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We talk a lot about making good decisions, using good frameworks and building good strategies. Even if you have all those things, sometimes things will go wrong. Good strategies can fail, good decisions can turn back and even the best frameworks break. At least a few times during your journey, everything will go wrong all at once.
It’s a horrible feeling.
Imagine this: You are missing revenue targets because your new marketing strategy isn’t working. Before you can jump in and fix it, you get notice that your biggest customer is churning out! Losing them is a big hit, but before you know it one of your key employees quits. All on the same day.
Yeah, a horrible feeling.
In these situations you have to be careful that you don’t make things worse. It’s easy to panic, and take some actions to feel like you are doing something. Throw a huge retention package at the departing employee, offer the churning customer a huge discount and kill the marketing strategy. We all hate feeling powerless, and taking actions makes us feel like we’re taking control.
Unfortunately, all of those initial, panicked reactions are unlikely to help. They are reactions to an unlucky confluence of events, and they don’t go to the deeper reasons that problems are happening. They make you feel better in the short term but make things harder going forward.
Instead, when everything is going wrong you need to take a breadth. Your team looks to you as a leader, and if you start panicking they will panic as well. They need you to be calm, and slow things down. It’s hard, I know, but important.
Once you have slowed things down, here’s the playbook I use when everything starts going wrong all at once:
Pick one problem to solve. It’s tempting to try and solve everything at once, but impossible. Instead, pick the biggest problem and focus entirely on that one. It does mean you need to leave all the other problems to fester, but they will be there when you are ready to tackle them.
Create at least 3 options. Force your team to generate alternatives, as that will make sure you aren’t just reacting with the first thing you think about. With three options in hand, you can make a good decision on what to do next.
Get the entire team behind 1 option. After picking one option, get everyone mobilized towards making it succeed. You want to avoid having everyone sit back and wait to see what happens, make sure they are invested in helping see it through.
If you are lucky, you will solve the problem. More likely, you will stem the bleeding which means the problem remains but will not get worse. That’s okay for now! In handling this situation, our goal is to get you the time to make more complex and long-term plans that will go to the core of how these problems started in the first place.
While you can’t give your team a quick solution, you can give them a plan. That is a surprisingly effective tool to prevent panic, as having a plan to believe in reduces anxiety about the unknown. Even if your plan doesn’t work, having one will help get everyone back on track.
You and your team want easy solutions, especially in the face of so many problems. Accepting that is not an option, and having a plan is the best you can do in such difficult situations.
I’m sorry to say that this will happen to you at some point, likely more than once. The only hopeful thing I can share is that if you successfully navigate these situations your team will have more confidence in your leadership and be more capable of handling crises in the future. That is not much, but it is something!
For more on Strategy and Crisis Management, see: