5 Powerful Ways to Lead During Crises
By Dr. Sophia Miranda
Most of the year 2020 has been the biggest challenge for those in leadership. As we are navigating a pandemic, quarantine, social justice, racism, politics, and personal issues with family, friends, and mental health, leaders are still looked upon to lead their teams, families, and in spiritual settings. With that being said how does one lead through time in crisis? Here are 5 way to do so:
Be present, visible, and available.
During these hard times, as leaders’ people are looking to us for guidance, therefore we must be present, visible, and available. Leaders can do this by letting their team know how they can best reach them, whether is it by zoom conference, Microsoft Teams, or by phone. Particularly during a pandemic and everything else going on in society, teams have a need to hear from their leaders frequently. Gene Klann, author of the book Crisis Leadership, noted “when leaders appear calm, concerned, knowledgeable, and in charge, workers feel encouraged and are more likely to have confidence that things are under control and will be fine.”
Clear communication.
Communication is always important in leadership however, when dealing with COVID-19, social injustice, racism, differing political views, it is extremely important to communicate where your organization stands on these topics. In other words, communicate what your organization is doing to ensure these topics will not affect work morale and how they intend to protect employees from undue stress in the workplace. Transparency is key!
Connect with others
A simply “how have you been lately” goes a long way. As a country “home” has been so many things, like your workplace, your children’s school, restaurants, entrainment, barber shop etc. Which in some cases has been stressful for people to juggle it all in one place. I know personally, converting my home into all of these things has had me going a bit stir crazy and could only imagine that my team may have felt the same way. So I took action, I called each team member, just to see how they have been doing lately. To them it was a breath of fresh air to have someone just check on them. Connecting with others will help you and them have some normality in this abnormal circumstance.
Remember that YOU are human.
Self-care is so important! As a leader, you need to remember that you are human and need to take care of yourself physically, emotionally, and mentally. This is important especially because leaders are responsible for other people in the workplace. With that said, as leaders we must be self-aware of our limitations, develop good habits on how to destress, give yourself some grace when things go wrong, extend that same grace to others, as we are all going through crisis at the same time.
Prayer and fellowship. (Optional for believers)
For those of you who are spiritual, praying is another way to deal with leading though a crisis. I know personally, keeping myself spiritually fed these past few months has been a challenge. I have had to go on many fast just to reconnect with God, with all the division in our country I needed to feel HIS presence. Also, I needed HIS wisdom and guidance when people sought me out for understanding and prayer. As leaders, we are looked to for all the answers and sometimes we just don’t have them. Therefore, I am honest with people and tell them, I don’t have the answers, but we can look up to him for the answers as we prayer and fellowship with one another. Let me tell you that often times, God answers us with peace from the questions we may not really need the answer to in the first place.
So, I will leave you with this as we enter a new year: Love your neighbor as you love yourself and lead accordingly.