Surviving the Storm – Leading through a crisis
Marie Large
Building Bridges with companies and clients across Europe, the Nordics and Ireland as a Senior Market Advisor | Board Member | Mentor & Coach
The network is down!? There’s been an accident on site! Supply chain announce further delays!
As a leader sometimes it feels you just move from one crisis to another.? In Swedish there is a great phrase “Is i magen”, which translates to having ice in your stomach, or keeping calm in tough times, a key asset when leading through a crisis.? From my experience dealing with all sorts of crises across countries in Europe and Africa I have learned that how you act as a leader in times of crisis, is what defines the leadership trust those who depend on you have in your ability to navigate and find a way forward.
Crises can take many forms and can strike at any time, often randomly and without warning, it can be a product quality issue leading to a serious service outage at a key moment, it can be a data breach, a human error, a health and safety severe incident, supply shortages of key components for a customer delivery and much more.
I share some thought and insights on how best to respond as a leader in times of crisis:
Act with speed and urgency - assemble a team quickly with broad range of skills who can analyse the situation, come up with potential solutions and be clear on each members roles.?
Acknowledge the seriousness of the event – be clear it is a crisis and that requires extraordinary efforts and commitment from all involved, be humble in customer discussions while committed to finding resolutions.
Communicate Openly and Regularly – create a communication drumbeat with the team, stakeholders, and customers, be open on the impacts and the actions ongoing to address.? Acknowledge mistakes and focus on the actions being taken to rectify the situation.
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Secure Key Competence – request immediately the people you need to be parachuted in, don’t take a "wait and see" approach. ?Its much better to over resource at the start, the customer, stakeholders, and the team will appreciate it and you can gain speed to resolution from leveraging experience from other similar incidents in other units or markets.
Protect and Help the Crisis team – take the lead in dealing with angry customers and demanding stakeholders, allowing the team to get the work done in both understanding the root causes of the crisis and coming up with alternatives to resolve.?
Lessons Learned – after the storm has passed, and the crisis has been resolved ensure you plan a session to walk through with the full team what went well, what could be improved and the learnings you can take with you into future crisis management situations.? Document and share with stakeholders and customers so all can grow and develop from the experience.?
In summary, I do believe that if a crisis is managed well, with openness and tranparency, admitting mistakes made, creates real opportunities for you and the team to dig deep with key customers or stakeholders, solve burning issues together and build a foundation for future deep trust and loyalty. Coming through the storm together, can not just sustain but grow the business in the future.
And if you are interested to read more see:
And... If you would like to explore how I can help in preparing you and your teams for crisis management checkout Makace AB