Chaos-Proofing Your Team (Chaos-proof part 4)

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The first rule of Chaos-Proofing your team is: Don’t add to the chaos. The second rule of Chaos-Proofing your team is: Don’t add to the chaos.

(Yes, I recently rewatched Fight Club.)

This rule seems obvious in theory, but in the heat of continuous firefighting, the obvious gets lost in the scramble.

The natural tendency is to jump into crisis leadership mode - here's the downward spiral:

1. Start delegating tasks without regard to capacity or capability
2. When things inevitably go wrong because of #1 above, starting pointing finger and blaming
3. Jump in and start over-managing or micromanaging to “ensure everything gets done right”
4. As they team gets overwhelmed and burnt out, start blaming their lack of skill, knowledge, talent … maybe even fire a few of them or drive them to quit
5. Lament the inability to find the right people for the job
6. Convince yourself that this is just the way the industry is … push away anyone who suggests that there is a better way as “not understanding the industry”

What makes this descent into the "chaos abyss" even worse is that the crisis leader somehow comes to believe that they are “the only one who can save the day” ... often because the company is now barely keeping it together but for their intervention.

The Crisis Leader starts to derive their sense of value and worth to the company based on their ability to put out the fires, over and over. The leaders above them start to believe the Crisis Leader is “indispensable”: “We could never survive without them.”

In fact, the Crisis Leader is the problem. They set the very same fires they heroically put out.

Rather than point fingers at themselves and say, what could I do differently to improve this situation, they blame everyone around them, multiplying chaos in their wake.

So, the most obvious solution is, don’t add more chaos to the chaos. That is, don’t be a crisis leader.

Lead the team out of the crisis cycle.

But how do you do that?

• Train the team to be crisis proof. (See last week’s article.) You actually want your team to shine a light on the causes chaos, creating visibility to challenges and issues.
• Stop blaming and start learning. View mistakes and issues as an opportunity to understand and improve.
• Focus on creating repeatable processes. Often chaos is the result of gaps in processes or a complete lack of processes. Let the team focus on getting the latest fire out, while you focus on getting at root causes so you can break the cycle.
• Chaos-proof yourself. Use the techniques from last week’s article to control the sources of confusion and chaos coming at you from above. Protect the team by controlling what you can control with your boss.
• Identify where “uncontrollables” are likely to come from. Build contingency plans so you are ready when something unexpected does happen.
• Create a team culture that celebrates avoiding chaos even more than saving the day from the chaos.

Your job at all times is to follow the first rule of chaos-proofing your team: don’t add to the chaos. And if that fails, then go to the second rule.