How To Lead In A Time Of Crisis [0:00:00]
So, with all the craziness going on in the world, gents, I think we can agree, this world
needs better leaders. But, what makes for good leaders especially in a time of uncertainty,
in a time of crisis, in a time of chaos? Lesson number one. Make the right decision,
not the popular decision. This is difficult. Even if you’re in charge, your entire team
wants to go this direction, it’s easy to agree with them. It’s easier just to go
along, but you know you need to a different path.
Gentlemen, personal example. My daughter wanted to do a sleepover awhile back. I am against
it. My wife is for it. They’re family friends, she doesn’t feel there’s any risk of the
virus and all that stuff. I am going to be the bad guy here and I am saying, no, I’m
putting my foot down because I feel there’s an invisible enemy out there.
I know that this is the right decision to err on the side of caution. And you’ve got
to make difficult decisions like that all the time especially in your business. Well,
the work is already done, they’ve set it up, so it’s going to be an easy decision,
but you know you’ve got to take it in this other path and it’s going to require people
to redo work. People are going to be upset, but if you know it’s the right decision,
gentlemen, you’ve got to do it. Lesson number two. Lead by example. I learned
as a young second lieutenant in United States Marine Corps, you never ask anything of anyone
that you wouldn’t do yourself. So, you want people to work on Sundays, guess what? You
should be the first man there. You should be there making coffee for those guys on the
floor. Yeah, you’re going to be up in the office
managing, that’s your job that’s what you got to get done. But, if you need to get
production up, if you need to make the turnaround in the company, then you need to be the person
leading from the front, not in the back telling people what just to do.
Lesson number three. A good leader genuinely cares about his people. I’ve seen so many
bad managers out there they don’t give [bleeping sound]. All they care about is profit and
the numbers and those are important, but not at the expense of your people. You need to
know your people. If you manage one person, you manage five
people, you manage twenty five, you manage twenty five thousand. I’m not saying you
got to know everyone’s names at that level, but you should know what’s going on. You
should have systems in place, so that you realize your people are your greatest asset.
And, I know for me, you know I know a lot about my people. I – it’s something that
I set up time to be able to get to know them, to know what their pains are, to understand
what their real needs are, what their real concerns are, how I can help to alleviate
some of their worries, so that they can do a better job. A good manager understands.
Again, his people are his greatest resource. The next tip to lead in a time of chaos is
to bring order to disorder. What am I talking about here? A good manager gets everyone in
the boat rowing in the same direction. Because, guys, it is so easy for our people to get
distracted. You may just manage three people, but what
you may find is that each have three different very different priorities and they don’t
understand where they fit into the big picture. So, imagine if you’re managing 30 or 300,
guys, that’s when it gets really bad and also and you’re wasting effort, you are
wasting energy. And in the time of crisis, you need people
to be focused in on a laser on the number one project that’s going to bring the company
in money, that’s going to turn the company around. And that’s what a good manager does.
He gets everyone rowing in the same direction. Now, this next tip to lead through uncertainty
isn’t really talked about, but I think is critically important and that is to have peers,
to have companions because leadership is incredibly lonely.
Many of you guys know what I’m talking about. You have your own business and you can’t
talk to anybody. You can’t talk to your spouse about this. You can’t talk to your
employees. They don’t want to hear you complain. If you are a leader, if you are the head of
the company, if you manage a lot of people, this can be something that it’s frustrating.
And especially now that we’re isolated that we are working from home, guys, there is a
big problem, I think just coming up of all these business owners all these leaders that
don’t have anyone that they can bounce ideas off of. So, to solve this, I’ve created
a mastermind. I’m going to link to it down in the bottom, Fortune Favors the Bold is
what I’m calling it. And I want to get together a group of other
business owners that have employees that are dealing with the current problems and want
to be in a mastermind group where they can be around positive energy, where they can
with no judgment lay out, hey, these are the problems I’ve got to make, I’m going to
have to lay people off, I’m going to have to, you know, cut salaries, I’m going to
have to change the direction of the company and I’m scared.
And, imagine to be able to say that and to be able to talk with other business owners
who are unique, who have really cool skill sets can give you different viewpoints offer
advice and support you in the decisions you need to make.
I just feel right now is a pivotal point when you’ve got so many people so many businesses
that are going to go under, not because they have to, but because the business owner the
leader is incapable, he just doesn’t know that there are other people out there that
want to help him. So, guys, if you’re at all interested, check out the application
down below. It’s for a mastermind, Fortune Favors the Bold.
The next characteristic of a good leader during a time of chaos, the ability to remain calm.
When everyone else is panicking, when everyone else is jumping all over the place running
around like chickens with their heads cut off, you have the ability to remain calm.
[0:05:02] And this is something you have to practice.
Most of us aren’t born this way. Most of us we want – we’re nervous, we’re scared,
we’re anxious. But, we realized, okay, I can’t control everything, but I can control
a few things. I can control my breathing, I can control the way I react to the situation,
and I’m going to take a second to breathe and to think to look around and to calmly
assess what’s going on. And that’s the key. When you remain calm,
you don’t let your nerves, you don’t let your emotions drive you because that’s where
bad decisions happen. When you make something that’s a bad decision, instead you hold
off on making a decision maybe for a few minutes maybe just for a few seconds. But, that little
bit of time gives you the chance to gain to get your wits back about you and all of a
sudden make a better decision. Next up, let’s talk confidence. A good leader
has confidence. He believes in himself. And that’s what confidence is. It’s not that
you are always right, it’s not that you are the best, it’s simply you understand
your strengths, you know your weaknesses, and you’re ready to use them and meet the
challenge ahead. It’s not arrogance. Arrogance is simply
where you are way overconfident and you don’t truly understand your strengths and your weaknesses
and that can get you in trouble. A leader is confident and he’s also humble because
he knows that he’s going to have to reach out to others, that he has to have a strong
team and that’s he’s going to have to ask for help.
Let’s talk about being honest and transparent. Now, to be honest is to tell the truth. Very
important as a leader that you don’t lie. You don’t have a good enough memory and
eventually people are going to catch you and then it’s going to undermine all of your
credibility. But, you’re also transparent, meaning that
you tell the whole truth because there are ways to simply tell one thing that is true,
but to omit things to leave things out. No, you want to be transparent. If you think other
people can use this information, you want to make it readily available even if in a
way it kind of makes you look not as infallible as you would like.
We all would like to look perfect, but here is the thing is a confident a strong leader
especially in crisis makes the information, he makes it known, so that everyone out there
is able to see what’s on the table and they’re able to see, hey, he’s a human being as
well he makes mistakes, but he quickly corrects and fixes himself.
Now, this next one is really important. A good leader manages expectations. And it’s
human nature that we want a quick fix for things. We want it to be over, we want to
move on. We want things to have a quick conclusion especially when they’re painful, when they’re
going to hurt. You’ve got to manage expectations. If you
know what’s going on right now the magnitude of it is incredibly high is incredibly large
is going to affect all these people, you owe it to them to let them know to the best of
your ability what you see and what you think is going to happen.
You don’t want to alarm them. You’re not there to scare them, but you want to be open
with them. You want to let them know you want to set that expectation because if they think
that this problem is going to be solved within a week within two weeks, then they are not
going to be prepared and it’s going to set them up for disappointment and failure later
on. The next lesson on how to lead in a time of
uncertainty is to understand the plan never survives contact with the enemy. I think that
one is from Clausewitz. What I like better though is that the plan is nothing, but planning
is everything. So, as we were gearing up with 3rd Battalion
1st Marines to go into Iraq, that was something that was said again and again. And I saw this
in action whenever we were going through Nasiriyah and I can tell you everything fell apart that
we have planned. But, guess what? We had gone through that
plan over a hundred times. We knew exactly how much fuel, how much ammunition, where
we needed to be, we have maps of everything, and we were able to quickly build out a new
plan within minutes, so that we were able to adapt to the situation.
So many business leaders, they get stuck in on their systems on the way things should
work in their models. The way, guys, you got to understand that the real world is not something
that can be modeled. And your ability to be able to meet with, you know, obstacles with
a problem and then to be able to find a way out of it, that is what makes you uniquely
human. And you need to leverage that as a great leader, so that you can overcome situations
which you couldn’t have expected, but as a human being you can find a way to overcome.
Next up, gents, surround yourself with confident people. The best people you can have on your
team, this is key, this is critical and just as critical is to remove incompetent people.
This one very difficult, sometimes very painful because you may have had someone on the team
that, yeah, as things were going great with the company, their incompetence never showed
because everyone is looking good. But, guys, in a time of crisis, this can sink
the ship. And this is very difficult. You like this guy, he does a decent job, but you
find in the time of crisis, he locks up, he’s not capable of making decisions. He is in
a leadership role and he needs to be relieved, he needs to be removed, otherwise, he can
sink the entire ship. [0:09:59]
And, when it comes to rules, gents, don’t be afraid to throw some of them right out
the window. Again, a lot of these rules a lot of the SOPs, a lot of the ways your company
has always done it, this was created when we were going through a bull market, when
everything was great. We are in a recession, we are in a painful time when painful decisions
have to be made. And you’re going to have to go back, do
not be a slave to a system that’s going to sink you. You need to go through you need
to relook at everything and don’t be afraid to scrap rules which are useless.
Now, with all these, gentlemen, don’t forget as a leader it’s important that you over
communicate. You cannot be clear enough when it comes to the directives, when it comes
to what’s important, when it comes to what to throw out to play, to make sure that you’re
engaging with your people. And, it goes both ways. I tell everyone my
team, you’re responsible to push up that an email sent is not mission accomplished
because when you’re in the office and you’re around each other, okay, you can actually
just yell at somebody across and say, “Hey, did you get that?” “Yeah,” you know
that isn’t happening anymore. So, you sent that email, you thought that
they got it. They never received it because they are now working from home and they had
bad internet or they’re on a different time zone. Guys, miscommunication, this leads to
a project that should be done in two hours going on for two to three days if not two
weeks. You want to nip that in the bud, you want to press that people on your team that
you are showing -- leading by example and you over communicate.
Now, a great way to communicate is actually to have accurate measures that are reported
on a daily basis. So, if in your company, you don’t know what the KPIs are, the key
performance indicators for your job for everyone else’s job that’s under you. If you’re
not looking at that information, you need to.
These are just the simple numbers, the simple bits of information. And numbers don’t lie,
so you’re able to see and you’re able to measure things and it’s a very effective
way of communicating. And, with all the doom and gloom, guys, don’t
forget a good leader can leverage the power of humor. I’m not saying you got to be cracking
jokes, but I am saying don’t underestimate the power of levity to break up the situation,
to use a misdirection that all of a sudden people like paying attention to what you have
to say. Great example. Remember the movie, Saving
Private Ryan, when everyone’s about to shoot themselves in the group and everyone’s yelling
screaming. And the captain gets up and he asked, “What’s the pool?” And everyone
is like, “What is this guy talking about? Why isn’t he, you know, diffusing the situation?”
All of a sudden, they want to know what’s going on, and everyone’s quiet because everyone
really does want it because they’ve been asking for months what does the captain, what
do we do before the war. And he reveals that and all of a sudden, it changes the framing.
It also it grabs the – he is a master at that point of grabbing their attention and
diffusing the situation and really revealing everything for what it is.
Now, as a leader, the responsibility of the final decision rest with you, but there are
people that you can lean on to help make a better decision.
First up, experts. Experts are really good in their chosen path. They don’t always
see the big picture and that’s what you’ve got to be careful of. But, experts can oftentimes
shine the light on certain things maybe you didn’t think about and they can help reinforce
a direction you want to go. I also recommend that you have somebody with
a contrary opinion, someone that is not a yes man, someone that will bring up objections
and will try to fight for the other side. Why? Because you want this stuff brought up
to you before you make the decision and then you find out, oh, I wish we would have thought
of that, I wish we would have thought of that. That is their job to go through and to find
all the reasons why your decision is wrong. Now, this next saying one of my favorites
and that is fortune favors the bold. 3rd Marines, you know what I’m talking about. Guys, we
are in a situation in which fear, chaos, uncertainty is in abundance. And guess what? It is shrinking
people’s minds and their viewpoints. They are focused on what’s in front of them and
they are worried they are scared and this right here is preventing them from taking
risk. Now, we take risks all the time in business,
but at this point, a lot of business owners their minds have shrunk and they reduced the
risks they’re taking. And as such, they’re not going to be able to get out of the situation
because they’re just simply chasing their tail and they circle. They don’t realize
that if they just look up and they went in this direction, they could get off of the
hot plate, that they could get out of the current situation they’re in.
And that’s what you need to do. You need to have the courage to take risks. Yes, that
everything seems like it’s chaotic and risky right now. But, gentlemen, if you don’t
take risks, if you are not bold in this time period, then you’re going to miss out on
the opportunities that are out there. And I can tell you opportunity is out there in
abundance for those that have the courage to go out there and grab it.
All right, gents, so what did I miss? What would you add? Let me know down in the comments
below. And don’t forget, I’m linking to my mastermind, Fortune Favors the Bold down
in the description. This is something I’m doing because I am passionate about working
with other entrepreneurs. I used to do this years ago, but I’m excited to actually get
to know other business owners that’s why I’ve got the application there.
So, if you manage people, if you have employees, if you are in a situation in which you don’t
want to be surrounded by negative thought, you want to have positive energy from other
business owners and you simply know that, hey, being able to talk about your problems
for other people to be able to tell you their thoughts their insights and to be able to
help you to create really better decisions for your company, guys, I’m excited. So,
check out the application. I’m linking to it down in the description.
That’s it, guys. Take care. And if you want another video, I’ve got you covered right
here. And, in fact, I don’t even know. No, of course, I know. This is a good video right
here. Go check it out. I had a lot of fun with it talking about the importance of routines.
You should have one. [0:15:26] End of audio