadership and cascaded through the ranks (i.e., we work tirelessly to assure personal safety full stop).
Once this is done, we can begin the conservation phase. This is when we assess the impact into two large categories: what do we still have and what did we lose? What is working, or could be working shortly, and what did we lose that will be offline for a significant amount of time? This includes human resources, physical resources, financial resources, processes that are core to our operations and upstream and downstream partner resources.
The third piece of Phase I is to set up a central point of integration, either virtually or physically. You can think of this as the “war room” or command center. To kick this off, begin directing all ad hoc information to one point at the command center to be parsed to the right resource. You will also want to make the resources from the conservation work visible as well as current information on safety, and any ongoing support needed there.
The last element in Phase I is to ensure that you have a cadenced, frictionless set of information feeds flowing to your central integration point. The pulse needs to be fast enough to make sure that no new issues are left unattended. This typically is daily (at the least), and at times may need to be hourly.
Phase II – Interpret
Now we need to put in place the process that will move us toward thinking as a team again.
This is the work of the designated response team, typically under the leadership of the most senior executive with experience and the gravitas to get quick action. The first job in this phase is to establish steady “stand up” meetings with key team members who are watching over the incoming information flow. These stand-ups are primarily there to ensure joint collaboration in a highly fluid environment.
In the early stages of Phase II, this can be highly tactical and somewhat ad-hoc as fast mitigation is implemented. It is usually pretty quick that synthesis of what exactly happened occurs (it’s very common to be not completely sure), and what the key “fast” response items are. In taking these actions, the group is getting a sense of what it is dealing with, but it’s way too early to feel like they are on top of anything.
The next key event is for the group to “chunk-up” the incoming information into some preliminary groupings that suggest what needs to be considered together and what the working hypothesis is of what is driving that data (this is the beginning of very crude visuals – charts and graphs).
It is very, very common at this stage to have your first cycle of “expert” disagreement – that is two credible leaders who differ on their views and recommendations of what you should do. If there are safety issues involved, you need to make the call with the best information you have – immediately. If you have time to keep multiple hypotheses active, then do that and use the collective intelligence of the group to seek the truth in a disciplined way.
Phase III – Align
Once the best data is on the table, and the fact base is stabilizing, it’s time to move to alignment. This will be uncomfortable for some of your most ardent subject matter experts, as we will need to complete this phase when we have 60-70% of the information.
In this phase, we develop the dominant “agreed to” narrative. While this sounds easy, in the heat of incomplete data and everyone working long days, this is anything but. This is the most demanding phase and requires the most investment from the whole team to have productive conflict and come to a decision around what the consensus narrative will be that they will all support together.
The key to working this phase is what I call “high challenge” and “high support” leadership. If it’s your job to guide this, you need to be ruthless in examining fact, without becoming personal, and in demonstrating the highest respect for others.
If this is done well, you will “fight like family” during the discussion and it will end with a strong, tightly aligned, agreement as they leave the room to go implement.
Humbly said, there simply is no room for two views. Dissenting viewpoints in the leadership narrative create chaos at scale in the firm at large.
Once this milestone is completed, the scale part of the job begins where journeyman, runway-level leaders can execute on the map and guidance of the crisis team.
Phase IV – Execute
This is the part of the work where the crisis team works itself out of job.
Once the team has found the core of the solution and has validated that it can work without the oversight of the cross-functional team, it’s time to return the operations back to the designated leaders who can scale the implementation. The key to this is the completion of a control plan that allows everyone who was on the cross-functional team to be confident that the issue is fully completed.
Lastly, and certainly not least, a communications plan needs to be established that flows this to all the stakeholders. This needs to be very robust and hit all the learning styles. Once the leadership team feels like it’s overdoing it, the front lines are just hearing it.
Now What?
The quality of your team’s response pivots on cadence, discernment and collaborative decision making.
If you find yourself in need of a thought partner to clarify this process and its implementation, feel free to use this link to put a short call on my calendar (no salesy stuff, we’ll roll up our sleeves and get to it – this is a crisis), or use my direct line at 847-651-1014.
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