Crisis Management Lessons That Improve Your Business and Team
One of several things we focused on as partners and as a retained executive search firm this past year was client organizational development. This entailed working with individual executives, teams, and even companies, to ascertain their bench strength and helping them pivot or expand. This was both an exciting and enlightening exercise. The necessity to examine and understand three key areas became very apparent and has led me to question the future of the annual performance review as an effective tool that we will rely on going forward. Here’s why.
Do you really know who is impacting your business?
As we reached out and spoke with teams of executives individually and in a group setting, we found that focusing – in real time – on three key areas quickly became very necessary. These three areas are:
Sustainability
Do you know how to sustain much less accelerate your team/company performance during an extended business continuity phase (e.g. COVID, recession, market instability, etc.) for 6 to 12 months? What needs and solutions bubbled up that employees embraced? Who were your surprise leaders under stress?
Purpose
What is the process you are using to determine where to focus your business for the future? How are you sifting the “right data” to capture sustainable trends and competitive advantage? What did your teams/individuals contribute that left a sustained positive (team) impact? Who stood out as thriving in this disruptive environment?
Character
As you absorbed the challenges of the day, who in your team and your network stepped up to lead? What other key traits emerged that proved effective in turning the team in a (new) direction? How did they manage stress of change into an advantage? Do you know how to retain those characteristics and individuals?
All this real time crisis management naturally requires normalization over time. However, in this evolution, you have just gotten insightful demonstrations of behaviors that not only supported the business at hand – but likely re-shuffled the priorities and strategies for the future. Hopefully, my leap of thought that all this does not lend itself to a static, traditional, “what did you accomplish this year” kind of discussion, makes sense.
Instead, your team (and you as their manager) should be expecting constant and consistent feedback, support, corrective action and rewards vs. via some annualized process removed from the action/behavior that ultimately determines raises, promotions, stock allocation or added responsibility. The fact that this was not a short-term jolt to the system most recently, should only underline the need to have a much more immediate, near real time process for giving feedback on employee performance going forward.
Easy to say but hard to actually implement?
Clearly this is easier to spot and easier to respond to on a small department, team or even small company level. However, the approach to capturing a “best practice” should still be the same in a larger environment or company.
- It requires that managers have the emotional intelligence, autonomy, and support systems to recognize, reward and encourage key leadership behaviors in at least near real-time as they tie those back to the mission of the team, department, or company.
- It requires engaged senior executive team members who take the time to do frequent skip level meetings and openly share concerns and perspectives 2-4 levels up in the organization based on changes in strategy.
- It requires Business Partner HR voices who are actively living and embedded in what is happening in each team.
It may even require that team results are elevated and recognized over individual results and success much more often. In other words – you have to invest in the organization in order to capitalize on disruption and deliver sustained results.
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