The Human Side of Crisis Leadership: The intersection of people, process, and technology
What Organizations Learn from Crisis
This human crisis is again magnifying the fragility of organizations and the importance of leadership principles based on collaboration, communication, empathy and decision making processes. A human and economic crisis is not the time to discover your people are not appropriately trained, your processes are insufficient, and your technology is not modernized enough to enable effective remote work. Crisis events are litmus tests of your overall operational preparedness. Successful businesses learn from these events and increase investment in their people, processes, and technology to further mitigate business risks and ensure future sustainability.
About their People, Processes and Technology
Below are observations and best practices that will help strengthen your overall business and response to crisis events
People: leadership via collaboration, communication, empathy, and decision making processes
As people are all different, they need varying forms of leadership, especially in crisis driven isolated situations. The independent and high performers can often thrive on their own longer while the weaker performers need more oversight, supervision, and teamwork. Trust your observations and take steps to support their challenges.
Regular formal and non-formal communication keep remote teams together and functioning well. Implementation of decision making processes are imperative. For example, each person should be empowered to make decisions within agreed boundaries. This will help improve staff’s participation and filter out the most critical issues for escalation to relevant leaders. Decision making will become timelier and more dynamic.
Processes: performed remotely manual processes are even more ineffective
Manual processes are not easily replicated remotely leading to confusion, stress, and errors. The manual checking processes break down and managers lose oversight.
Staff without appropriate training, skills, and capabilities can`t adapt to a new process environment and become more ineffective. For example, businesses should ensure their people are trained on crisis management and have agreed processes / workflows that will be invoked during a crisis (BCP). Although not perfect, these steps will help mitigate business risk of crisis events.
Technology: effective system implementation is process dependent
Insufficient integration of processes and technology negatively impacts the effectiveness of system automation.
Infrastructure modernization, implementation and live testing is imperative to availability during crisis events. Businesses should ensure that their technology infrastructure can support business functions during various crisis scenarios such as fires, cyberattacks, earthquakes and pandemics. Implementation and testing of collaboration tools, messaging forums and virtual communication applications are key to automate workflows and improve communication during a crisis event.
Impacts their Long – term Sustainability
During a crisis, the key to success is flexibility and commitment from all levels of staff and senior leadership to do whatever is necessary as a company. Once the situation normalizes, businesses should conduct postmortems to understand their challenges and opportunities and action them. Investing more in people, processes and technology is key to ensure future sustainability in the face of ever increasing and intensifying business risk events.