Handling Crisis

Better-quality Leadership can let you survive in a Time of Crisis

Leadership is the kind of subject that invariably rises to the top in a time of crisis. Otherwise, it is one of those topics that companies talk a lot about but otherwise don't feel the need to pay much serious attention to. When skies are blue, the business can usually cruise along quite nicely with executives who are likely top operational managers but may or may not also have good leadership attributes.
Think about how executives typically reach senior management positions? The key responsibilities of middle management are to deliver against their operational and functional commitments. Those who perform well in their jobs will generally be promoted to positions of higher responsibility. The selection process will ensure that they have very good operational skills and have experience in managing different kinds of functions in the organization - finance, sales, customer service, HR, manufacturing, logistics - or all of them in the case of good general managers.
Managing a large global organization is very tough and getting tougher given our unpredictable, fast changing, intensely competitive market environment. Being a successful manager in such an environment is truly difficult: you have to constantly improve your products and services to keep up with fast changing technologies and markets; you have to work hard to retain existing customers and attract new ones regardless of how ferocious the competition is; and you must achieve good financial results quarter after quarter, lest you disappoint shareholders and financial analysts, who will then start asking for your head.
But, in highly disruptive times, let alone in a time of crisis, being an excellent manager is not enough. Presumably the company is in crisis because the new disruptive environment is so different from everything that came before. The tried-and-true management disciplines are no longer working. Something else, over and above excellent management is required, namely leadership.
The reason companies are often not able to turn themselves around and survive a serious crisis is not because they don't know what to do, but because the culture of the institution is not able to embrace the needed changes. What they lack is the leadership that through simple words, hard work and sheer passion is able to generate the urgency needed to mobilize people, as well as the sense of confidence needed to attack and solve the complex problems the organization is facing.
Management skills tend to be hard or quantitative in nature. Business and management schools, as well as engineering schools to some extent, do a fairly good job in teaching such concrete skills - technology, analysis, modeling, finance, and logistics, marketing and so on.
Leadership skills, on the other hand, are soft, that is, people-oriented in nature - human capital, market strategy, knowledge, innovation, culture. Some might wonder whether such leadership skills can be taught at all. Perhaps these are skills that you have to be born with.
Humble
To better appreciate why modesty and humility are critical attributes of good leaders, consider their opposite qualities: arrogance, pride and hubris. Hubris is a particularly appropriate term, first used in ancient Greece to describe the overconfident pride and arrogance that gets people, especially the powerful and rich in trouble. The word was frequently used to describe the actions of heroes in Greek tragedy whose disregard of the gods and their laws resulted in their downfall.
Human nature has not changed all that much in the intervening centuries. It is nearly impossible to find people, - especially those whose accomplishments have helped them achieve positions of power, success and wealth - who do not exhibit feelings of arrogance and pride to some degree. But to be a good leader, one has to truly fight hard not to let those feelings take over. Otherwise, they will lead to a distorted view of reality. They might even lead to a disregard of societal laws and norms, much as tragic heroes disregarded the laws of the gods.
Open Thinking
Open thinking that is ready to embrace whatever changes the new disruptive environment brings, is an essential attribute of good leaders
Collaboration skills
Disruptive innovations almost always come from outside a company, whether it is new technologies, products and services, or new competitors, processes and business models. Those innovations are increasingly collaborative and open, the result of people working together in new and integrated ways. Just about every study on innovation has identified the power of collaboration as one of the major forces driving innovation in today's environment.