Monday, 8:22am: You arrive at the office and the 31 Post-It notes on your computer, phone, and desk remind you of the misery you left on Friday. You’re trying to do a hundred things at once and there could never be enough time, money, or people to accomplish them all.
8:37am: You get a coffee and start organizing the Post-Its into a to-do list.
10:14am: You finally get through your emails and dive into the work.
1:00pm: You sit down at your regular seat in the weekly team meeting. The morning has given you some confidence that you have a handle on your plan. The room goes dark, the projector powers up and the PowerPoint slide says it all. The team leader has decided to take a new tack. He changes the priorities and changes the game. It’s hopeless.
3:00pm: You try to move forward. You meet with two teammates to talk about how to approach the new initiative. You share a couple of ideas. “We’ve already tried that.” “That’s my area.” “Pablo would be pissed if you stole that from him.” Every inch of ground you cover is already claimed as someone else’s turf. You can’t think of anything to say except, “THEN WHY HAVEN’T THEY DONE ANYTHING ABOUT IT??”
4:30pm: Cross-functional team meeting with people from across the company. You enter with your head down, embarrassed. You know that your team hasn’t added much value lately.
But then…
5:10pm: Something wonderful happens: a crisis. Your biggest customer threatens to move all their business, there’s a fire in your Distribution Center, the competition launches their new product to rave reviews and your response was scheduled to be months away. Any crisis will do.
Suddenly, instead of a hundred priorities, there’s one. The resources that were so hard to unlock a week ago are flowing freely. The people who were staking out their turf are collaborating and cooperating. The spineless and conflict-avoidant boss is finally assuming a leadership role. This is fantastic!
The team comes through with flying colors. The CEO sends an email to the whole company thanking your team for the extraordinary effort and brands your boss a hero. Your team interactions are great. You’re all proud of what you accomplished together.
And now your team has had the first “hit.” What you do next will decide your fate. Will you become a Crisis Junkie team?
In my next post, I’ll talk about the pervasive crisis addiction I’ve seen in my work with teams.
Further Reading
What your Team can Learn from the Crisis Junkies in Congress
I agree with this scenario, I beleive this is how it works with in all enviroments. I think the key is to understand how to prioritze and to really set aside and what is the important. There is a lot of individuals that have not been trained on how to properly priotize. In this example one of the crises was a threat from a customer to pull the business? if you drill down on this threat every contract has that clause in it if you are not meeting the contract agreements. So if you are proactive in looking after that customer it should have never escelated to being put on notice. A lot of times it boils down to communication of what is expected and to ensure that front line managers understand expectations of both internal and external customers from the beggining and then in my opionin we would see a reduction in crisis managment.
It is always hard to plan a good crisis to focus the team. And no matter how well we manage our businesses, there will be a crisis. One element that we probably don’t look at closely enough is the look back to see what caused the crisis in the first place and how could we have managed differently to avoid it. Crisis to crisis management is not healthy for any organization and how do you celebrate success if it becomes the norm?
This is the life I lead almost to the T. I find that you can be in almost a bobble head state were everyone hears what you are saying, but nobody is really listening. You can forewarn the consequences of certain actions or lack of action, but nothing get done till the 11th hour and there is truly a consequence being presented by the customer. Sometimes Crisis Management becomes the norm that the answer always becomes, “you will figure it out, you always do”. Just because you can pull it off at the last minute, doesn’t mean that we could have always done it. People don’t always look at the cost that it takes to pull it off at the last minute, what other business had to suffer to make it happen, how much stress was put the staff and management to complete the task, what relationships were damaged in order to “Getter done”?
I also find that crisis situations arise and if you are able to get the team to focus and achieve getting the situation handled or solved then most times you learn that the situation was never really as much of a crisis as what it was made to be. Every person or group or team has a responsibility and to each there goals are most important and need to be escalated to a crisis level in order to get them done. I am not sure how to manage these situations as it is hard to tell someone there situation is less important then anothers? In the end I feel that there will always be crisis and if the focus is there to get through it and after that the focus can change to why were we in that situation in the first place.then success is imminent.
Living the crisis junkie team life is a hard one, especially when the praise rains down after the marathon rescue sessions; it is appreciated that efforts are recognized but it really undermines attempts at team reform. One of my goals is to get my team off this path, but it is proving to be a challenge. For me, it almost has the reverse effect for resource availability; the constant crisis’s tie my resources up so deadlines get pushed and it becomes a way of life.
Jason, I think you’ve nailed one of the hardest parts of dealing with a crisis junkie team–there’s no bandwidth to do the things that will get you off the treadmill. For some short period of time, you and your team will probably need to take on a heavier than normal workload to clear the backlog while at the same time creating a more manageable plan for the future. These are the cases where I often recommend a contract employee. No one can afford to add headcount these days, but having someone take some of the pressure off with busy work can actually give you just enough breathing room to clean up your act. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what my clear the log jam for your team.
It has been my expreriance that the crisis junkie culture does give everone a “rush” of a great accomplishment and actually aids on some levels in team building, but the hightened stress and lack of organization in this culture will wear on everyone over time and set you up for failure and loss of personel. I personally have worked in both a “crisis state” and a in proactive well planned system, and would always prefer to be in the later but to do that you need to have everyone on board and communicating the goals. Once at that level the crisis’ will be few and far between.
The management of crisis to crisis becomes perpetuating, feeding from one to the next. Rather than work on the long term goals and vision, wating 5 more minutes and the next problem will present itself. As the leader of a business unit we are expected to have the vision to create an environment that fosters growth and long term sustainability, while finding the solutions that keep these same problems from repeating.
We all live in a fast paced world where things out of our control dictate the flow and direction of our days. In some cases the believe may be that if we are not in crisis mode then we are coasting and there is something wrong with our work ethic . As leaders when we portray this attitiude we encourage short term fixes so that the appearance is that everyone is engaged.
Planning something out a month or year can be a mundane job that does not give the daily sense of completion that a lot of people need. Our industry typically attracts the getter done guys that need the sense of accomplishment.
Hi Howard, thanks for this reality check on the need for tangible and concrete progress. I think the challenge for the team leader is to have a plan and a well laid-out roadmap, while keeping up the progress reports and sense of momentum. If you keep the majority of working moving along well, the world will be sure to throw a few crises at you for excitement! If the regular work is done in crisis mode, there’s no spare capacity when the true emergencies land.
Crisis is the climax in a sequence of events, there are warning signs and various stages along the path to crisis. Solid communication, planning and a strong understanding of your industry, customers (internal and external) and competitors will help to make these warning signs more visible. I agree with Jim, after each crisis there needs to be a review of how it came to be in the first place otherwise there will surely be a repeat.
Crisis management is the art of making decisions by way of retroactive management. Although a crisis can be the result of the unknown, seeking to plan for this can help avoid drastic and pervasive impact on the organization. A degree of readiness can also drastically reduce the stress level throughout the organization.
Everyone gets a sense of accomplishment and value when they are able to show their ability, solve something difficult which is visible to many. Just like the overtime goal in a big game or the recognition of being a clutch player. Clearly defined expectations which are consistently measured and communicated across an organization are able to provide the same sense of accomplishment while steering a company down the path to sustainable success.
As much as I love the adrenaline of solving, fixing or contributing in any way to solving crisis on a daily basis, I have grown to truly appreciate avoiding these situations all together and experiencing a successful follow through and smooth running of a proactive plan. Working on a proactive plan to avoid as much crisis as possible will save me years of stress wear and tear on my heart… Hopefully this will allow me to enjoy the unavoidable crisis for a longer healthier life