A key cornerstone of any crisis team is the role played by the team leader. They can make or break a response through their behavior. Here are 5 things good leaders do when managing a crisis.
Leaders set the tone in a crisis. Under pressure, team leaders must stay calm, making decisions based on reason, not urgency. This ensures that time and energy aren’t wasted and that team members are able to work productively throughout the response, it also maintains morale.
Given the extreme levels of pressure created by a crisis, some leaders respond by feeling obliged to ‘carry the response on their back’ and input into all aspects of the response. This kind of micromanaging risks creating a bottleneck in the response, and leads to some team members becoming marginalised. The best leaders perform like a conductor with an orchestra. Maximizing team potential through an effective framework and smart delegation. This includes holding the team to account against established processes and course correcting as needed.
That said - you can’t lead a crisis response through consensus. Good leaders need to be prepared to act decisively, and to overrule colleagues occasionally.
It’s people, not processes, that manage a crisis. Any organization or crisis response is only as good as the people it has working its response effort. As such, the emotional wellbeing, energy levels and morale of the team needs to be a priority for leaders. Beyond empowering the team and fostering productivity, leaders must swiftly tackle logistics to support their well-being. This means setting fair shifts, freeing team members from normal duties, and watching for burnout.
One of the key ingredients for implementing a cohesive and consistent crisis response is developing a clear strategy at the outset. This ensures there is a plan in place which informs priorities over the duration of a response. Too often teams jump straight into dealing with the tactical actions needed to ‘stop the bleeding’ and resolve the most obvious impacts resulting from an incident. This is the incident response team's role and should be handled by tactical responders. Crisis responders should be focusing their efforts on protecting the reputation and wider strategic interests of the organization.
Clear communication and information sharing within the team and with key support functions is vital for crisis response. Great leaders embed this into workflows, ensuring information is logged and shared through regular Situation Reports (SitReps). This also requires leaders to be good at ‘reading the room’ and sensitive to team working becoming overly chaotic. In these instances, the best leaders use timeouts and breaks to restore a measure of composure.
Read our resource: How to write a good crisis management plan
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