From Crisis Management to VUCA Leadership: How to build a resilient team

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Transcript:

(AI Generated)

I was talking with an executive yesterday who runs a pretty sizable organization and they've been living and leading in crisis for the last four years. And that was the exact words when I interviewed all the executive team at the start of the engagement, they all said, we've been in crisis management for four years.

And I was like, how can there be a crisis for four years? Like there's a crisis for one day, and then we go into solution mode.

Yeah.

And so when we're talking in the boardroom, he said we need to stop using the word crisis because crisis is really triggering. Crisis is causing challenges for our people.

Crisis is putting people in a scarcity reaction the whole time. And he suddenly realized, petty dropped. He said, yeah, just that word makes people trigger adrenaline and cortisol and creates this massive scarcity reaction. He said, well, actually what we need to be creating is a senior leadership team that,

is able to deal with VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We need to be creating a leadership team that's resilient and able to look at every single one of these supposed crises that come along and go, okay, another problem, but we know how to deal with this. We will get through it.

And when we move from, oh my God, it's another crisis to another thing, let's get into it. That's a shift. Right? And the tone shifts and the response shifts from a panic reaction and business continuity planning and emergency response meetings to, okay. Another thing that is complex and ambiguous and difficult to deal with is a volatile situation.

And we haven't talked about it in the book, but we do talk about it in our program, but essentially, how do we move people from feeling vulnerable, uncertain, concerned, and anxious to having vision, understanding, clarity and agility. And part of that is moving from a scarcity to an abundant mindset.