You may have heard that people show their true colours when they are under pressure. In psychology–speak, we say that the default response, the most well-worn brain pattern, is the one that shows up when the proverbial stuff hits the fan. The question is: how effective is your default response inside the pressure cooker of sudden, unexpected tough stuff in your workplace? Do you manage this off-the-cuff stuff well and produce positive outcomes during a crisis? Or is that the very moment that things tend to fall apart?

A crisis presents as a particular type of tough stuff, most often characterised by unexpectedness, uncertainty, a threat to important goals or a change to demands.

We believe there are three key areas to address in effectively dealing with a crisis. They are:

• how you turn up to a crisis situation
• how you deal with the aftermath
• how you prepare for future crisis events.

In this chapter we will unpack these points and discuss how you can apply them to the off-the-cuff stuff in your workplace.

Turning up to a crisis situation

Successfully dealing with tough stuff that occurs in the moment rarely requires just a reactive response. Most, if not all, leaders who handle the off-the-cuff stuff well share a common characteristic: they proactively arm themselves with the right way of thinking and never substitute genetics for hard work.

Crucial to achieving desired outcomes in the off-the-cuff stuff is exercising a possibility mindset; that is, challenging yourself to see what is possible when the odds are stacked against you.

Seeing possibility creates freedom

If you don't see possibilities, the likelihood of achieving success drops dramatically. Imagine your sales team has reached only 50 per cent of its target with two months to go until the end of the financial year, and the result could mean the business will be restructured, and jobs lost. Achieving budget may seem highly improbable, but if you and your team buy into that improbability, you will guarantee failure. If you've decided that something is not possible before you try to achieve the goal, the brain will shut down motivation and effort faster than you can blink an eye. Why? Because it's a simple survival mechanism: the conservation of energy. In ancient times there were many more occurrences of famine than feast, and as a result human beings became expert in conserving energy.

Not wasting energy can be important for survival and for being effective at work, but our energy shut-down mechanisms often kick in when we don't need them. To deal effectively with a crisis — such as being significantly behind budget at a turning point in the business — takes energy, creativity and openness to what's possible so that we keep stimulating the brain to find new and more effective courses of action.

If you are to have any hope of getting through a crisis powerfully, you have to be able to imagine possibilities for solving it.

Practised preparedness versus birthday gift

You may be capable of conjuring up the possible solutions to a crisis in your head, but you could still feel concerned that you lack the natural talent for executing those solutions. People generally put crisis response capability in the trait category, thinking of it as something you are either good at or not, or that it is part of your genetic make-up. ‘Gee, Sam is fantastic under pressure. Cool head — she's just that kind of gal'. Maybe you think of it as a special leadership gene — the one that maybe you missed out on and only the people from planet fabulous are lucky enough to receive at birth. However, being effective in a crisis is not a gift from birth; it's a preparedness practised throughout life.

We've seen too many examples of managers who have transformed their crisis leadership skills from implosive to impressive to buy into the genetics argument.

In her book, Mindset: The new psychology of success, Stanford researcher on motivation, personality and development Carol Dweck draws a distinction between a fixed versus a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, you believe your capabilities are more or less determined by birth and don't leave a lot of room for improvement. In a growth mindset, you believe your capabilities are flexible and can be improved significantly with time and effort. When you believe your ability to deal with the off-the-cuff stuff is fixed — something you have or don't have — rather than something you can learn, and you combine that with not feeling too good about your current capability, you may find yourself trying to avoid the prickly predicaments or jumping in awkwardly and stuffing things up even more.

But in crisis situations, the application of a growth mindset works and awesome responses can result. There's an opportunity to develop the skills of effective crisis response, and the way to start is to foster the growth mindset. So, for example, maybe you've lost your cool with a direct report during a high-pressure time in the business — for being late for a critical meeting, not following up with a key customer or making a simple error in a crucial sales document. Reflect on how you handled the situation: did your self-talk include comments such as, ‘I've got to put more practice into handling pressure and I could benefit from some work on that', or was it more like, ‘I've never been good under pressure, and there's not much I can do about it anyway'? If your response was more like the second statement, it's time to challenge your mindset and see that growth is possible.

Growth mindset, however, is not simply a thing you can tap into on a whim, especially under extreme pressure. If you're not well practised in the growth mindset, the more instinctual parts of your brain can take over. Like the emotional hijacking that occurs with rising anger (see chapter 6), under pressure your reptilian brain can hijack your problem-solving mechanisms. Crisis situations tend to stimulate the fight-or-flight response, the instinctual survival response designed to help you respond to physically harmful threats. In this response, the brain perceives a circumstance as threatening and triggers the release of hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline, which prepare the body for violent muscular action so you're ready to stay and fight the threat or run quickly from it.

When businesses are going through a crisis (perhaps a major budget cut or restructure), employees in fight-or-flight mode tend to let the small stuff slip, such as accountability for daily tasks. However, managers who are good during a crisis at motivating their staff to stay accountable for things such as timely meeting attendance or good customer service have learned how to keep their own survival emotions in check and how to respond well to the pressure overload. These managers respond to crises by interpreting perceived threats as manageable, and by using calming strategies such as deep breathing, time-outs and non-judgemental perspective-taking so that they aren't hijacked by their limbic system in the first place.

If you aren't quite there on the cool-headed approach, the way to improve is, first, to believe it is possible: see your capability as adaptable, not fixed; and, second, to practise identifying the strong survival emotions for what they are (overreactions to perceived threats). Practise thinking through your reactions to these emotions rather than responding automatically so that you can select an effective solution to the circumstances.

We will revisit some of the clever things that Sandy achieved in handling her situation, but before we do let's shift our focus to the second key area of handling the off-the-cuff stuff: how you can deal with what happens after the incident.

Dealing with the aftermath

The emergency situation has passed, and the fight-or-flight response has diminished. Although there is often some residue from the experience, there is a greater sense of calm. Being able to assess the fallout and pick up the pieces is an important step in dealing with these tough situations. There are two matters to address when dealing with the aftermath of a crisis: first, recognising the importance of resolving the heightened emotions that were experienced during the situation; and second, exploring and making meaning from the experience.

Resolve emotions

If you've conquered the peak of the crisis, it's time to resolve emotions — and quickly. You must acknowledge and work through any emotional impacts of the crisis situation as soon as possible — that is, deal with the crises after the crisis.

Contradicting ourselves may seem like a poor tactic to convince you of the strength of our arguments, but in a crisis you have to be ready to manage contradiction and uncertainty. As quickly as you've tuned out the personality and relationship stuff in front of you, to ensure that the boardroom negotiation was effective or that serious injury was averted, you have to tune back in and work hard to resolve the emotional fallout with the different individuals involved. We can't emphasise this enough. People will tell you they're doing fine in the aftermath of a chaotic workplace storm, but they're often not great judges of, or therapists for, themselves and the state of their emotions.

We have only to look at the horrific long-term effects of unaddressed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among survivors of Vietnam and other wars to realise that the suppression of emotional trauma is not effective beyond more than a few minutes — hours at most. In a more recent example, mental health researchers Joseph Boscarino, Richard Adams and Charles Figley showed that people who received worksite crisis interventions offered by their employers after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 experienced benefits across a spectrum of outcomes — compared with individuals who didn't get any help — including reduced risk of binge drinking, alcohol dependence, PTSD symptoms, major depression and anxiety.

Being a victim of terrorism is probably one of the most extreme forms of crisis: something not representative of what managers face in the workplace. Nonetheless, the process of acknowledging and working through people's emotions is critical. You're not expected to be anyone's psychotherapist, but what you can do as a manager is follow a number of useful steps:

• Empathise. Try to put yourself in other people's shoes to imagine what it might feel like for them and communicate your empathy to those people.
• Acknowledge publicly that whatever anyone feels is normal. The entire range of emotions in response to a crisis is normal: there is no right or wrong way to feel at any time.
• Coach people to get to a place of acceptance about what they have been feeling. This is more effective than reinforcing that they block out their emotions.

In the case of significant crises, where individuals (including yourself) have had difficult emotional responses, help people to get professional support, whether it's through an internal employee assistance program or external consultants.

Manage meaning

Once the peak of the crisis has passed, work with your team to make healthy meaning out of why the crisis happened and how you will grow from it. Often, people can think they have got past a crisis and have put it behind them, only to relive the trauma of it all over again when it pops back into memory a few months, and sometimes years, later. In the workplace, if there have been interpersonal conflicts during the crisis, as there were in Sandy's organisation in the case study, while immediate tensions may have diminished once the crisis settled down, unresolved tensions can be reignited in a future crisis.

The effective way to put a crisis behind you is to create positive, adaptive associations to the experience. This is not an easy process. It takes creativity and fortitude. But it gives you power and real strength to move on and respond effectively to future crises. You need to come up with positive reasons for why it all happened. For example, ‘Although it was tough, that restructure was probably needed to get us thinking about how we can be more efficient with our time management', or ‘We didn't really need to lose three of our major sponsors to acknowledge that our strategy had to change, but I believe that crisis was a turning point for us. Without it, we probably would not have come up with these innovative ideas for growth'.

There may always be some tough emotions for people when they reflect on a crisis, but making positive meaning of the experience is the difference between bouncing back from it and stagnating for the rest of your career.

Preparing for future crisis events

We talked earlier about possibility versus probability. Sandy's situation, described in the case study, shows it is also essential to prioritise the actions that deliver on the possibility, rather than getting caught up in the negative results going on around you. Focusing on negative outcomes is like getting caught up in the gawk phenomenon on a highway, where drivers stare at a car wreck rather than focusing on good driving to get past it, which creates more traffic jams and accidents. Focusing instead on the conditions that caused the crash is how you can avoid becoming part of the pile up.

Prioritise: control the controllables

In a future crisis, you have to focus on actions, but not just any actions. The things that matter most in a crisis are the actions that will make a difference and that are in your immediate control, not the outcomes going on around you that you can't control. We often use an expression with our high-performance clients that is relevant for those having to sort out a tough situation under extreme pressure: ‘fail going 100 per cent'. This means being okay with the unavoidable failures as long as you're doing everything you can to achieve the outcomes over which you do have control. When people get caught up in the failures that they can't control anyway, it just reduces the precious few resources they have for tackling the priority actions in a crisis.

Expert in dealing with crises, retired US general Russel L. Honoré (the former commander of Joint Task Force Katrina), who oversaw the military relief efforts after the devastating hurricanes of 2005 in the Gulf Coast, reminds us of the importance of prioritising critical action: ‘Try to quickly assess the number-one priority … if the number-one priority is to save lives and people understand that, then that will trump a lot of the other conversations or good ideas that come up'.

Less planning, more practising

Jonathan Clark and Mark Harman, experts on crisis management, remind us that an effective crisis management plan is founded on two distinct principles:

• You can't plan for every possible crisis that might occur.
• Practising or rehearsing your response to potential crises can make all the difference.

Studies of crisis management will remind you that anticipating and preparing for crises using scenario or contingency planning is essential for an effective response. However, recent research has revealed that crisis planning may not have any significant association with the effectiveness of crisis management, and in some cases a high level of crisis planning could get in the way of implementing decisions and create rigidity that blocks a team's effectiveness in getting things done.

Planning for a workplace crisis on its own can be like planning to run a marathon from the comfort of your couch without ever going for a run. The planning may even give you some (false) confidence, but no matter how well you plan the run, you won't achieve any gains in your physical fitness. Planning for crises could be setting you up for disaster if you don't have a way of rehearsing the crisis response. Planning is not enough and is sometimes downright counterproductive because it can paralyse effective action. It makes more sense to make crisis mindsets and behaviours a regular part of your routine.

A good mate of ours, founder of the Global Thought Leaders movement and guru on professional speaking Matt Church, calls this process ‘practised spontaneity'. Form effective habits through regular practice that you can then draw on spontaneously when you need them.

Surveys tell us that the greatest fear among people in the modern world is speaking in public. Fight or flight isn't much use when you step up onto a stage and try to deliver a compelling message to a large, expectant audience. How smooth and engaging is your CEO's presentation at the annual conference? Have you ever watched a comedian shoot from the hip, spontaneously engaging with different audience members? If the person fails in either of these situations, the result can be utter humiliation. What professional speakers and comedians (and the rare CEO) do is practise what they want to say and how to say it in so many different ways and in so many different sequences that on the day they can be spontaneous in terms of when and how they deliver their practised material, drawing the right response for different audiences at the right time without missing a beat. What they are saying may look made up at the time, but the content is incredibly well rehearsed — it is the method and moment of delivery in context that is the spontaneous part.

Going back to our case study of Sandy, the approach she decided to work on was developing skills that would serve her and the team at all times, in crisis or in calm. Sandy focused on being open and authentic in her feedback to all her staff (and reinforced them to do the same with each other). She initiated the tough conversations when the issues were still small, before they could blow up into big problems, and she constantly checked in with key members of her staff to get an emotional barometer of the team, so that she could provide coaching and other resources to help manage and minimise the escalation of interpersonal tension. Learning and practising the techniques for effective management were going to be the best tools for Sandy to manage any future crises that might arise.

Choose your daily behaviours carefully — if you are complacent and practise mediocrity when things are easy, you can only expect to get mediocrity when things get tougher.

Conclusion

As much as you may plan for it, a crisis is pretty much defined as a situation that you can't be totally prepared for. A crisis is different from a simple failure in that it demands significant and immediate change, and you and your team will be stretched to adapt effectively. What will make all the difference is if you practise the key mindsets and behaviours outlined in this chapter regularly, regardless of whether you're in crisis or not.

Remember, given that there is probably no perfect response for dealing with a crisis, if you are in constant action around the suggested strategies, you will be ahead of 99 per cent of people in responding to crises.