Reflection: Some Learning From 2008 Global Financial Crises

While attending a Sa?d Business School, University of Oxford webinar on "leading and organizing for impact in times of crisis", I could reconnect to the concept of facilitating sense making and recollected an interesting instance from mid 2008. At that point the subprime crisis was snowballing in US and the financial services company I was working for had a JV with a Fortune 500 New York based financial behemoth. Though the effect of the crisis had not impacted India till that time, I was drawn by the curiosity to learn about the US crisis and also had a gut feeling that sooner or later it will have its impact felt in India and our employees, partners & customers are bound to be worried. I did a detailed research and then created a document that explained the crisis in a simple manner, the impact on our organization and the country at large. The document was discussed with the stakeholders and was circulated among the zonal team. We ran a training sessions which were well appreciated by the team as it simplified the entire crisis with detailed analysis of why our organization would not be impacted by the US crisis and how our partner was largely immune from the crisis. The team was enabled to proactively handle the queries relating to the crisis and we were able to reduce the impact of the crisis on our business.

After a couple of weeks of the roll out, I received a call from my manager and he inquired about the mail that I had sent to the zonal team and was curious to know whom all had I sent the mail to. I immediately retrieved the mail and found that a copy of the mail had been marked to the company CEO (Expat). I was very nervous and embarrassed as I never knew that he (CEO) was marked and even did not intend to mark him, but the fact was that a copy had been sent to him. My then manager, the coolest person I have ever met (he still is) comforted me and prodded me to recollect the situation. We were using Lotus Notes back then and I found that while sending the mail to a group, one employee was not active in the system and lotus notes suggested an alternate name and in excitement I had not noticed that the replacement suggested was that of our CEO and that is how he had received the mail. The CEO had sent the mail to the legal team to check the validity of the document and my department heads were also notified. Luckily the document I had created had factual representation of data with the correct analysis of the crisis, the only error being that I had used the template of the company and not got it approved by compliance team before circulating it internally. Since it was an internal training document, the matter was resolved. Eventually the document I had created became the basis for a communication pack for the entire organization, which helped it manage the crisis situation.

I was driven by deep sense of purpose and empathy for our field teams, partners and customers that made me to proactively create an innovative solution. The learning that I carried forth was to ensure that a sign-off from relevant team is taken before releasing any such document in the future. I have a sense of satisfaction and pride when I look back and wish to have a similar feeling a decade from now, when I am reflecting about the COVID19 situation.

Please click the link below to view the recording of the webinar: https://www.dhirubhai.net/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:6660884603500277760/