Fundamentally, a crisis is a grave and urgent challenge that threatens a group, community, organization, or nation. In medical parlance, it is critical rather than acute. Danger is in the air, and the situation is volatile. The symptoms of a crisis challenge include the following:

Hostile forces, from without or within, threaten survival of the group.
The situation is explosive, fueling a group’s fear and anxiety while creating an urgent need to take some sort of action – to fight or flee.
There is a widely perceived danger that the groups accumulated “value” (its resources, culture, and goods) will be lost and significantly diminished unless immediate action is taken.

- Dean Williams, Real Leadership

Sound familiar?

Over the past two months, we have been thrust into an intense crisis challenge. The many restrictions and fundamental life changes resulting from the Coronavirus outbreak have created ongoing social, economic, physical, and psychological effects. Most people are struggling to deal with the new realities of everyday life, and many of us are wondering how we might practice leadership in our businesses, families, and communities through this challenging time.

Even in normal circumstances, Leadership is a practice to mobilize people to do adaptive work. It often requires exploring different perspectives, holding complexity, and focusing attention on tough issues. It requires learning in the face of uncertainty, which can raise tensions in a group.

What does Leadership look like during a crisis challenge?

Leading people through times of crisis is complex leadership work, for which there are no easy answers. A crisis challenge holds up a magnifying glass to the Leadership practices required in normal circumstances. Exploring different perspectives, holding complexity, and focusing attention on tough issues become doubly important during a crisis challenge. Executives may feel pressure to take some action, any action, to appear as if they are addressing the crisis while not bringing the group closer to any sort of meaningful resolution. The better approach will be one that involves a measured, steady response that addresses true problems while building a sense of community among the affected individuals. Leadership during a crisis challenge will shape the future of the group, so it is crucial to pay attention to both technical and adaptive components. In his book, Williams outlines four strategies addressing the crisis challenge and common traps to avoid.

Four Strategies for Leadership in a Crisis Challenge

Address the Imminent Danger

The very first priority in any crisis challenge is to establish safety. Without this critical step, it is impossible to address any of the emotional or adaptive elements. These measures decrease the imminent danger to many people and buy time to think. For the current Coronavirus crisis, social distancing, hand washing, stay-at-home orders, and the closing of non-essential businesses have been some of the methods our politicians and executives have used to get people to safety. By taking measures to flatten the curve of Coronavirus cases, leaders can (we hope) use that time to understand and plan for more adaptive elements. Depending on the type of crisis, addressing the imminent danger might take days (e.g. a broken leg) - or as with our current pandemic 12-18 months until we have a treatment or a vaccine. For organizations, the imminent dangers are not only health considerations, but also economic ones. How to ensure liquidity for the next few months? How to stabilize the sales pipeline? Or how to secure a government loan?

Common Traps: There are two common traps that prevent leaders from effectively addressing the imminent danger. Leaders may play down the danger, thinking they can establish safety by claiming the threat is not as dangerous as others claim or feel. Leaders may also only focus on addressing the imminent threat and creating a sense of safety, ignoring the more emotional or adaptive components of the crisis.

Offer for Emotional Holding

People will have strong emotional reactions to a crisis challenge, and it is a crucial act of leadership to give space for these emotions, be it fear, anxiety, grief, anger, or stress. In our current crisis challenge, people are facing incredible loss of financial stability, routines, freedoms, human connection, and most traumatically, life. In my own life, my husband and I have faced a changing routine in our small apartment, social distance from our parents and friends in the US that we normally see regularly, and deep uncertainty about when we will be able to travel back to Germany to see my parents and friends. Honoring that loss at every level of society – individual, community, and country – is a necessary part of moving forward. Only once the loss has been honored can the group begin to re-establish hope. Working towards a common goal or purpose and recognizing the opportunities for transformation will help people gain resiliency to better cope with their losses. Shared purpose turns loss into sacrifice for something bigger. I found these two articles particularly useful in thinking about providing holding:

Common Traps: Sometimes leaders fall into the trap of spreading false optimism or worse, outwardly denying the emotions those in a community may be feeling. Sometimes leaders feel discomfort with strong emotions or worry that by acknowledging strong emotions, it will only make those emotions worse. However, without genuinely honoring the emotions of a community, it can be nearly impossible to move forward and address more adaptive elements of the crisis.

Focus on Underlying Issues

Crises reveal and magnify deeper underlying issues. These might be issues that are directly caused by the crisis, or they could be entirely unrelated to it, but come to the forefront as a result. The leadership work here is to keep people in learning mode around this challenge, allowing them to experiment and innovate while still feeling safe. This is where the difficult conversations will happen, and those exercising leadership need to allow for conflicting opinions and expression of views. It is important to analyze the situation and create time to think to prevent rash actions that only address parts of the underlying crisis. At a macro level, the Coronavirus crisis has magnified the underlying issues of globalization, capitalism, industrialization, economic and environmental injustice, poverty and inequality, and climate change. At a more micro levels, the crisis has opened up deeper issues around our education and work environments. What the Coronavirus has helped (and forced) us to understand is that virtual education and development is possible, but we must adapt our own behaviors, content, and expectations to virtual teaching and learning.

It is impossible to learn if people are not feeling safe.

Make sure the, imminent dangers are addressed first, and people feel held, before you move to the underlying issues.

Common Traps: Keeping people in learning mode is difficult work, especially when there are no easy answers. Leaders can fall into the trap of focusing in on the technical components to avoid the difficult, learning-focused adaptive work.

Manage Uncertainty

No two crises are ever the same which means that nobody will automatically know and understand every part of a crisis. It is important to acknowledge what is known and what is not known transparently, both internally and to the group. Learning together, openly and honestly, will strengthen the community and allow for shared responsibility in the development of strategies to manage the crisis. In the Coronavirus crisis, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern models transparent communication of uncertainty in this short video about the impact of a stay-at-home order.

Common Traps: Rather than transparently admit to what is not known, leaders may feel the pressure to convey a false sense of certainty. We have a word for those who offer confident certainty when things are uncertain: charlatan. The confident certainty offered by charlatans prevents shared learning across a community.

Leadership in a crisis challenge doesn’t fall only to those in a formally recognized position of authority, but on every person involved in the crisis. At KONU, we believe that you can lead from anywhere in a system. Taking the time to test your own assumptions and examine alternative perspectives can only help to strengthen your community’s resilience. The complexities of a crisis challenge will rarely allow for an easily agreed upon strategy, but working together will increase the likelihood of keeping people alive, moving forward, and making progress on adaptive issues.

Leadership for a Crisis Challenge: It's impossible to learn if people are not feeling safe