The Power of Empathy, Vulnerability, and Authenticity

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This transcript has been edited by Adweek and may not reflect the video-recording exactly.

THE CHALLENGE

I have had a front-row seat to some of the largest corporate crises of this century. From failing product launches that sent our competitors’ market share soaring to 19x of what it was to corporate reputational issues so severe that 25% of our customers boycotted the company to a global pandemic that literally made it illegal for non-essential workers in almost every country we operated in to use our product.

While each of these experiences was radically different from one another, there are lessons and best practices that apply universally. One of the most important roles of a leader is to align their organization strategically and operationally. Everyone should have a shared understanding of where the company is, what the tailwinds are, as well as the headwinds that they’re going to be facing. They should know what success looks like in the future. They should also know, collectively, how the company is going to get there.

THE APPROACH

Habits of High-Performing Leaders…Can Sometimes Backfire in Times of Crisis

Marketing leaders are often described as adaptive, strategic, logical, and decisive. These have likely been important characteristics to most of us as we’ve grown and navigated in our careers. But as we all know, towering strengths always have the potential to cast shadows if we’re not paying attention carefully. In this case, they can backfire during the heat of a crisis.

How can these towering strengths be negatives? First, in times of crisis, somebody who is highly adaptive and can adjust to a new reality quickly is going to do that more quickly than the people on their team. If the team they’re leading isn’t keeping up with them, they’re going to be communicating information without understanding and internalizing where the team’s lingering concerns and questions are and that can ultimately result in both confusion and frustration.

When the leader is speaking rationally to someone else who is listening emotionally, that again leads to confusion, dissension, and frustration. It’s simply not possible to create that alignment that we all crave as leaders without being decisive, but there again is a big watch out. Keep your ear to the ground in times of crisis. Information tends to seeps out over time and some of that information does necessitate that you make a pivot. If you fail to pivot, it could again create dissension and frustration.

Lead From Where Your Team is Emotionally

Some of the best leaders out there are able to guide their teams through crisis without actually experiencing a massive decline in team morale. Morale doesn’t necessarily have to fall off a cliff. So, how do they do it? In order to maintain—or even win back in the event that you’ve lost it—your team’s commitment, you need to absolutely meet them where they are.

It’s completely unrealistic to expect a team to process a crisis as quickly as their leaders do.

It’s completely unrealistic to expect a team to process a crisis as quickly as their leaders do, because after all the leaders have more context, more information and more organizational capital.

What the table shows below is how employees tend to process information in a crisis. So first off, the crisis often triggers feelings of both grief and loss, and we’ve all heard of the five stages of grief but the five stages of grief often manifest differently in the workplace. Denial can show up as avoidance, bargaining can show up as disorientation, and so on. If you encourage dialogue and you listen intently, the types of questions your team asks will help you diagnose what stage they’re in so you can respond appropriately. If you don’t tailor your message for the audience, you run the risk of paying a supremely high price.

Two quick caveats to this table:

1. Every individual that you encounter, whether it’s you or people on their team or your team, they’re going to navigate the stages differently. Some will move from stage to stage quickly. Others will be slow.
2. Any time somebody makes it to through stage four reappraisal, it doesn’t mean they’re going to go straight on to stage five. Sometimes people backslide because as they’ve internalized new information or as an aftershock of the initial crisis hits they may sort of swing them back into an earlier stage.

The reality of crisis is that grief isn’t the only human response to crisis. Crisis is typically fast-paced; it’s complex and unpredictable as it unfolds. More information is coming around the corner as days go by and that can create extreme stress in most humans and the impact isn’t just on mental and emotional levels, but simultaneously on physiological and cognitive levels. And as we as leaders are mere mortals. It means that we, right along with our team members, likely experience impaired executive function.

Luckily awareness of how that impairment manifests and distorts our perceptions is half the battle to overcoming it and ensuring that our perceptions and decision-making remain sharp because after all, in times of crisis, you want those things to be razor sharp.

The Psychological and Physiological Impact of a Crisis

I’ll cover five of the possible manifestations of distortion that I’ve come to consider the most common.

1. Fight or Flight: When the amygdala and our brain get stimulated and that flight or fight response gets triggered, whether it’s in us or in someone else, that is not the right time to be making a big decision. Because again—your view was distorted.
2. Mistake Assumptions for Fact: When new information suddenly gets surfaced as a hard fact, make sure that you are validating and really verify by an independent party. That the fact is actually fact because, in times of crisis, assumptions can be mistaken for fact.
3. Increase In tunnel Vision: If you, or those around you, get myopically focused on a single item, you are essentially blind to your surroundings, like true tunnel vision. Don’t allow anyone, least of all yourself, the luxury of obsessing or fixating on a single isolated event, especially if it’s in the past.
4. Confirmation Bias: This one can be highly intoxicating. Without healthy debate and dialogue, this gives every one of us the ability to examine, fully consider, and reconsider the pros and cons of potential alternatives we run the risk of making unforced errors.
5. Overconfidence Bias: If someone’s absolutely certain that their perspective is the right and only correct approach, I would say that they are officially in the deep end of the overconfidence bias pool. We know that in times of crisis, almost nothing can be certain.

THE IMPACT

Stability Management

The first is all around stakeholder management. Everything starts with self-awareness. Crisis can trigger personal memories, fears, trauma, memories of loss, and those things can trigger unintended behavioral consequences. If leaders let earlier catastrophes echo in their head, it can lead to withdrawal at the very time that they need to be most available to others. Make sure you’re checking in with yourself.

Next on stakeholder management is prioritizing connecting with colleagues on a truly human level. It’s easy to get sucked into the transactional nature of emails, meetings, and calls, but make time to truly check in with people, whether it’s one-on-one or in small group settings. It can be a text. It can be a phone call. It can be a call when you’re commuting. All of that stuff really means something to your team members. The bottom line is that any form of authentic human outreach is better than not. Word to the wise, showing up authentically and being honest about a bad day or an emotional low endears people to you and can boost your leadership reputation.

We don’t need overdrawn, decks and big, long emails.

Finally, in terms of stakeholder management, it’s important to make sure that in times of crisis to recognize that time moves differently. Hours can feel like days, days can feel like weeks. Leaders should increase the frequency of the touch points with the people that they work with but keep things bite-sized. We don’t need overdrawn, decks and big, long emails.

Leadership Mindset

To be credible, leaders need to face reality with true pragmatism—no sugarcoating. Just gather the facts and the context quickly and prepare for additional uncertainty. We as leaders should also make sure that we’re viewing the possibilities of the future with the truly optimistic lens grounded in strategy. Notice, I didn’t say delusion, but optimism that is grounded in strategy with a clear path forward can inspire teams to newer and greater heights.

Similarly, I’ve also found that striving to be open and humble truly pays dividends. Research shows that leaders who listen to a broad group of people ranging from different levels and backgrounds make better and more well-informed decisions. Always stay open.

The best leaders in our nation’s history have always consistently looked beyond their immediate inner circles. Looking beyond that immediate tribe attracts a broad range of inputs that enables better decision-making. A second-best practice in responding to a crisis swiftly is that you get a jumpstart on competition as a leader. You want to create a sense of urgency, but you want to do that without breading fear. Because fear is paralyzing, whereas urgency can actually be quite exhilarating.

Leaders also need to empower and rely on other leaders. Because there are more opportunities for one-on-one conversations in smaller groups when you’re empowering the leaders beneath you.

Best Practices

Anytime you’re communicating with your team, you want to acknowledge the broad range of perspectives that are represented in every meeting session or check-in.

The second tip is all around embracing the three R’s: review, repeat and reinforce.

• Review the current situation as transparently as you possibly can.
• Repeat critical information and details multiple times in multiple forums simply saying that something one time is not enough.
• Reinforce key points with examples, whether it’s images, facts, quotes, those things make it tangible.

My third and final communication tip is increasing the frequency of team meetings but reduce the duration. Frequent check-ins reduce team member anxiety and give you an opportunity to really stick the landing on those key points. Experts have shown that in times of crisis, oftentimes employees need to hear things 3, 5, 7 times.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Habits of high-performing leaders can sometimes backfire in times of crisis.
2. Lead from where your team is emotionally.
3. Create a plan to deal with crises.

Why You Need to Become a Human Swiss Army Knife of a Marketer