How Coaching Can Help You Move from Crisis Management to Crisis Leadership
- by Magdalena Nowicka Mook
Harvard Business Review — Leaders always have known that uncertainty in the world, the workplace, and personal lives makes shepherding an enterprise or team a daunting and complex challenge.
In a crisis, leaders inevitably turn to what is readily at hand to navigate through difficulty—and they often miss resources they might not have considered. One resource in particular, coaching, can change the process of crisis management into constructive crisis leadership, an approach that is both proactive and powerful.
Sooner or later all organizations go through a crisis experience. When these situations arise, leaders naturally shift into planned or ad hoc behaviors that usually involve securing assets, making sure employees are taken care of, reviewing supply chains, and revising financial projections. They might think of messaging their clients, customers, and vendors. They may conduct scenario planning.
All these actions constitute what is traditionally considered effective crisis management, the process by which an organization deals with a disruptive and unexpected event that threatens to harm the organization or its stakeholders.
Futurist and trend hunter Jeremy Gutsche suggests that times of crisis lead to times of chaos. But chaos, Gutsche writes, is not what we might think of as fundamentally negative; in fact, it can lead to innovation, opportunities, and course corrections.
This is where crisis leadership comes into play. Effective crisis leadership can reveal potential benefits in factors that at first glance seemed to present only disadvantages and distress. Leaders who recognize how chaos can change the rules come out of crises stronger and with greater employee, customer, and community loyalty than they had before.