Welcome back to part two of a two part series where I lay out the final five (of ten) principles that form a path for leading in uncertain times, whether that be a pandemic, blizzard, long winter, ice age or simply the tasks of everyday leadership. If you missed part one, you can catch up here.
Number Six—Build Trust
It’s important to build trust in uncertain seasons. It’s been said that the antidote to the unknown is that which is known. Trust lies in what is known. Personally, it lies first in our faith, but as an organization, there is trust that you have with the community and vendors and partners and investors and stakeholders of every kind. In order to lead through crisis, committed to mission-centricity and the people that have been entrusted to us, you need to act in every moment in a manner that allows you to build upon, and build up, that trust.
McKinsey Consulting released an article last summer that contained an interview with three executives who had led through previous crises including the 2008/09 economic disruption, the SARS epidemic and the swine flu. There were numerous learnings that came through leading in those challenging times, but all three leaders indicated that a central theme was this idea of building upon and building trust.
One of the ways trust is built is to resist the natural tendency when crisis strikes to pull all decision-making back to the top leadership level. The reality is that the best solutions are most often discovered closer to the ground, closer to where the challenges are occurring. So a key principle is to build trust by avoiding the knee jerk response to bring everything back to central planning and control and instead let your decisions be informed by listening well at the edges.
Number Seven—Practice Stewardship
The next principle is stewardship. Stewardship is closely related to trust and includes stewardship of people, finances, and opportunities. Trust is built through transparency and honesty and a commitment to protecting relationships. In uncertain times as you engage with your team and other stakeholders there’s no need to sugar coat the challenges.
Steward Your Words
If the situation involves potential job or compensation cuts, don’t step around the elephant in the room. In that case you may simply say, I know many of you may be wondering if your job and compensation is secure. This could be followed by a statement acknowledging your own uncertainty in addition to your commitment to protect their jobs or keep them informed without sudden surprises or … whatever the situation calls for. Speak honestly about what the realities are in the situation, appropriately framed of course for each constituency.
Steward Your Human Capital
Another aspect of stewardship as it relates to staffing has to do with capacity shifting. In extreme situations like those experienced during the pandemic, pivots in program and changing economic realities can lead to the need to reallocate staff. In these situations, both the organization and the staff are best served by adjusting according to function as opposed to role. The driving question should be, What do we need right now? This should be followed quickly by the second question, Who on the team has the capacity, gifts and skills to meet that need … even if it is above, below or beyond the scope of their role or job description?
Steward Your Financial Resources
The next area that must be stewarded well is the finances. Unfortunately, this is an area that is too often not managed well. Many nonprofits, including churches, do not have an adequate understanding of their financial operation, especially the management of cash which becomes acutely important in uncertain times. You need to know how much cash you have and how far that is going to carry you. Your burn rate, the amount of monthly expense, is a key metric in stewarding finances.
In addition, the management of the cash on hand is key. As a leader you must guide appropriate expense containment and communicate to your team and board or other stakeholders, these decisions. This will build confidence as you demonstrate that you are managing well the resources of the organization. Good financial stewardship, especially in uncertain times, provides the greatest potential for organizational sustainability.
Steward your opportunity
Finally, it’s important to be a good steward of opportunity. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked in the rush to move beyond the current uncertainty or crisis back to “normal.” The reality is that today’s problems are the launchpad for tomorrow’s innovations. If you are observant you will see innovation happen at a very rapid rate in organizations as they learn new solutions for new problems. A colleague encourages leaders to ask themselves, Knowing what you’ve gone through, what would you tell your ten year younger self that wasn’t available to you at the time that the current challenge was presented? This simple exercise helps to cement the learnings of the current season and slows folks down long enough to have them think about implications for the future.”
Begin to think about the problems that you are facing today and how they can be transitioned into innovations for tomorrow.
Number Eight—Communicate Often
In real estate, it’s always about location, location, location. In uncertain times is about the eighth principle, communicate, communicate, communicate. Effective communication is always important. It is especially important in times when things are changing so quickly. It needs to be done clearly. It needs to be done frequently. It needs to be done with an eye towards anticipating what those in your constituency are going to ask and includes responses to the concerns that they have. It also needs to be appropriate to the situation. Finally, the most important thing that a leader can do in a time of crisis is to be deliberately calm.
McKinsey also reported the results of their research measuring the importance of the different aspects of communication; what aspects contributed most to successful communication. They report that 55% of the success of communication is related to visual aspects. So, it’s important to think about what the visual components are as you send out communication within your organization. An additional 38% of the effectiveness is driven by tone. This aligns with their insistence that leaders must remain deliberately calm, but it also refers to the tone of written communication as well. Finally, only 7% of effectiveness, which is very painful for those of us who like our words, is the result of what you say – the actual words.
I recently lost my dad and so I’ve been helping my mom with the management of her finances. In the early days of the pandemic when the financial markets were crashing, she was obviously concerned about the impact on her retirement investments. I tried to assure her (and myself) that it would all be ok, and she need not worry – she had plenty of money to meet her needs. The other part of the battle was convincing her that the best decision was not to put everything into cash because that could be risky as well. I believe that my words were accurate, I had good tone, but it wasn’t until she began to hear from her financial advisor that my dad had spent hours and hours with and that she had history with that she began to relax a bit. And how did that happen? Every weekday, she received by email a quick video from “her guy” talking about what had happened that day in the market, his insights into the causes and what the plan was for the next day. It was her daily dose of hope. The video was not a slick, heavily produced message but rather her guy sitting behind his desk with his phone pointed at his face earnestly delivering the message of the day and encouraging mom “not to worry because that was his job.” There was something about the video that made the difference between his communication and the other sans-video emails she received from other financial institutions where she did business.
In the recent pandemic, I have seen this executed well not only in the financial services industry but also in other sectors including the Church. On numerous occasions I have heard the phrase, old school is the new school, as churches have created calling trees where everyone in their church, including visitors over the last 12 months receive regular old fashioned phone calls to check-in. Others are using a strategy like that employed by mom’s financial guy – video messages from various members of the team. There are regular Facebook Live messages from senior leaders, daily online times of prayer, additional gatherings of groups, and more, designed to keep the communication, and the care lines strong.
Anyone in the communication business, which is basically anyone who leads, not only wants to get the message right but wants to get the frequency correct as well. In today’s information saturated world there is a concern about too many messages leading to overload and a resulting, unlike, unfollow or even worse, unsubscribe. But in seasons of crisis, if you err, do so on the overcommunication side of the equation. The reality is that something you communicated today, may make a major shift tomorrow. And a week later, you may find yourself needing to guide the recipient in a totally new direction. Times of uncertainty include rapid change, and as result, warrant frequent communication.
Number Nine—Stay Flexible
Principle number nine is to have flexible priorities. In challenging seasons, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Each piece of new information informs a new decision and that new decision precipitates a long list of cascading implications. Just when you thought you had some semblance of direction; it may all seem to fall apart. You stabilize from that decision and then a member of your board or someone in your organization, strongly suggests something new that would require another shift. One of the often heard and most crazy-making comments of this nature goes something like this, Since our primary work is having to slow down because of the current season, it seems like you should have capacity to … fill-in-blank with whatever the messenger’s pet project happens to be. Now what? How do you prevent moving from being overwhelmed to immobilized? One of the best things you can do in uncertain times is to think in terms of tiers of work that will help with your prioritization of tasks.
Tier One: These are the things that are mission critical. They must happen in order to continue as an organization today, tomorrow, and next week. They keep the doors open and the boat afloat.
Tier Two: These are the things that are important and strategic. They may not have to be addressed immediately, but they do require action and are critical to the long-term vision and sustainability of the organization.
Tier Three: Tier three actions are those that may be helpful, but not necessarily strategic. They are things that would be nice to do or have but are not time sensitive. They can be “back-burnered” until stability is regained.
Tier Four: These are the things that are not only not critical but likely need to be eliminated or at a minimum be placed on a far back burner without a flame. In a season of uncertainty, leaders often discover work that prior to the crisis was seen to be tier one, but when eliminated as an option, was not missed. In many cases the resources directed at other priorities reveal greater results. In these scenarios, leaders should insist that some programs, products, ministries, etc. not be brought back once the environment returns to more normal times. It’s easier to not bring something back than to stop something that may meet the needs of a few but is draining resources from the most strategic work yielding the greatest results.
Having established tiers of flexible priorities helps you know where to place your attention. It also provides a line of well thought out, strategic defense in relationship to the incoming requests mentioned above. They give you an ability to say, Hey, I hear what you’re saying. We’ve identified that as a tier three priority. It’s still very much on the radar, but our current focus is on the actions associated with tier one and two priorities.
Another area of flexibility includes the discipline of providing direction as opposed to directives. In the rapid pace of change world that we live in, this is always important but becomes amplified in a season of uncertainty. Focus on helping your team, your people have clarity regarding where you’re headed but give them some freedom in determining how to get there.
In regular seasons of ministry and work, it’s the conversation about do you have an inflexible five-year plan, or do you have a strategic direction that allows there to be opportunity for movement and adjustments to strategy and tactics. You must establish the route to success and boundaries of the river you will traverse to get there informed by the principles of being mission centric and stewarding you people resources. Providing the clear direction keeps folks moving toward the vision and mission and trusting them to operate from their unique giftings and insights stewards well their contribution.
Finally, leading in uncertain times requires scenario planning. When the environment is significantly disrupted you must think in terms of developing rolling seven-day, 30-day, six-month, and 18-month plans. And each plan must have scenarios built in. The most recent pandemic requires at least three factors be considered in the scenarios—what stage of the virus are you/might you be operating in, what are the financial realities and what season are you in. In this example you might have three scenarios including continuums from continued infection acceleration to a vaccine for the virus, financial loss to strong recovery and next month to next year. And these plans are monitored by regular and agreed upon data and touchpoints and reviewed to determine what course adjustments will be required.
Give direction, not directives. Stay flexible.
Number Ten—Reimagine Next
Principle number ten is reimagine. At the front end of any crisis there is an appropriate time for stabilization and triage. Let’s make sure that the patient is stable here and that the organization can remain viable and sustainable. But it is also important that when the time is right that you and your organization don’t get stuck in triage mode. There comes a time for treatment and in the case of organizations a time to move toward adaptive solutions.
I believe that there is a great danger in seasons like this to become so focused on getting back to normal that you can miss the learnings of the crisis and shortchange the potential for enhanced and new innovative solutions that lead to accelerated results and impact. One of the ways to guard against this is to encourage those you lead during the storm to begin to dream a little bit again. What new options have become available? What are the new tools and resources that have been or need to be developed to address the current season of challenge? How might my product line, my team interactions, my ministry be different and be better not despite but as a result of the current challenges?
Again, going back to looking at your people, what reserves of talent, skill, money, assets, systems, and processes can you deploy in new ways? I’m working with an executive pastor who serves a large church in Tennessee. They have eight campuses and in the early months of the Covid 19 pandemic, they were not able to meet on the weekends. As a result, the large number of hourly employees that work in a variety of ministry areas on Sundays were without jobs for which to be paid. Instead of furloughing or releasing these team members, they redeployed them in a project to call everyone in their congregation to check on them, but then also to ask them to consider moving to online giving. So, they took an asset that they already had and used it to meet another need that presented itself in the challenging season. And increased their online, recurring giving from 40% to over 75% – double win!
Keep future focused and reimagine next.
