This week I had an important personal appointment about ten minutes’ drive away. It was at a location on an industrial estate I had not visited before so I determined to leave plenty of time for the journey. I got in my car and drove down our local road – only to have a tyre pressure warning light come on after about a minute. I stopped to discover I had a puncture and the tyre was virtually flat! After a moment of panic, I realised there were alternatives. I limped home and organised an Uber. I got to the appointment on time, only to discover as I sat in the reception that my mobile phone had fallen out of my pocket in the Uber! Not really my day. However, I managed with the help of my son to contact the Uber driver who kindly returned the phone to the gate office on the industrial estate where my appointment was. I also then managed to get my car to limp to a tyre repair garage who could replace the tyre, albeit the next day.
My point here is not so much as to record my personal travails, but to recognise that some crises are inevitable in our personal or professional working lives, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. I think it helps in the heat of the moment to get your work or personal crisis in perspective. I was reading on the news this week how 20,000 people are being evacuated from the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife because of an approaching wildfire. That is really a serious crisis. If push came to shove I could always have rearranged my appointment which, while inconvenient, was not like losing your home and your town.
Crisis is defined by the Oxford Learner Dictionaries as “a time of great danger, difficulty or doubt when problems must be solved or important decisions must be made.” While this guide Business continuity and crisis management defines a business crisis as “an event, or a series of events, that causes major disturbance for a business. A crisis typically occurs suddenly and poses intense difficulty or danger for the business, usually in a situation where time is short and decisions have to be taken quickly.” It concludes “The process of managing and dealing with crises is known as crisis management. It involves dealing with threats before, during, and after they have occurred, focusing on minimising the damage and enabling the business to recover quickly.”
You tend to know a crisis when you see it. In my working life the breaking up of a law firm in which I was an equity partner is probably the most intense I can recall. It brought together potential business and personal concerns which were eventually resolved but not without considerable difficulty and complication.
It helps to concentrate on how to remedy the crisis, not panic because it has happened. And no matter how prepared you are with a disaster plan (see my blog in June Have a Panic Room), these events always take you by surprise. See this Forbes article 5 Steps To Help You Respond To Crises At Work which make some sensible recommendations including:
See also this Stanford Graduate School of Business article Responding to Crisis: A Spotlight on Your Organizationwhich points out the opportunities provided by a crisis commencing “Rather than be derailed by crises, seize the opportunity to articulate what you stand for — at a time when everyone is listening.” It quotes its professor Steven Callander who says “A single crisis under the glare of the spotlight is more effective at getting your message out about who you are and what your organization stands for than a hundred meetings or a thousand speeches.”
While this blog The importance of responding to a crisis says there are three key elements speed, accuracy and consistency observing “Responding quickly and effectively enables your organisation to control the narrative around the incident.”
I also found this perceptive Harvard Business Review article Are You Leading Through the Crisis … or Managing the Response? which as the title suggests draws a distinction between leading and managing through a crisis saying “Crises, replete with both complexity and change, require executives to both lead and manage effectively.” And cites leadership traps including taking a narrow view “The human brain is programmed to narrow its focus in the face of a threat. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism designed for self-protection. The trap is that your field of vision becomes restricted to the immediate foreground. It says “Leading through a crisis requires taking the long view, as opposed to managing the present.” Observing “that crises are most often over-managed and under-led.”
See these great quotes about coping with a crisis.
"Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is." Jack Nicklaus.
"The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which greatly afflict us. To fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives." Thomas Jefferson.
"Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think." Jawaharlal Nehru.
My point here is not so much as to record my personal travails, but to recognise that some crises are inevitable in our personal or professional working lives, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. I think it helps in the heat of the moment to get your work or personal crisis in perspective. I was reading on the news this week how 20,000 people are being evacuated from the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife because of an approaching wildfire. That is really a serious crisis. If push came to shove I could always have rearranged my appointment which, while inconvenient, was not like losing your home and your town.
Crisis is defined by the Oxford Learner Dictionaries as “a time of great danger, difficulty or doubt when problems must be solved or important decisions must be made.” While this guide Business continuity and crisis management defines a business crisis as “an event, or a series of events, that causes major disturbance for a business. A crisis typically occurs suddenly and poses intense difficulty or danger for the business, usually in a situation where time is short and decisions have to be taken quickly.” It concludes “The process of managing and dealing with crises is known as crisis management. It involves dealing with threats before, during, and after they have occurred, focusing on minimising the damage and enabling the business to recover quickly.”
You tend to know a crisis when you see it. In my working life the breaking up of a law firm in which I was an equity partner is probably the most intense I can recall. It brought together potential business and personal concerns which were eventually resolved but not without considerable difficulty and complication.
It helps to concentrate on how to remedy the crisis, not panic because it has happened. And no matter how prepared you are with a disaster plan (see my blog in June Have a Panic Room), these events always take you by surprise. See this Forbes article 5 Steps To Help You Respond To Crises At Work which make some sensible recommendations including:
- “Take a deep breath, and remember that you are paid to handle challenges
- Gather and synthesize the information you have on the crisis.
- Engage stakeholders and subject matter experts to help inform your response.”
See also this Stanford Graduate School of Business article Responding to Crisis: A Spotlight on Your Organizationwhich points out the opportunities provided by a crisis commencing “Rather than be derailed by crises, seize the opportunity to articulate what you stand for — at a time when everyone is listening.” It quotes its professor Steven Callander who says “A single crisis under the glare of the spotlight is more effective at getting your message out about who you are and what your organization stands for than a hundred meetings or a thousand speeches.”
While this blog The importance of responding to a crisis says there are three key elements speed, accuracy and consistency observing “Responding quickly and effectively enables your organisation to control the narrative around the incident.”
I also found this perceptive Harvard Business Review article Are You Leading Through the Crisis … or Managing the Response? which as the title suggests draws a distinction between leading and managing through a crisis saying “Crises, replete with both complexity and change, require executives to both lead and manage effectively.” And cites leadership traps including taking a narrow view “The human brain is programmed to narrow its focus in the face of a threat. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism designed for self-protection. The trap is that your field of vision becomes restricted to the immediate foreground. It says “Leading through a crisis requires taking the long view, as opposed to managing the present.” Observing “that crises are most often over-managed and under-led.”
See these great quotes about coping with a crisis.
"Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is." Jack Nicklaus.
"The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which greatly afflict us. To fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives." Thomas Jefferson.
"Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think." Jawaharlal Nehru.
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