How You React To Crisis Shows Your True Leadership Character.

Late last year, somewhere around October, I was dealing with a crisis situation that challenged my sanity. I always pride myself to be cool and calm under pressure circumstances but this one, wow, tested my mental.

One morning, while I was driving my daughter to school, my facial expression change and to be quite honest, I wasn’t even aware, my daughter said “daddy why are you looking so angry” with a pitiful worry look on her face. Her eyes began to swell with tears because she never saw her daddy looked like that before. 

At that moment I immediately check myself and I said Gifford, you need to take control of yourself, you cannot allow one challenge to derail you like that. I started to talk to myself, and I learn a lesson from that situation, how you react to crisis shows your true character as a leader. 

Crisis Reveals Character - The Test

According to Carey Nieuwhof, the best way to assess the state of someone character is to simply analyze how they responded during their last crisis.

It could be a crisis at home, at work, with their family—or any situation.

How you respond to a crisis, will tell you exactly where your character is at.

So, how did you react the last time…

Your kids melted down in the back seat?

Your spouse got defensive when you suggested some things to do on Saturday?

Your ideas got shot down at the meeting?

You showed up Sunday and a key element for the service was missing because someone else messed up?

Your computer crashed and you lost the last 30 minutes of work?

You got stuck in the longest line at the grocery store and it made you late for your next meeting?

You read that email criticizing your leadership?

Be honest.

What did you think?

What did you say?

What did you do?

Boom. There’s the true state of your character.

In fact, nothing reveals the true state of your character better than how you handled your last crisis.

True Story

Take this example, true story. A new CEO took the helm of a company, at the first meeting with his new staff, the CEO said all the right things:

We will build a culture of trust

We will focus on our employees. 

Let me tell you, the guy sounded picture perfect, someone you can follow and learn from, but according to my Tobagonian friend, all skin-teet (teeth) eh laugh. People started to notice a change in the new Chief Executive personality; the open-door policy was gone, trust was eroded and the company became fragmented. While the CEO appeared to be competent and well adjusted on the outside, the CEO lacked real substance within and his true character was revealed during the worst crisis in the company history. 

The late great Dr. Myles Munroe said:

Character is when people around you can predict what you are doing when no one is watching.

In Jim Collins book Good to Great, he contrasts the turnaround successes of outwardly humble, even shy, executives like Gillette’s Colman M. Mockler and Kimberly-Clark’s Darwin E. Smith with those of larger-than-life business leaders like Dunlap and Iacocca, who courted personal celebrity.

For example, Darwin E. Smith who became the CEO of Kimberly-Clark in 1971 did not have any alter ego. According to the Harvard Business Review, Darwin E. Smith was a seemingly ordinary man, shy, unpretentious, even awkward; dressed unfashionably, like a farm boy wearing his first J.C. Penney suit. But if you were to consider Smith soft or meek, you would be terribly mistaken.

During his tenure, Smith created a stunning transformation at Kimberly-Clark, even selling the mills and turning the company into the leading consumer paper products company in the world. The company beat its rivals Scott Paper and Procter & Gamble. And in doing so, Kimberly-Clark generated cumulative stock returns that were 4.1 times greater than those of the general market, outperforming venerable companies such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Coca-Cola, and General Electric.

Smith, the company’s mild-mannered in-house lawyer, never changed. He stayed true to his character even in very difficult times. That morning with my daughter I learned a valuable lesson in my leadership journey. You should always stay true to you, in other words, don’t allow any situation or circumstances to change who you really are. Your true leadership character will be exposed at some point and it normally revealed itself during a crisis. 

Leading people is an awesome responsibility because you have the opportunity to change the trajectory of someone's life. If you are pretending to be someone you are not, at some point a crisis will bring out the real you and believe me, you will face challenges, it is inevitable, how you handle it will ultimately determine your true leadership character. 

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Gifford is the founder of Leadership First, a leadership community dedicated to inspiring every leader into creating a great organization, one their employees will enjoy. Help us achieve our purpose, SUBSCRIBE to our community and get exclusive leadership articles from the best leadership minds in the world focus on Purpose, Trust, Communication, Vision, Values, Culture, Employees Engagement, Motivation and Change Management. Let's change the leadership status quo and inspire every leader into great leadership. Leadership First