Fright or Fright
Two months ago, in late March, as the growing momentum of the COVID-19 pandemic stunned the globe, I joined a group of international managers in a webinar where a roster of experts attempted to defragment the crisis into manageable decision points. Their goal, ostensibly, was to help the audience lead their organizations through the crisis with clarity, confidence, and composure.
COVID-19, they said, is both a medical catastrophe and a management challenge. The latter, it was also said, needs close attention and choice-making for institutions to emerge unscathed, if not stronger, from the crisis. Obviously, the backdrop to this period and this conversation was the abysmal handling of the pandemic and the ensuing domestic fiasco plaguing some national governments around the world.
From my own experience, leadership during a pandemic that came with neither precedent nor playbook, needs much effort in a special mindset. Managers and their advisors have to continually wrestle not only with the unpredictability of the infection, but also avoid infection themselves - not by the disease, but something less physical - infection by fear.
Fear is a potent emotion and because it is so natural, can easily override reasoned action, but those entrusted with decision-making in crisis such as the current one, must learn how to spot fear and channel it to constructive, not more destructive, ends.
Here are three ways in which fear shows up. I also share some techniques to avoid infection by fear either in my own decisions or in perspectives of well-intentioned advisors.
Fear as a voice – I call this the democratization of fear. It happens when someone in the team, perhaps someone well respected or naturally persuasive, articulates negatively not just for themselves, but for the entire group – “We can’t do that”. By itself, this could be a major decision derailer, if the team were let to fall in this line, because it saps confidence away.
When this happens, I give the rest of the team their voice back, by going around the room and asking each for their thoughts. They almost always break away from the negative assertion of “We can’t” and towards perspectives that are truly diverse and not only forward-leaning but even more enhanced.
Fear only sees the downside – This is the familiar and perennial fear-of-change mindset that is especially good at cataloging all that could go wrong with a decision and is unable, or unwilling, to find any upside to it. The result is that the clarity of new possibilities is dulled and replaced with an overwhelming list of amplified limitations - no action wins over great options that are not 100% risk free.
When facing this, focus on the organization’s values or most important stakeholder, or consumer. Shift the team’s focus from the downside of the decision to the alternative - the impact on the key stakeholder. “Yes, there are risks. However, if we allow this impact to our stakeholder, what will this say to them about us or say to the world about our values. The cost to us is higher than the size of the downside risk”.
Fear as a rush to do something - anything – This expression of fear looks like decisive action, but it tends to bias towards doing something at the risk of not thinking it through, or even creating serious unintended consequences down the road. This mindset reassures us that “We are acting”, even if it reactive and with fragile composure.
Here, create discipline in how information flows into the team’s deliberations so that its sources are consistent and reliable. Play out short, medium- and long-term scenarios and identify which priorities and values are driving the choices in each scenario. Any new information or updates must flow through the structure to the choice that makes the most sense in the moment. Agility is allowed, but the goal is for the team to stay from rash action.
All said, the emotion of fear exists for good reason, not the least because it is designed to jolt us to attention and focus us on risk at hand. Once it has our attention, fear must not and should not be allowed to take control of our psyche or our decisions. It cannot infect us or paralyze our judgment when making the calls that will allow us to live and thrive another day.
Be it through its voice (eroding confidence), what it allows us to see (reducing clarity) or what it forces us to do (losing composure), fear is infectious and limiting – and in the COVID-19 crisis and any other where the stakes are so high, we need all the clarity, confidence, and composure that we can muster.
#purpose #courage #leadership #impact