Apr 28th 10 Posted by Bob Sevier in Featured Articles, Leadership

Leadership In Crisis

A Harvard Business Review article from last summer (HBR, July–August 2009) offered an interesting article entitled, “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky.

I have often felt that until higher education has its first heart attack, there will be a powerful temptation to maintain the status quo. Of course, over the last year or so, higher education has had its first heart attack.

This article expanded my analogy a bit. Instead of a first heart attack, what if the heart attack is ongoing? The authors posit that when the economy recovers, things won’t return to normal—and a different mode of leadership will be required.

They write, “It would be profoundly reassuring to view the current economic crisis as simply another rough spell that we need to get through.  Unfortunately, though, today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue as the norm even after the recession ends.”

“The task of leading during a sustained crisis is treacherous.  Crisis leadership has two distinct phases.  First is that emergency phase, when your task is to stabilize the situation and buy time.  Second is the adaptive phase, when you tackle the underlying causes of the crisis and build the capacity to thrive in a new reality.  The adaptive phase is especially tricky:  People put enormous pressure on you to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t.  As you ask them to make necessary but uncomfortable adaptive changes in their behavior or work, they may try to bring you down.  People clamor for direction, while you are faced with a way forward that isn’t at all obvious.  Twists and turns are the only certainty.”

It’s kind of like triage and long-term care all at the same time.

Photo by maxmana