Winning - Jack Welch [50]
With all the noise out there about change, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and confused.
But there are really just four practices that matter: Communicate a sound rationale for every change. Have the right people at your side. Get rid of the resisters. And seize every single opportunity, even those from someone else’s misfortune. That’s it.
Don’t get all caught up in your knickers over change.
You just don’t need to.
10
Crisis Management
* * *
FROM OH-GOD-NO TO YES-WE’RE-FINE
IT’S NO WONDER that crisis management is often referred to as firefighting. Like a four-alarm blaze, an event of the oh-God-no variety can really consume an organization. Managers huddle in meeting after meeting, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, while everyone else gathers in little clumps all over the office to whisper. They wring their hands over whose head is going to roll. They obsess about their jobs, pointing fingers up, down, and sideways. Often, panic rages so high that real work grinds to a halt.
Sound familiar?
Look, crises happen. As long as companies are made up of human beings, there will be mistakes, controversies, and blowups. There will be accidents, theft, and fraud. The cold truth is that some degree of unwanted and unacceptable behavior is inevitable. If people always followed the rules, there would be no police forces, courthouses, or jails.
For leaders, crises often stand out as the most painful and trying experiences of their business lives. Crises can create anxiety-ridden days, sleepless nights, and a churning in the pit of your stomach like no other challenge you face at work.*
And on top of it all, crises demand from leaders a daunting balancing act. On one hand, you’ve got to throw everything you’ve got into understanding and solving the crisis. You have to unleash a torrent of time and energy, mainly your own, at dousing the flames. At the same time, you have to put that activity into a compartment and carry on as if nothing is actually wrong. That’s what leaders usually neglect—to their regret. Because when you focus only on the crisis, it can overtake the whole organization, sucking it into a vortex of blame, dread, and paralysis.
This balancing act is obviously brutal to pull off in the midst of an event that feels like a living hell. At the outset, you never have all the information you want or need, and solutions often emerge much more slowly than you’d like. And the ending to a crisis rarely seems completely fair or right. Good people sometimes get hurt, and all you can really be happy about is that the mess is finally over.
Each crisis is different. Some are entirely internal affairs with swift solutions. Others are huge media events, with all sorts of legal ramifications. The uniqueness of each crisis makes it hard to come up with rules for getting through them.
There are, however, five things you can assume about how your crisis will unfold. These assumptions played out in virtually every crisis I managed, from Aircraft Engines’ bribery case involving an Israeli air force general, to the company’s battle with the government over time card accuracy, to the Kidder Peabody scandal, where an employee misrepresented earnings by millions of dollars. These assumptions aren’t a formula for managing a crisis, but hopefully they’ll provide directional guidance as you get from oh-God-no back to yes-we’re-fine again:
First, assume the problem is worse than it appears. Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Don’t let that happen to you. Skip the denial step, and get into the mind-set that the problem will get bigger, messier, and more awful than you can possibly