Leadership in Uncertain Times
I was invited into a briefing call with a client who is a major corporate in Australian Healthcare. The discussion was focused on developing insights for their internal leaders and the leaders of the companies they partner with, around uncertainty and dealing with events that are often outside their control. The client was acknowledging that “the external stressors are increasingly affecting focus, morale and psychological wellbeing at work.”
I think we all became better at responding to uncertainty as we learnt to live with the unpredictability of Covid 19. It started somewhere else in the world, then it found its way to us, it went from a perceived temporary inconvenience to, in some instances, a years long battle that resulted in irreversible change to how we live our lives.
With the current geopolitical and economic storm, once again starting beyond our shores and without our active willing participation, we’re involuntarily being brought into the vortex without desire or consent. However, we are now part of something we didn’t choose to be part of and we need to respond accordingly or, at the very least, consider where we are exposed.
I was invited into this discussion with the client based on the years I spent working internationally, responding to crisis and disaster without the time or resources to plan a response. Of course there was training, planning, scenario testing and capacity building that we engaged in, yet nobody ever foresaw what we would encounter when we would walk through the gates of the temple at Wat Yan Yao in Takua Pha, in the south of Thailand, and find the decomposing bodies of 3,500 laying on the ground. That was just something on a scale that we hadn’t been prepared for or realistically considered.
The numbers of deceased and the environment was different when I worked at the request of the Government of Saudi Arabia after delay floods there, or when I deployed into Japan in 2011 after the tsunami hit that beautiful country. The circumstances, the physical conditions and the resources at hand were different in each country, however, what remained the same was meeting the challenges.
I shared during my briefing call this week, a number of the clear learnings that I took from not only the deployments into these fields of international crisis and disaster but also my time working for Interpol on a highly classified counter terrorism program.
Hope is not a plan - from my time working in counter terrorism the maxim that hope is not a plan is balanced by the practicalities of our inability to prepare for every scenario that might occur. Predicting where the threat may come from is the inevitable challenge of those working in counter terrorism. They are only ever exposed for what they miss not what they prevent.
As leaders we don’t have to have all the answers, we do need to be present - the rise and fall of leaders who find themselves in a position of leading through crisis, is often not the solutions or change they bring to the table, but their presence. By being present, it says to the teams, company or community we are leading that we care and understand. Our absence says the opposite - we don’t care and we don’t understand the challenges.
Give information and you will get understanding - it was never my role dealing with families, friends or communities of those who had died to “make it better”. I wasn’t there to mend a broken heart and fix what in reality would never be fixed. My job was to give information and from that, you get understanding.
The caveat I attached to this is that we don’t need to be in crisis or disaster for these learnings to be relevant or have application. Crisis is the critical testing ground for leadership, and during these times, leaders will be identified by their actions and reactions, not the position or title they hold within an organisation.
To further emphasise the point of how these learnings have served me well, and subsequently the audiences I speak to, I shared a final learning during the briefing call. It didn’t come from the scene of crisis, but a clear learning I took from my 1400km run over 26 days in Thailand, when I was confronted with an injury that was a defining moment of the run. I needed to respond to the conditions that I had found myself in - not the ones I was hoping for. It’s where we find ourselves heading once again, as outlined during the briefing call, and how we respond will matter more than how we found ourselves in this position.
In times of opportunity as in times of uncertainty, action will often define us. If we wait until we have all of the answers to all of the possible questions, we may miss the opportunity that is seized by someone who had the courage to move first.