Some leaders are very good in a crisis. They may or may not acknowledge that, but the adrenaline of the crisis is fantastic for them. These people always explain to me the beauty of (finally) seeing employees aligned, super-committed, engaged, going the extra mile, taking accountability, collaborating across borders and achieving results in high performance mode. In other words, they are describing to me what the normal, non-crisis life of the organization should be. Pity you need to have a crisis to outperform.
But here is the trick. Don’t wait for the crisis. Create an inflection point in which you need to draw all those behaviours (employees aligned, super-committed, engaged, going the extra mile, taking accountability, collaborating across borders and achieving results in high performance mode). You need to reboot.
The organization needs ‘scheduled stress tests’, and leaders must be their orchestrators. This self-test, self-awareness, self-critical view, is vital for ‘readiness’. Again, don’t wait for a crisis. There are ways to do this. In our case, we compress a Reboot! Injection session in a day with a full leadership team. And this is often enough to launch ‘the stress test’.
The ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ is wrong. If it ain’t broke, the break may just be around the corner, so don’t be complacent and reboot-‘it’, before you have to.
Readiness is not a concept, it is a state of action.
Let me share tomorrow the fourth and final ‘readiness driver’: ‘Renounce adaptation and robustness’.