When Michael Bloomberg became Mayor of New York he was asked what he had achieved in his first 100 days. “I built my team,”, came the reply. “Yes, but what policies or legislation did you change, what did you accomplish?”. “I built my team.” He commented that “they, the press, never got the concept.”
Hiring the right people and building them into a capable and resilient team is the most important thing any boss does. This is because when fast-moving and complex events take hold there is just too much for a single person to do. This certainly applies to the President or the Prime Minister and to the CEOs of all those large corporate entities. It applies equally to more finite interests like small businesses or family offices where key individuals span a range of responsibilities as part of a relatively tight group. It’s too late to hire and build the team as crisis or setback ensues.
Strategy isn’t just for the big boys.
If my organisation, however small, is under an existential threat then for me that’s pretty strategic. And in that situation I want to be able to deliver a fitting response: proportionate, rigorous, timely and decisive. How can I make that happen?
Resilience in a crisis starts with getting the basics right, day to day. I need a cohesive team, comprised of people I trust, who also trust me. That team needs to be focusing on results, assuming collective accountability, happily handling challenge or conflict between us and putting our collective goals ahead of our personal aspirations.
Only with that trust, and confidence that the team is coherent and aligned with my clearly laid out strategic direction and shorter-term goals, can I give people their heads. I want each individual to understand their freedoms and constraints to exercise their responsibilities in an accountable way, without reference to me. Of course, if they are unsure, they can come and seek advice; but to become fully effective we all need to get used to owning the risks attached to our decisions. That’s what responsibility is all about. This type of delegation certainly focuses peoples’ thinking and gets more minds on the job. It’s proven to be good for innovation and agility too.
Given the choice wouldn’t everybody do this? Alas not. There are plenty of organisations that crave control and hold decision making centrally at the top. This is neither conducive to efficient working, especially when the pressure comes on, nor to creating a motivated team or workforce. Indeed, it runs counter to the Bloomberg doctrine: build the team. Why worry about building a strong team to enable you to cope with multiple pressures in a complex crisis if you are not going to delegate the handling of those challenges, at least to a reasonable extent?
COVID-19 has exposed the lack of capability in some over-centralised and under-prepared organisations in a fairly ruthless fashion. The response to the pandemic has exploded the myth of western exceptionalism, and has exposed some questionable leadership habits. In those nations where hubris may initially have delayed the response to the virus, both the medical and economic costs have been punishing, few more, so than in UK.
The most capable leadership teams are resilient; they prepare for crises by subjecting themselves to stress tests; they design for setbacks by building the collective temperament to deal with them. Many of us have risk registers with those heat maps to get us thinking about scenarios which trigger the necessary contingency planning. This is of course a useful approach to mitigating risk, but it is constrained by our imagination. It doesn’t help us with the events we don’t or can’t credibly anticipate.
Military experience is instructive here. Genuine resilience stems from the ability to handle the pressures of a crisis by applying method coupled with mental strength. The method is pretty straightforward: first, what problem are we trying to solve, based on access to the best information and assessment? Second, what are our options, evaluated in terms of risk, cost, impact and performance? Third, which option are we going to pick, then implement, doing whatever is necessary to achieve success?
The mental element comes from conditioning through training under pressure. External providers, like Amicus, have a range of scenarios that will expose individuals and teams to simulated pressure over a period of a few hours. The experience will alert people to their own personal response under a spotlight and they will also see how the team is likely to behave. Their collective capacity to handle setbacks will be considerably enhanced, and the payback will accrue just as much for more routine operations too.
All teams should look at building their capability through enhancing their resilience; it’s up to us as leaders to make sure they do.
