Leading & Managing in a Crisis

A crisis is an opportunity riding a dangerous wind.
— Chinese Proverb

The Challenge of Change

When the world changes in profound and unfamiliar ways, leaders and their organizations are forced to scramble in response. Whether the crisis you’re facing is self-imposed, or it’s imposed on you by circumstance, you need the ability to shift your thinking to fit the new problem rather than interpret the new problem to fit your old thinking.

That’s a challenge in its own right, but the work doesn’t stop there. You next need the ability to change your processes and behaviors so they align with this new thinking.

Adaptive Learning

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
— John F. Kennedy

Facilitating the adaptive learning required to do all this is a core leadership challenge. It’s hard work. In this interactive workshop members will gain practical strategies and skills for how to build teams, projects, and organizations that can perform this work in a highly effective way – even under intense pressure. To do this there are 6 activities to get right:

  1. Accurately diagnose the type of problem you’re facing.
  2. Frame the challenge and the response.
  3. Establish a clear and robust decision-making process.
  4. Run tighter, more disciplined meetings.
  5. Foster genuine and meaningful engagement across the organization.
  6. To perform these activities effectively, you must increase your conversational capacity and that of your team.

Learning Objectives

More specifically, participants will learn to:

  • Use a crisis as an opportunity to build a stronger team and organization.
  • Improve how their people work together and communicate when facing tough situations and difficult issues.
  • Exert their authority in a way that elevates rather than degrades the performance of their team – especially in high-stress circumstances.
  • Help everyone on their team bring their A-game to the challenges at hand.
  • Create more alignment in their organizations by getting everyone on the same page about what they are working together to achieve and how they’ll work together to achieve it.
  • Run more focused and impactful meetings that people are eager to attend.
  • Improve both the quality and the speed of decision-making.
  • Increase the effectiveness of other critical activities like solving problems, implementing strategy, resolving conflicts, and managing change.
  • Strengthen your team’s ability to work in the sweet spot under pressure.

Complementary Courses

Length: 2 hours +

Format: Virtual or in-person