Crisis, What Crisis?
During my 20+ years of leadership at independent schools, I definitely faced the full range of crises that might beset small schools. I learned a lot about being both somewhat prepared for these exigent events, and also about being totally unprepared and yet somehow able to invoke the necessary actions and skills to get things level again. Initially, and in much of my early experience of these big bumps in the road, I tended to think that crisis was always something like a chemical spill on nearby Route 128. Over the years, however, I learned, and internalized, that a crisis could develop from any event or incident that might adversely affect the mission of the school, if left unattended.
Oddly enough, in spite of being minimally prepared in my early years on the job, I began to see patterns, recurring themes, actions and repeated use of institutional values that helped me learn how much of our behavior during these difficult interruptions to our daily work contained an approach worth replicating. It was a recurrence of applying certain skills that could in fact be used in many areas of organizational management.
As you might guess, if you do a little research, you will find basic information to help you understand the nature of crisis. There are 4 stages of a crisis, 5 stages of a crisis, the 4 C’s of crisis, the 5 C’s of crisis, etc. Mostly these helpful structures are suggesting that we: 1. Recognize the Crisis; 2. Create an initial response; 3. Manage the crisis; 4. Create and acknowledge the need for flexibility in the managing of the crisis; and finally, 5. Make time to recover and transition back to normalcy. These five steps alone are actually helpful to us when defining many kinds of situations that are not crises. Recognizing the situation, naming it, creating an initial response, and so on, are all helpful to deconstructing and managing problems of many kinds. They are good first steps in organizational behavior.
So what additional parts of our leadership approach during crisis might be utilized in everyday work? Preparation for one—the advance work that creates systems and channels of communication that are robust and clear. Forming a team for another—a team that knows how to work together, how to be flexible and nimble and a group of people with baked-in trust and respect—all there to do the work that makes the institution better. In addition, what teams learn about themselves during crisis work can equally be internalized and applied to different situations.
During the recent pandemic we all faced levels of crisis that we were unaccustomed to—we rapidly saw that even so-called experts did not truly know what we were up against. What we thought we knew shifted and changed daily. As we attempted to focus on “keeping school open” we found that our technology systems weren’t robust enough, or our air filtration systems were non-existent. As we got the curriculum moving, we were confronted with mental health issues in our students and the adults alike, and realized we had no systems or structures to acknowledge and tend to these concerns. To use one of my favorite images, it was the game of croquet in Alice in Wonderland, when the mallets keep morphing into a new live creature. Pretty hard to follow any rules and play the game!
Even though we did not know what we were up against managing our organizations during Covid, we could, with effort and focus, mostly find ways to build trust and confidence in the teams we created. Suddenly the school nurse and her consulting doctor became frontline in our work. Immediately we had new respect for our facilities crew—we saw the ways we could support these professionals during the crises and the re-vitalized respect we had for them, one hopes, has continued to this day.
While it is during crisis management that senior leaders frequently move into a command-and-control zone, good senior leaders also access their empathy, knowing that everyone will experience crisis differently, and that the flexibility that was highlighted in stage 4 above, is vital to keeping the community together.
As our Words of Wisdom readers may know, I have deep admiration for Jacinda Ardern’s leadership. The former prime minister of New Zealand is now doing work at Harvard’s T.C. Chan School of Health and Harvard Law School. Her central research and discovery relate to leading with empathy. In a recent interview at T.C. Chan School of Health, she also spoke about how she began to access and draw on the skills she used during the massive crises she handled during her tenure, to her approach to leading each day. She described the components of crisis leadership as: authenticity, proximity and action. These moments and approaches she found to be valuable in her everyday work as an international leader.
Ardern too found that the work she and her team did during the horrendous crises she handled on her watch, brought them together as a functional group in ways that they were then able to apply to times of non-crisis. Think about it: being authentic, to me that means being honest with each other, being “real” and therefore relating to the public in ways that they can easily receive. Proximity, or being near, I think of this as getting close to the issues, understanding them fully and acting by using your best judgement, based on what you know—which may not be everything. And action—doing something and communicating about it; letting your organization or constituencies know both that there is something that can be done, and that your leaders are doing it.
In her interview at Harvard, framed under the heading, leading with empathy, Dame Jacinda went on to say that through the approaches to leadership she followed, both during times of crises and beyond, she learned humility. This humility in turn taught her to be open constantly to learning and to sharing what she had learned, leading to transparency, which became an additional watchword in her work.
I hope that you and your team can find ways to grow and learn through the vital work you do when managing crisis. The common ground that crisis provides you can frequently be found in what might first appear to be the disparate elements of an everyday problem. Bringing together a team of like-minded people, none of whom is necessarily the expert, will often create the right environment for solution. As the Chinese symbol for crisis indicates, opportunity exists side-by-side with danger.