Being able to motivate and inspire your team through great communication, using Google forums and charisma is all well and good. But what about when the going gets tough? When there's a crisis? Perhaps things aren't going too well in the organization, and you need to make cutbacks. You'll not be popular with some members of the team. And your greatest detractors will look to you for answers and explanations.
How do you deal with any kind of crisis as a leader and come out unscathed? The best way to handle a crisis is to avoid it altogether. Whether this can be done to a large extent, by foreseeing a crisis in the future, try and anticipate something bad that may happen and take account for it. This is your job as leader to look into the future and trying to see what could stop your team achieving their goals. This is also why you need to be able to delegate and to set the work that's necessary for your team. This way, they can work in the business while you work on the business.
They keep the machine running while you pilot it. You can do this by looking at potential futures feel business or your organization and thereby seeing what lies ahead. You can do this by foreseen different futures for your team and organize ization and taking account of your reactions. Here are a few techniques to help us do this. The planning fallacy refers to the fact that we almost always underestimate the amount of resources required to complete a task. Very often will ask a team, how long will it take you to do this task?
If the response is two weeks, it may take three. In this case, part of your job as leader is to add a buffer so that if the team do overrun, it's not too much of a crisis. scenario planning is a kind of mental simulation. Basically, you imagine different situations and how the team would react in each one. Think about all the ways you would deal with all the things that could go wrong. And even imagine your doomsday scenario where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, all at the same time.
Keep track of all the risks that are on the horizon and be ready for them. Resilience refers to a business or organization ability to withstand difficult times. A business can be more resilient by ensuring it has low outstanding debt, low overheads and fixed costs. multiple independent products, even multiple different brands, flexible workers and employees. No weak points, fail safes, backups, and reserves. When things are good, you can prepare for the bad times.
If you have time by explaining to your team, the importance of imagining a difficult crisis and dealing with it ahead of time, then when something does go wrong, your team will survive much better than if they were not prepared at all. But with the best will in the world, things do go wrong, and for sure some things will go wrong. And there may not be an obvious solution. So what do you do now? First and foremost, make sure that you never point the finger and dole out blame to a team member. Doing this is a fast Way to make your team resent you.
And they can also create infighting. Remember, you need to be responsible as a leader. And that means that this, whatever it is, is your fault. If in actuality it's Jeff's fault, then it's still your fault, because you allowed it to be Jeff's fault. He should never have been in that position. Jeff is clearly not capable of performing that task.
So you need to take responsibility and take responsibility in front of your leaders without making any of your team members escape code or blaming them for something that's happened. It means that your team knows that you stand up for them, that you will take responsibility and protect them while they do their work. Keep Calm and making sure that everybody is working together to the same goal, which is to remove the crisis.