#35 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Crisis At Work (I)

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “That year was the worst year. But I got so much along the way. Is it strange that I’m kind of glad it happened?”
• “We lost a major funder we were depending on….big projects didn’t pan out. Every crisis has opportunities? I sure don’t know what good came out of all that s***. I am barely surviving….it’s depressing and I’m not really sure what to do next.”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Crisis At Work

?? THE GOOD THING about a crisis is it shakes up your Normal, exposes unhealthy things that got Normalised - and pushes you to do better.

A crisis is not a matter of “if” but “when” - it will happen whether you know it or like it.

A crisis is a moment in time where you suddenly realise what you assumed was OK is NOT OK.

A landmine of an event happened - and the Normal you took for granted got blown apart.

The crisis event can happen on a singular level:

• personal (e.g. a health scare)
• interpersonal (e.g. a sudden request for divorce)
• group (e.g. an expose of dark secrets kept between friends)
• organisation (e.g. discovery of a breach of ethics, sudden mass lay-offs)
• system (e.g. a freak election result, a global pandemic)

But the impact of the crisis can reverberate across multiple levels simultaneously.

The global pandemic of 2020-21 for instance locked down countries, destabilised sectors, ruined businesses, affected marriages and friendships and decimated some people’s overall sense of well-being - all at the same time.

Crisis blows open a whole new window into our world.

We suddenly see:

Wow, I had so many Blindspots.

So much was Hidden from me.

So much was Unknown to me.

A typical rendition of the Johari’s Window framework reflects our assumption of the proportion of what we know and what we don’t know.

A crisis is a psychological sucker punch to this status quo.

It shows us that the proportion between “what is known to us x known to others” is way smaller and “what is unknown to us/others” is way larger than we assumed.

Yet, this can still be a good thing. A Good crisis….

• Forces Awareness: makes previous unknowns much more obvious.
• Raises Motivation: pushes previously complacent or passive people into becoming active agents for change.
• Overcomes Resistance & Creates Permission: fast-forwards necessary changes that were merely debated about or delayed. While many people are still processing their shock and suddenly more open to different answers, change agents can push through changes more easily. (e.g. Look at how quickly even the most resistant organisations had to embrace digitalisation and remote work during the pandemic.)

This is why seasoned crisis leaders advise us to “Don’t waste a good crisis” & “Find opportunity in crisis”:

• Got fired by your company because of ‘cost-cutting’ even though they just promoted you and you were an undisputed top performer? Good. Time to revamp your criteria for the next organisation you will work for - or get serious about making that midlife career pivot.
• Over tolerated work stressors and landed up with a major health scare in the hospital? Good. Time to put your well-being on the table and negotiate for better work-life balance.
• Find out on social media that your corporate culture has a past history of awful racist and sexist behaviours? Good. Time to rally HR to get rid of the most problematic people and also push for investigation into questionable organisational practices that enabled those behaviours.

Good crisis leaders recognise the grim Goodness in the bad situation, get up, dust off and re-engage in the fight for change.

Just check out this infamous motivational clip called “GOOD” by former Navy Seal Jocko Willink on what he tells himself and others in the face of crisis.

His style won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but Jocko does capture the spirit of how crisis leaders grimly push through really bad situations.

?? THE BAD THING is many of us can go from in-crisis panic to post-crisis neglect because of Wishful Thinking.

In 2017, at the Skoll World Forum, Head of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim already warned the world that the international community was ill-prepared for another pandemic because “what happens every time” in the face of pandemics is a cycle of “panic, neglect, panic, neglect.”

2020 proved him sadly right.

It’s madness but many people, organisations, sectors and even countries can go through the same exact crisis again and again - and still not do anything significant to change things.

I looked up Quora’s “Why do people often neglect the signs around them?” and found a post that summarised a list of reasons:

Our bad habit is Wishful Thinking: formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality.

• The bad thing happened. I got away with it. Phew. I’ll always get away again, right?
• The bad thing happened once. Surely it won’t ever happen again, right?
• The bad thing happened. Someone fixed it and it all went away, right?
• The bad thing happened. We can’t ever do anything about it, right?
• The bad thing happened. It’s not ever gonna affect me, right?
• The bad thing happened. It’s nothing to do with me, right?

Whether or not it’s based on benign ignorance or malignant intent, neglect is still nelect. Bad Things happen when Good People choose to think nothing, feel nothing and do nothing to change things.

Every crisis leader must resist the post-crisis temptation to slip on the coasy socks of Ignorance and Apathy by learning instead to:

• ASK QUESTIONS & GET FEEDBACK about our blindspots.
• Explore SELF-DISCLOSURE to reveal what was hidden.
• Embark on SHARED DISCOVERY & SELF-DISCOVERY to deal with what remains unknown.

As this rendition of Johari’s Window shows, post-crisis work is a commitment to learning to expand “what is known to us x known to others” so that “what is unknown to us/others” is smaller than before.

These are just 3 signs of good and bad behaviour you can look out for to see if organisations learnt anything after a crisis:

? Good: institutionalising changes in problematic people, processes or policies.

? Bad: retaining problematic people, processes and policies as-is.

? Good: facilitating a psychologically safer culture so that more learning and knowledge-sharing about problems can take place

? Bad: maintaining a culture of silence and opacity which makes people feel uncertain or fearful to share about problems they notice.

? Good: encouraging discussions, educating each other about facts of what could spring up and encouraging curiousity towards how to do better.

? Bad: discouraging discussions, soothing each other with opinions that nothing bad will happen any more and encouraging complacency about how to do better.

?? THE UGLY THING is too many of us try to handle a crisis alone but the uglier the crisis the more support we need.

In 2020, I had to navigate my previous organisation through a massive external crisis called the pandemic.

That was bad but it was nothing compared to the shock of having to navigate us through a massive internal crisis in 2021. It was a serious enough breakdown of trust that led to the necessary ending of a 20-year business partnership.

Even if I am trained to work on organisational cultural issues for clients, there’s no way I could do this alone - nor did I want to.

If you are facing an internal crisis, it’s also professional due diligence to get external professionals in who can give a more objective, clear-eyed and skillful outsider perspective.

We brought in a range of external specialists who could provide specific and invaluable in-crisis and post-crisis support: legal, human resource, organisational development, trauma-informed therapy etc.

Bringing in a diversity of external professionals into your crisis management team may be costly but it will help you see different things, value different things and pin-point different areas of concern.

They will bring up opinions and options that are different and difficult for you. If they are doing their jobs well, they know they are not there to agree with you. They are there to educate you about the blindspots, hidden areas and unknowns.

This diversity of information can really help you as a crisis leader figure out better how to triage and troubleshoot your way through a swamp of unknowns.

Organisational trauma is real and bringing in external, trauma-informed help is vital to the healing of not just the individuals but the system itself.

2021 also taught me there is such a thing as organisational trauma.

Every professional who supports, manages and leads organisations needs to have a healthy respect for that. But too few leaders, coaches, facilitators, even organisational development practitioners know how to identify or work with traumatised professionals and traumatised organisations.

I would not have identified or cared as much about this issue if I had not gone through my own traumatising organisational crisis.

And now that I have come through on the other side, I want to do what I can to help leaders and organisations better understand this.

Organisational trauma is an underrated and necessary factor to consider as we deal with organisational crisises.

That’s a whole new newsletter though.

So I’ll talk more about managing organisational trauma in Part II.

Look out for next week’s edition.

?? THE BEAUTIFUL THING is a crisis can be the best worst thing that happened to you.

Nobody asks for a crisis. But crisis will happen sooner or later in your life.

Learning to manage a crisis and lead people through it to “the other side” can be the worst and best thing that you go through.

You may be surprised at the depths of courage, conviction and growth you never knew you had inside you.

I would never want to go through the worst parts of 2021 again.

But I know this:

I am grateful for how it challenged, provoked and matured me as a person and a leader.

I better understand the high stakes involved in my work as a leadership and organisational development practitioner.

I better appreciate the sober challenges and responsibility of being both an organisational leader and team member.

I better respect the good, bad and ugly dynamics of the modern workplace.

And I believe - even more wholeheartedly - that:

after all that is ugly, we can still heal and make something beautiful in due time and with great intention.

PRACTICE THIS

If I am leading my people & organisation through a crisis, how do I realistically strategise what to focus on?

There’s a million things pinging for your attention in a crisis - and you could go quite mad. It gets overwhelming.

MODEL:

Here’s a handy little framework that can help any crisis leader quickly categorise and discern: Stephen Covey’s Circle of Control / Influence / Concern.

• Control: what you can directly control or impact via our thoughts, words, emotions, actions.
• Influence: what you are concerned about, can’t control in terms of outcomes BUT can influence through what’s within your control.
• Concern: everything else that is way outside your ability or capacity to influence or control.

STRATEGY:

Whenever you are feeling burnt out, dazed and confused by the crisis, do a daily dump of your thoughts in the right circle.

• Proactive, empowered, healthily coping crisis leaders learn to channel more of their mental, emotional and physical energy on what’s in their circles of control and influence.
• Reactive, disempowered, overwhelmed crisis leaders put too much energy and give away too much of their power and attention to the circle of concern stuff.

In a crisis, I always feel worse when I get sucked into a negative downward spiral about circle of concern things.

I always feel much better when I get myself into an upward spiral of just focusing on the sizable list of things I can control and influence instead.

Thanks for reading!

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Take care of yourselves & the ones you love,

I’ll see you next Friday,

Shiao