Composing an effective team requires finding experienced and heterogeneous members. It is helpful when individuals have prior knowledge relative to the crisis and can contribute something complementary to the team. During a crisis, flexibility, creativity, and agility are key team competencies. Often, crisis teams are ad hoc and must learn as they go. Given the lack of previous experience dealing with crises – because crises are rare occurrences – it is important that team members seek new knowledge broadly across boundaries. An effective leader builds a team like a puzzle, so that each piece plays a role and fits with the others to make a whole picture. The team leader creates a vision that others embrace and are committed to strive toward. The team leader identifies the team purpose and without being rigid, guides the team toward its goals.
Team Composition – be intentional and strategic about team composition:
- Think strategically about the composition of the crisis leadership team. It is not advisable to only take the first people who volunteer even though they may be well-meaning.
- Look for team members who bring knowledge, expertise, familiarity and experience to the process.
- Diverse teams have the potential to generate better ideas because of their different backgrounds. A diversity of membership helps the team blind spots and make connections beyond those of team members with similar expertise or shared experiences.
- The advantages of a diverse team can only be realized if team leadership and members together foster inclusiveness by listening and valuing the contributions of each member.
First Steps – establish purpose and accountability:
- Identify and communicate the team’s purpose. This will guide the team’s actions and help establish explicit goals and performance measures.
- Set the terms for how team members should be mutually accountable to each other so that the team as a whole is responsible for producing results.
- Establish explicit goals and expectations.
Effective Crisis Leadership Team Culture Norms:
- Psychological safety and a climate of trust – team members should feel safe sharing a broad range of ideas and be willing to accept constructive feedback.
- Embracing complexity – team members understand and respond to the complexity of the crisis situation and do not simplify their interpretations of complex problems.
- Systems thinking – the team takes in broad and varied data simultaneously paying attention to local, immediate inputs and the entire system.
- Seeing failure as learning – the team exams failures and anticipates worst-case scenarios without fixating on blame. Team members focus on learning, adapting and responding. They bring challenging issues and questions to the team for response; they do not hide failure or make assumptions.
- Valuing expertise and knowledge – the team seeks out, respects and utilizes expertise – even when information comes from people with less seniority or traditional authority. If the expertise is relevant, the team respects and uses it.
- Boundary-spanning – the team deliberately and actively seeks relationships, information, and ideas across boundaries. Team members are broad minded and do not become insular. Identify team members to serve as external connectors.
- Learning-oriented – team members easily share skills and seek out new knowledge. The team recognizes the need to un-learn bad habits or old ideas in service of new realities and needs.
- Cultivating individual and team resilience – team members have the ability to bounce back after setbacks and continue to function and operate during times of extreme duress.
Continue to Empower and Adapt – help the team quickly respond to changing situations:
- Minimize red tape
- Be nimble and allow for improvisation, flexibility and innovation
- Adjust roles, structure and process as needed
- Focus on team purpose when existing hierarchy and rules need to be challenged
- Be transparent about the reality – people can handle known challenges much more than they can not knowing
- Address the anxiety the team feels – ignoring anxiety will prevent the team from learning and seeing opportunities
- Stay actively engaged
Often a charismatic leader will emerge during a crisis event and crystallize the team’s performance goals.[i] Effective charismatic leadership not only involves the nuts and bolts of crisis management, but also includes communicating the parameters for action.[ii] Through their visionary communication style, charismatic leaders are masterful at influencing and inspiring teams. Charismatic leaders motivate by utilizing persuasive and positive language to convey an expectation that the team will achieve its goals, with an emphasis on high productivity.[iii] Through the articulation of ideological purpose and the impression of competence, charismatic leaders engage in actions that motivate team members. Charismatic leaders excel at managing their team when they can not only communicate rationally and clearly, but also coordinate the team’s activities to focus on solvable problems.[iv]
[ii] Carling, Seristo, & Gabrielson, Anatomy of crisis management, 343-360
[iii] Hackman & Johnson, Leadership
[iv] Devitt & Borodzicz, Interwoven leadership, 208-216