Three things to do in order to establish emotional and professional safety in a moment of crisis at work.
A checklist always gets the job done.
It accounts for rules and processes, it ensures that timelines are met, and it guarantees that no critical step is forgotten.
But what a checklist does not do is to consider the emotions of those involved. The stress it puts on them, the uncertainty between one step and the next, the guessing that tends to fill in the gaps.
For that, there’s no checklist that can help.
You’ll just have to be human.
Some people mistake performance with loyalty. It’s common in sport, for example, where players are good only for as long as they wear the right jersey. And it’s common in business, where employees get rewarded for tenure and compliance.
But while performance can be fluctuating over a period of time and in context, there is no correlation with loyalty.
One could actually argue that the capacity to be in different teams, to learn from different environments, to deliver under different circumstances, tends to increase and strengthen performance.
So, when mixing performance with loyalty, what we are really doing is judging the worth of our cause, of our principles, in a sense of our very own performance. It’s one of those cases where we let the decisions and opinions of others affect how we think we are doing.
And we should try to never let that happen.
The problem with looking at a small unit to discuss the larger one is that the tone of the discussion is going to be very different depending on the small unit you look at.
Can a great day make the entire month invariably great? And can a poor one make it invariably poor?
Can a bad week make the entire quarter invariably bad? And can a good one make it invariably good?
Can a disappointing month make the entire year invariably disappointing? And can an exciting one make it invariably exciting?
You should your effort into controlling the broader unit instead – that’s made of narrative, of strategy, of purpose. And use that to try and explain the smaller units.
This is what will give you course and momentum.
As a person in a position of power (a parent, a manager, a politician) your role in a moment of crisis is to inspire tranquillity.
That’s how others around you can continue to think clearly and help everyone out of the crisis.
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