Managing Uncertainty Podcast - Episode #55: Crisis Leadership Roundtable

What does strong crisis leadership look like? What makes a strong crisis leader?  How do you develop a strong crisis management team? What role does emotional intelligence play in crisis leadership?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Sr. Consultant Jenn Otremba and Consultant Bray Wheeler talk about crisis leadership and their experiences coming up in this field.

Topics discussed include emotional intelligence, crisis leadership skill sets, how to train & develop new crisis leaders, the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) program, educational and learning opportunities for crisis leaders, and more.

Some relevant previous episodes and blog posts include:

• Top Business Continuity & Crisis Management Executive Programs
• Managing Uncertainty Episode #5:  Leading during an Active Shooter Situation

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast this is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. Joining me today are –

Jenn Otremba: Hi, this is Jenn Otremba, Consult at Bryghtpath.

Bray Wheeler: Hi, I’m Bray Wheeler, Consultant at Bryghtpath.

Bryan Strawser: So this is our long form episode for the week and we’re going to be diving into a round-table discussion about Crisis Leadership. Since the three of us are here, a few weeks back I had done a solo episode on our podcast about characteristics of strong Crisis Leaders, and we’ll link that in the show notes but I think we want to talk just more openly and with a couple of different opinions about what we see as strong and not strong Crisis Leaders, and some of the things we’ve learned along the way. I think between the three of us we’ve got a good thirty-plus years of experience in Crisis Management, and we may have learned a few things along the way.

Jenn Otremba: One or two.

Bryan Strawser: One or two things along the way. So what makes a good crisis leader? What are good examples of crisis leadership? We start there.

Bray Wheeler: What makes a good crisis leader? What demonstrates crisis leadership? I think it’s a lot of things. I think some of it comes a little more naturally to people. Some of it’s learned for folks, but I think some of the key things are really having that ability to kind of see the incident for what it is, and not get too … not overact to it, not get too flustered by it, kind of see it as an opportunity to kind of jump in and manage the situation for what it is, and make sure that you’re trying to do the right things. And make sure that you’re bringing the other people along with you, because it’s not a solo sport by any means.

Jenn Otremba: That’s a good point, it’s not a solo sport at all so I think it’s developing that team around you to work through a situation. It’s being careful to not get too emotionally involved with what is going on. I think it’s like you said it’s really keeping a level head as you’re managing through the situation. And then I think also recognizing when you’re beginning to escalate or when the people around you are beginning to escalate and get stressed and separate yourself or separate others as necessary. So it’s really being able to read the room and understand kind of where everybody is at – that’s crisis leadership to me.

Bray Wheeler: That self-awareness is a huge piece of it. To your point I think it’s being able to read the room, being able to read yourself, knowing when you’re tired, knowing when you’re stressed, knowing when you need a break, knowing when somebody else needs on too, to be able to take those intentional pauses because that’s how you’re going to be able to get through that stuff, is to be able to recognize-

Jenn Otremba: Especially a long term, on-going situation, right?

Bryan Strawser: I kind of start with just the thought about the person of the crisis leader, and I think you’ve both kind of hinted at this, and I’m just going to go back to the kind of elements of Mettle Leadership that the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Institute folks have researched and talked about and that’s that Crisis Leadership starts with the person of the leader. It starts with that understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, or opportunities, as we like to used to say. But what do you do well? And then how do you build a team around you to compensate for the things that you don’t do well? Like I’m not the … I’m well aware that I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, but I could build a team around me to do those things. To add that to the tool box in a crisis.

Bryan Strawser: But I think it is understanding kind of what are the things that you do and don’t understand. I think the second is just, the situational leadership aspect that comes with being the leader of a crisis that somebody’s got to have their head above the clouds looking around and understanding kind of where you’re at and what you know and what you don’t know and “What you don’t know you don’t know”, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, and understanding how you need to fill those gaps to really understand the impact of what’s going on. It’s that need to be able to see the big picture.

Bray Wheeler: It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole really fast.

Jenn Otremba: Really fast.

Bray Wheeler: In a crisis.

Bryan Strawser: I mean look at … we always use that example of Japan with the 2011 tsunami-

Bray Wheeler: Yes. Oh my gosh, yes.

Bryan Strawser: Earthquake, nuclear issue where Japan was really really good at all of those things taken as individual crisis situations. Give them all three at the same time, on a scale that the world had never seen, and they didn’t see it. They didn’t see the issue for what it was and it cost them. It was really a failure of crisis leadership.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: And it practically brought the government down. From there I think it’s the crisis leadership aspect of the leader understanding that they’ve got a couple of constituencies that they have to communicate and work with. And that’s … they’ve got to lead and communicate up within their organization, or if they are the top person in the organization that now they’re interfacing with executives or political leaders, elected leaders, who look to you to know the subject matter, but they’re dealing with all of these other things and you’ve got to … how do you communicate the right message?

Bryan Strawser: There’s leading the Silo, leading the team through the crisis and then the ability to lead across and I think that’s the most important it’s the connectivity of effort, leading across multiple Silos and some people just don’t see that.

Jenn Otremba: I think it even comes before that with the … I think that you had mentioned earlier about developing the team and picking the right team around you, and I think training the team as well so that they’re prepared to respond to incidents and it’s not shooting at the hip for every situation.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative)..

Jenn Otremba: I also find it interesting that you pointed out that you were not the empathy in the room –

Bryan Strawser: Oh hell no.

Jenn Otremba: Which, we’re not either Bray, so who plays the empathy here?

Bryan Strawser: Marie.

Jenn Otremba: Marie, [laughs]

Bryan Strawser: I think you’re really empathetic.

Bray Wheeler: Not really.

Jenn Otremba: Can you?

Bryan Strawser: Yeah, I can try. If you’ve ever taken … but I knew this because our previous employer put me in a situation to take an assessment tool, the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, and it told me that I didn’t have any empathy. I mean I literally have no empathy on that scale. But it was interesting to me as a leader to see that, and this is long before I worked in Crisis Management, but to look at that and go, “Well I’m going to have to find some ways to compensate for that. I’m going to have to have some people around me that have this”.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah, I think it’s huge to know yourself, and know how you may not know how you’re going to react in a crisis situation, we see this all the time especially in the military, you don’t know how you’re going to react in those overly stressful situations that are unheard of to the normal population but you may know yourself to know at least those types of things.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jenn Otremba: That you’re not the person to go to for that but you know the people on your team that are.

Bray Wheeler: Well I think it’s one of those things to where … excuse me … I don’t think that … Bryan to your point … I don’t think that that you’re not an empathetic person, but it’s probably not your natural inclination to go the –

Bryan Strawser: No, you’re right. I have to think about it.

Bray Wheeler: And that’s those traits in a Crisis Leader that they need to be aware of, I am that person and I could be that person outside of work or outside of this situation but my natural instinct is not to go there it’s to go here. Which isn’t wrong, but to know those things and to know those things about … to your guys’ point to build that team around you … where they go there. And then that kind of-

Bryan Strawser: That helps me go there.

Bray Wheeler: – And that kind of support.

Bryan Strawser: Yeah I mean, to your point, I had to train myself that when things happen, that my first questions were, what is the impact on the team? And how are we doing, how is the team doing?

Bray Wheeler: Yeah.

Bryan Strawser: And that team question is two-fold. How are the folks at the sight or the sights that are impacted, like how are they doing, but, and I think both of you have brought this up, it’s also how the crisis team is doing, right?

Bryan Strawser: My team and the other folks that came there to work on the crisis, how are they doing? Because you get into four or five days of 16-hour a day, 24-hour day response, and you’re dealing with … you’ve got employees that have been killed or injured and families impacted, homes lost –

Jenn Otremba: Or you don’t even know where everyone is at.

Bryan Strawser: Right, yeah.

Jenn Otremba: I think of like the Boston shooter situation. Trying to account for people and trying to get creative on how we could find out who was where. And that lasted for days. That was stressful for everyone.

Bryan Strawser: That was a week.

Jenn Otremba: Yes.

Bryan Strawser: Almost a week. Although really only about a 48 hour period that was crazy.

Bray Wheeler: And I think, back to your point, that a Crisis Leader kind of sitting in the middle of all those different tiers, the across, the up, the down, it’s their disposition that probably matters most. Especially in the probably first 24, 48 hours of … they set the tone.

Bryan Strawser: They do.

Bray Wheeler: Their disposition of how they react, how they’re kind of constructing, how they’re seeing the scope of the incident matters to how people are reacting to it. Because if you’re frazzled, you’re overcharged, certainly the people underneath you are going to act that way, people next to you are going to maybe be asking questions, and the people above you are going to be asking questions too of, are you the right person or do I need to be doing more? Or, is this a bigger deal, or ah it’s not that big of a deal, you’re overreacting. So I think it’s … to your earlier point, Jenn, that level-headedness, that disposition, that calm in the storm.

Bryan Strawser: Yeah, you can’t be otherwise. You’ve got to find … I mean, first of all, this isn’t for everybody. Crisis leadership isn’t for everybody.

Bray Wheeler: No.

Bryan Strawser: But it’s … you have got… there is some of the ability here to kind of train somebody to do some of this, but you’ve got to … you have to portray a calm, in-control persona even if it’s not … even if you’re not at the time. I mean you might have a thousand things going on in your head, you better be talking about one.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah.

Bray Wheeler: Right.

Jenn Otremba: I think, and some of the things that we’ve done in the past and our different experiences, is we’ve had teams that were large enough to where we didn’t have to be that direct leader each time. We could take turns as to who, okay you got this one, all right then I will step back and play the other role of taking care of everyone while you’re managing through that. So I think for us, we were lucky enough in a lot of different situations that we’ve worked into where we had other leaders that we could lean on to, you know this time isn’t my turn, this time is my turn to be the follower. So I think being a good leader, demonstrating crisis leadership, is a big part of that is also being a good follower when it’s not your turn to be the leader.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: A friend of mine was the Police Incident Commander during the 35W bridge collapse here in Minneapolis back in 2007.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah, I think so.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: I was not in Crisis Management at the time, I was on my little hiatus doing other things within Corporate Security at our previous employer. But he was the … I mean the fire department and the Sheriff’s department had Incident Command because this was on the river. But the Minneapolis Police were a significant part of the response. They had hundreds of people down there and they get their Command Post set up in the Red Cross parking lot there, overlooking the Mississippi.

Bryan Strawser: And they had trained this particular Lieutenant for a couple of years to be like one of the top, he was going to be the next guy to run this kind of stuff when my friend retired. And they had a couple of incidents where he had kind of been frazzled and had kind of yelled and snapped at some people but apparently just went off on somebody a couple of hours into the response and my friend relieved him and sent him home. And that was the end of his time in, kind of large scale incident management in the public sector. Went on to a great law enforcement career, I don’t want to impugn the guy’s reputation, but this was not for him. He did not have the mindset to do this because you can’t act like that. You’ve got to be calm and controlled and in control of the situation – you have to demonstrate crisis leadership.

Bray Wheeler: Oh yeah. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad professional it just … it’s almost a calling. You have to naturally kind of be inclined to put yourself in those situations, want to be put in those situations, know yourself well enough to know that that is what you’re going to do … you’re going to kind of go into the fire so to speak.

Jenn Otremba: I think sometimes it can be important to acknowledge to that, while you may portray good traits as a good Crisis Leader one day, another day you may have a lot of personal things goin on-

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jenn Otremba: – Or your mind isn’t there and that’s not your day. So even though today may not be the best day for you when the 35W Bridge collapsed, they may be a great leader in another situation.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jenn Otremba: When their mind was in a different place.

Bryan Strawser: Or they’re more comfortable with that kind of an incident.

Jenn Otremba: Exactly.

Bray Wheeler: That’s true.

Bryan Strawser: You know, put me in a cyber incident and I’m probably not as calm as, you know, a natural disaster or something else but I think it’s that comfortability factor too is huge too. But it’s also, to your point, having a bad day.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah.

Bryan Strawser: You’ve got to be able to recognize, I’m having a bad day.

Jenn Otremba: You really do. And then I think-

Bryan Strawser: It’s not my day. Or, I have to know enough to set that aside if I’m the only one that’s on the docket. So, I kind of stepped in.

Jenn Otremba: I think you may also have to recognize as a, maybe a secondary leader, that your primary leader is having a bad day and they may have to be removed like you said Bryan.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jenn Otremba: And as a good leader you have to recognize, somebody is telling you that it’s probably true. So step down and move aside and let somebody else take over at least for a while.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And certainly, I mean lots of responses are a 24/7 thing.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Bryan Strawser: Your own fatigue is a big issue, the fatigue of your team I think, to your point about rotating and shifting people in and out. It’s necessary. I mean I remember when I first got into Crisis Management full-time in 2005, come around Labor Day Hurricane Katrina hits, followed by Hurricane Wilma, and Hurricane Rita, or that’s out of order. Hurricane Rita, and then Hurricane Wilma and I don’t think I had a day off for 60 days, 58, 59 days. Because we didn’t have, at the time we didn’t have the resources and we didn’t have the structure that we would have later on.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: When we built those capabilities out. That was not a healthy environment for the four or five of us that was carrying the load for this, but we didn’t have anything else. That was it.

Jenn Otremba: Well I think of… to your point there… working in consulting I’ve learned a lot about working with smaller organizations that don’t have built out teams quite like we did and we’ve had a lot of different organizations reach out to us for specific needs, you know maybe it’s just to understand or be better at Crisis Communications in that moment because you don’t have that expertise. And I think there’s no shame in asking for help outside of your organization as well.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jenn Otremba: Whether that be a consultant or even just people you know.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative)..

Bray Wheeler: Well I think it gets back to one of the mantra’s we use too when you need a friend-

Bryan Strawser: It’s too late to make one.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah.

Bray Wheeler: And that goes … it’s not just external partners and law enforcement or EMS, it’s the internal partners. It’s having those teams, it’s having that buy in, it’s having those relationships in place that … if you are a one, two person Crisis Management shop you need those other players in the organization to know that, yeah my other hat is Crisis. When something happens, I am shifting it to that. I am helping. And the organization knows that too. It’s not just … you know that HR person wanting to. HR knows that that’s … yep something happened and I’m shifting into that because that’s what the company needs, or that’s what the organization needs.

Bryan Strawser: Well, I think the partnership thing is … if you think about partnerships with other organizations, I think it’s important to look at …. there’s a two-way street there that develops over time in that relationship or that partnership. It’s not just about transactional nature of needing something in a crisis. I remember during … there were tornadoes that came through Minneapolis … gosh I don’t remember when, 2009, 2010.

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: They went into north Minneapolis-

Jenn Otremba: Yes.

Bryan Strawser: Caused a lot of damage, right?

Jenn Otremba: Yes.

Bryan Strawser: Remember this?

Jenn Otremba: Yes.

Bryan Strawser: It was a big deal. So, I wasn’t impacted, I was in charge of Crisis Management at the time for a Fortune 50 Company, we were not impacted, but on my own accord I picked up the phone and called Minneapolis’ Deputy of Chief of Police, and said “Hey,” … and it was like eight o’clock at night I think when this thing happened. I’m like “Hey, Chief, just calling to see if you need anything. Do you need anything?” And he goes, “Hold on.” He was in the Command Center. “Does anybody want anything?”. But they were okay, they had a great response.

Bryan Strawser: Fast forward to 2012, we had an active shooter situation that we were all three involved in, that was across the street from our offices, and for three or four hours we didn’t really know what was really going on. And it turned out to be a construction noise that occurred. This guy, at this point, is retired from Minneapolis PD. Calls me, just to see, one do you need anything, two, do you want to talk? And this was that night. Do you want to talk about, kind of what went down that day? Knowing that like, we thought people were in harm’s way and it turned out to be a false alarm. But we were all concerned about that. That’s the kind of partnership I think you develop over time, it’s not just about Big Company helping Big Police Department and vice-versa.

Bray Wheeler: It’s that community piece of it, too.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bray Wheeler: That communal, not only broad scale but just that Crisis Community of people who are in that …. kind of in the weeds all the time with it.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I do … and then I want to shift and talk about how do you kind of train, or get educated on some this but, during the 2017 Hurricane Season, which was such a monumental event for you know, four months. Between Harvey and Irma and Maria, I was at Bryghtpath but we were supporting … I was serving as Interim Chief Security Officer for a University that was impacted in all three of those. And it was a pretty stressful time because they didn’t have the resources that we had had previously. We’ve since, you know, they built some things after this. But I went to the Harvard NPLI program, and it … you know I got an email in the middle of the Hurricane Season from Dr. Lenny Marcus, the Co-Director of the Program, who said, “Hey, I’m down here with the Red Cross today in Virginia, but I’ve been all over talking to people, and I see a lot of you as alumni making huge impact, but here are some things to remember.” And kind of took us back to the things we would talk about in the program.

Bryan Strawser: And I thought that was such a meaningful email to send, knowing that, God he probably had 200-250 alumni on the ground, in leadership roles, doing different things, private sector, public sector. That connectivity I think really helps as you think about how you’re dealing with and working through these situations.

Bryan Strawser: So how do you learn this, beyond doing it?

Bray Wheeler: Practice, unfortunately. Real-life experience.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah, you don’t really know how you’re going to react, because I know I said this before but nobody knows how they’re going to react in the situation unfortunately until you’re put into the situation.

Jenn Otremba: I think, if you want to get into this line of work, the best place you could be is in an organization that has multiple Crisis Leaders that you can learn from. Being thrown into it where you’re the only one and you’ve never done it before I don’t think is the best place for you, that’s not what I would recommend. I think it would be best to be somewhere where you can learn from other people, see different styles so that you can develop your own style. And experience those things where you’re not the only point person.

Bray Wheeler: Yeah.

Jenn Otremba: There are obviously school programs you can go to that Academia has all kinds of options out there but that’s not going to be how you learn how to actually be in the nit and gritty.

Bray Wheeler: Right.

Jenn Otremba: You’re going to learn some basics there but-

Bray Wheeler: Yeah some of the structure and fundamentals and the background –

Jenn Otremba: Exactly, which is important.

Bray Wheeler: And the context of all of it, but to your point, it is one of those things where you … you have to put yourself in situations where you experience it. Whether it’s, you’re just kind of one of the minions, you know to help execute it. Or you’re a partner, or you have some sort of an assistant role or something like that. But you almost have to be in it, watch it, observe it.

Bray Wheeler: I know from my early days I was brand-new into the concept and hired in but it wasn’t until the wildfires in California, ’08, that it was really like, “Okay, now my feet have been wet for a little bit, for nine months or something like that, but now I understand what’s going on, now I see what’s happening.”

Bray Wheeler: And that was really eye-opening for me to be able to step into that and get a taste for … this is full-on. And watching it play out and being able to jump in and kind of my instincts kicking into kind of know what to do, what to expect.

Jenn Otremba: Yeah. One benefit too, I think for me having a pretty long career military-wise is, we in the military like to train, over train, exercise, train, exercise, exercise, train, train. And there’s something to be said …I mean, when we do it, man it is awful. But there’s something to be said about having so much training behind you, so that when you’re in a situation you at least have an idea, a little bit of an idea about how you can react and have some of the automatics happen right away because you don’t have to go back and read again a protocol because you have memorized, “what am I going to do in this situation?”.

Jenn Otremba: And you work together with other members of your military unit as well so that when you’re in those situations together you’ve worked together.

Jenn Otremba: In the Civilian Sector we do the same thing where we run exercise, after exercise, after exercise. We don’t do it as often, I think in the Civilian Sector as we do in the Military, but doing those over and over help to develop those sort of skills and those checklists in your mind as well.

Bray Wheeler: Especially if your organization is brand-new, or the people that kind of comprise your team, however big however small, if they’re new to it as well, it’s the more you do it, the better relationship you have with each other, which makes whatever response you end up doing, easier. Because otherwise, you’re … everybody’s flying blind or everybody’s inexperienced or nobody knows and then it becomes … you’re just complicating it for yourself, you’re throwing up other obstacles in your way because of you … nobody has that experience or nobody knows how to interact with each other.

Bryan Strawser: I mean I think it’s fair to say, everybody’s got their own learning style.

Jenn Otremba: Yes.

Bryan Strawser: And we should accommodate that as we think about this but I don’t think there’s any substitute for experiencing this in real life. In an organization where there are people senior to you that can teach you and mentor you and kind of bring you through this, that’s how all three of us kind of learned –

Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bryan Strawser: – this. At least when we started. I think exercise are great if they’re realistic, and we do exercises as a company for clients and we are getting … we’ve gone to the very realistic stage I think at this point in our consulting careers. Where we want it to be under pressure, we want people to feel time constraint, we want them to have to make the tough decisions. And where there is limited time and information and you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do. I also think there’s a place for the academic aspect of this which is … there are programs you can go to and learn this. I am biased, I think the Harvard NPLI Program, because it is focused on leadership versus like, how do you structure an exercise? None of that happens there.

Bray Wheeler: The nuts and bolts?

Bryan Strawser: There’s none of the nuts and bolts. This program is about, how do you lead in a crisis? And when you’re talking about … there’s a lot of discussion of cases where … that I think is even beyond what I saw in business school, on my M.B.A., in my M.B.A. program you read a case and then you discuss the case, and you might take action on the case in terms of talking through or writing something.

Bryan Strawser: But at NPLI, when you talk about a case you bring the Principal that was involved in the case to the class and they tell the story. And you talk to them about what happened. And I think that there is no substitute for that kind of experience in terms of learning about what happened, right? They would explain how they led – what crisis leadership looked like to them.

Bryan Strawser: So when we talked about managing an organization through reputational challenge we had the Director of the Secret Service, the Incumbent Director of the Secret Service come in, off the record conversation, no press contact, no sharing, and he walked us through what happened in their scandal in Cartagena, where they had agents that were hiring prostitutes and other things that went on down there, and military personnel, and others. And they got caught. So he’s the Secret Service Director, how does he manage through that? Okay, so that … I thought that was a great example of Crisis Leadership. And I agreed with many of the things he talked about doing. Right or wrong. About how they dealt with this.

Bryan Strawser: But I think programs like that are great, there are other good programs in Crisis Management and Business Continuity but they’re not focused on leadership. And I think what I got out of Harvard was about, here’s how you should think as a leader dealing with these situations and what are the things you should look for in yourself, good or bad, and how to compensate for that as you’re building the team around you.

Bray Wheeler: Yeah, I think it’s … I mean, to build onto that it’s that self-assessment piece that’s critical. To know yourself, we talked about this earlier but just, it is important. To know those things and to know where your limits are. I think the other piece too is, there’s a lot of good companies that have gone through different situations whether it’s reputational, whether it’s right or wrong, or tragic or not, finding those stories, finding those breakdowns, finding those reports from Harvard, from other places where they’ve deep dived into it and they’re talking to people and reading those articles or those papers or books. You know, to at least get a sense of, how did they respond, what were they thinking about? What did they learn? What, you know, at the very minimum, I mean it’s, it’s that preparation. It’s that.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jenn Otremba: That’s a good point. I love that actually because we spend a lot of time talking about things …at Bryghtpath especially we talk about a lot of things that go wrong and how they manage … and we break it down to, well how did they manage through it, what did they do, what could they have done better? So I think, to your point, that sort of, even if it’s your own incident, making sure that you’re running through that after action with your team so that you can get better for the next time. I think that says a lot about a leader when you’re able to not only assess yourself but have your team assess you.

Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And we’ve seen this, we’ve seen good and bad leaders in our experience from a crisis standpoint.

Bray Wheeler: Yeah.

Bryan Strawser: We’ve seen incredibly intelligent folks who are great leaders within their organization, could not lead through a basic crisis situation because of a number of different reasons. It could be they have low kind of emotional intelligence and so they panic and they get frustrated. We’ve seen the “Let’s debate the decision for four hours” –

Bray Wheeler: Yep.

Bryan Strawser: – situation. Meanwhile, you’ve got people in harm’s way, looking to you to make a call. There’s a lot of different things that we’ve seen but what we’ve run through is a pretty good example of, here’s what a good Crisis Leader looks like, here’s what good Crisis Leadership looks like, here’s some ways to grow it within the Org. Closing thoughts? Bray?

Bray Wheeler: I would say, one thing that we kind of talked about off here too is, I think it’s important to remember is this isn’t an opportunity for promotion. It’s not an opportunity that a Crisis Leader should look to take advantage of. It’s an opportunity that needs to happen for the company. You need to step into that role with some clarity and that’s not about you at that point. No matter what’s going on, and if does involve you or it is part of you or it is you, you should probably step aside. You know, because there is that bias coming into play, but it really isn’t about you at that point it’s about the organization it’s about the people impact –

Bryan Strawser: It’s about the team.

Bray Wheeler: That’s where your head’s got to be at.

Bryan Strawser: There’s my lack of empathy speaking.

Bray Wheeler: It’s about the team. Jenn?

Jenn Otremba: I don’t think I could put it any better than that, honestly. I completely agree with what you’re saying.

Bryan Strawser: Yeah I mean I think we’ve hit everything that was on my mind. I’d just end with this, that if you’re the Crisis Leader in the critical moment, your team and your organization is looking for you to lead them. Lead them. Take them through the situation. Show crisis leadership.

Jenn Otremba: Be the leader.

Bryan Strawser: Be the leader. And if you’re not the right person, find somebody that can and bring them in and put them under you. And let them lead it.

Bray Wheeler: I would say too, so my final FINAL thought.

Jenn Otremba: As it turns out, Bray has a lot to say.

Bray Wheeler: I have a lot to say on the subject of crisis leadership. No, I think it’s, to your point, if you’re the designated Crisis Leader that’s your opportunity to kind of step into that and lead them. That’s why you’re in that role. But I think if you’re not in that role if you’re one of the key partners, you’re on the Crisis … you know, their cross-functional team, if you’re underneath that person, you’re still a Crisis Leader. You still have a job to do you still have to lead your respective area, you still have to be that player. So it’s also about being a Crisis Follower too where you’re in it. And you’re self-aware enough to know, “I’m tired, I’ve got to take a step back”, or “I know about this, let me see what I can do to help.” I think there’s that designated Crisis Leader but everybody else has got to have a little bit of that too to be able to get through it.

Jenn Otremba: Right, there’s some responsibility for everyone on the team. But yeah, be the leader or be the follower, you know, right?

Bray Wheeler: Because the culture of the team is probably what makes or breaks that response.

Jenn Otremba: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Bryan Strawser: That’s it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, join us next week for our update on Current Events and News from around the World. Hope to see you then.