CHAPTER 6

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY: ‘WHAT IS YOUR EMERGENCY?’: LEADERSHIP IN A CRISIS

How do you know when you are in a crisis and what that crisis is about?

Will your strategy get you through?

What can you do to prepare?

INTRODUCTION

During the time they are a leader, everyone will experience some sort of crisis. For some it will be a relatively minor affair, for others it will be major. The enormous crisis caused by COVID 19 across the world during 2020 and 2021 is an extreme example that affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent. For many, thankfully, the crises that affect them during their leadership career will not be of such great proportions, though they could still create an existential moment for their organisation. Whatever the crisis that leaders have to deal with, they should understand that their leadership will have to change, and this short chapter is a guide to how. The title of the chapter is taken from the first part of the radio calls that a pilot will make when their aircraft suffers a serious emergency – she or he will make a ‘Mayday’ call – the word always repeated three times to ensure the message gets to everyone. If the pilot has not specified what the emergency is, the ground controller will immediately ask. And that is precisely what a leader must ask themselves when a crisis arises.

Once a leader knows they are in a crisis, and what that crisis really is, they can start to swing into action to deal with it. Clearly, to be able to swing into action immediately the leader must have first prepared for a crisis. It is important here to ensure that leaders do not try to deal with the current crisis by doing all the things they think they, or their predecessor, should have done in the last one. It is very easy to look at a previous crisis, see what should have been done, and apply it to the current one. But is that what really needs to be done for this crisis? Leaders need to understand what the essence of a crisis is and what applies to all crises, but also what applies to each specific one.

In every crisis, survival becomes paramount. Strategy should be forgotten, as planning starts to deal with the issues of the crisis. The way things have always been done – normal procedures, formal or informal – may have to go. Plans created at the start of the crisis will almost certainly have to be modified, goals let go and plans remade again. Eventually, strategy has to be returned to, at the right moment. But is it still the right strategy? What needs modifying? What needs to be kept and what needs to be thrown away?

WHAT CRISIS?

When asking what sort of crisis you have on your hands, the first problem is a psychological one. Most leaders like dealing with a crisis as it allows them to tell people what to do and sets them in the position of leader as hero (at least if things go right for them). It’s a great feeling: people look to you to solve things, they do as you demand, you get into the ‘flow’ and it’s a huge adrenaline buzz. Some people think this is the only kind of leadership – it’s not. Some think it is the best kind of leadership – it can be, but only in the right circumstances, if there really is a crisis and it’s not just the leader saying so.

First, the leader facing a crisis should take a little time to consider the situation – but not too much, as things will need to start happening quickly. Going back to the analogy of the aircraft emergency, all RAF pilots have to know their ‘bold-face drills’ off by heart; these are the pre-prepared plans for a crisis. But it is important that they apply the correct drill to the emergency. If you execute the wrong bold-face drill you can make matters considerably worse. Back when I was flying Phantoms, pilots had been known to shut down the good engine rather than the one that had failed – and the Phantom only had two engines! This came close to being me once, when my starboard engine blew up on take-off. Fortunately, the Phantom was capable of flying away on one engine, which we did. I was convinced that my starboard engine had failed from the engine indications. But my navigator, who had more experience and was a more senior officer than me, saw out the canopy smoke on the port side of our jet wash. A decision had to be made, and quickly, as a severely damaged engine left alone could cause a catastrophic fire. The crew room banter had always been that the first bold-face action for all drills should be ‘wind the clock’ (the Phantom had a clockwork stopwatch in the front cockpit as it was built long before digital watches!). The meaning of this banter was to pause, take a breath, and check exactly what the emergency was before launching into the drill. I did this: I re-checked the instruments, re-checked with my navigator and shut down the starboard engine, and I was right to do so. When we landed, we were told that we had left half the starboard engine in pieces on the runway. It is exactly the same with any crisis: make sure that whatever you are going to do is going to make this crisis better, not worse.

Once you have decided that you do have a crisis and you know what sort of a crisis it is, it is important not to deny to people that it is a crisis. Only by ensuring that all know that it is a crisis will you mobilise the support that you will need to get things done, to change things. However, it is equally important not to overdo the description of the crisis, or make more of it than it really is. You may initially engender the support and extra effort needed from people, but they will quickly see through the exaggeration and trust in you is likely to slip away. Without that trust, they will not easily accept being told what to do and the unifying force that a crisis can be to an organisation will disappear. Equally importantly, is to work out who should be involved, both internally and externally, and who should carry on as normal. Crises do not affect all areas nor all businesses the same – for example, COVID 19 has been a disaster for some but has created opportunities for others. From this it is obvious that your communications to various parties will have to differ.

PREPARATION

It is possible, and indeed vitally important, to prepare for a crisis. Just don’t make those preparations things that would only have helped the last crisis as they are likely to make this one worse. It is really important here to think about what the essence of all crises is. This is not something extraordinary, most businesses have some sort of ‘business continuity’ plans. These are pre-prepared plans for some sort of crisis. All I would say is, does your business continuity plan tell you how you are going to communicate with your own people in a pandemic such as COVID 19, as well as when your internet crashes from a denial-of-service attack or a companywide virus? These crises are very different, and it is to be hoped that they do not occur at the same time.

So, what do all crises have in common? They require speed of response, a huge amount of extra work for all involved, a larger volume of communications and re-planning for survival. From this we can see that decision making must be sped up and the resilience of leaders must be thought through – they are already under pressure and that will increase exponentially. Resilience within the team will also be needed. What and how to communicate to whom will need thinking through, and crucially what not to say. When under pressure being questioned by an audience, particularly the press, it is easy to say the wrong thing. Tony Hayward’s quip, when he was CEO of BP, that he would ‘like his life back’ was a major part of his undoing in the Deep Water Horizon oil spill crisis. The pressure on him was enormous as the crisis unfolded, but this was quite the wrong thing to say in the face of the damage to other people’s livelihoods and to the coastline of the USA.

Decision making is both an art and a science. Especially in a crisis, a decision will have to be made before it is possible to gather and assess all the information about what is going on. Leaders will have to hone the art of knowing when a decision must be made. Rather like my comments on taking a little time to consider right at the beginning of a crisis, leaping to an instant decision is also often a mistake. It takes instinct and judgement to know when a decision has to be made – past experience alone is not enough. Returning to the time I lost an engine in a Phantom on take-off, had I made an instant decision I may or may not have got the necessary action right; had I listened to my navigator and his greater experience, I would have shut down the wrong engine. By taking enough time, but not too much to allow the situation to deteriorate, and assessing all the information available, I managed to make the correct decision on which engine to shut down.

In a crisis, to make decision making slicker may well mean that decisions have to be taken by a smaller group than usual. In extremis, it may mean leaders taking decisions on their own, but all the advantages of constructive dissent and disadvantages of destructive consent must be remembered. Before a crisis hits, thought should be given to who is going to make-up the decision-making groups. Consider how the role of non-execs may change in this respect: what they may be able to offer and how far into the operating decisions they should be allowed. Some incursion into day-to-day operational decision making for the survival of the company would seem normal, even necessary, as strategy will have gone by the board. But what is not in their purview and when they should retreat from any incursion would be worth thinking about. Certainly, a much greater level of detail and information being passed to non-execs would seem necessary.

That brings us neatly to communications. It is not just the non-execs that will need more – all your people will need far more communication on the nature of the crisis. These communications should inspire them to greater efforts to overcome the crisis, tell them what they can do, what they should not do and how much flexibility they have to experiment and grasp opportunities. These communications must give them a sense of purpose and guide their actions. The fact that there is a crisis and what this crisis is about must come across clearly. Overdo it and people will not believe it, underdo it and they will shrug it off as someone else’s problem, and either way the unifying purpose that a crisis can create will not materialise. Thought can also be given to who is going to make the communications and how they are going to do it in varying situations. Obviously, the overall leader is going to have to make much of the early communication effort, but pre-designated people can be prepared to take over much of the load as things progress, to give relief to the leader.

Then there are the external communications. The exact nature of the crisis will inevitably define whom an organisation needs to communicate with externally. However, thought can be given by individuals or groups set-up beforehand as to any generic external groups and the sort of information they will need. Generic answers as to what, when, where, how, to whom and by whom can be ascertained, which will make the onset of the crisis a little less hectic. If you are going to be in front of the press, it is well worth practising what you will say, as it is easy to be led into an inappropriate, flippant comment. Practice makes it easier to get your points across, rather than just following the journalist’s agenda.

In these few short paragraphs, it becomes obvious just how much pressure is likely to be put upon leaders (and many others within an organisation) and thus just how important the resilience of the leader and their team will be. Obviously, the length of the crisis will be an important consideration in how leaders deal with resilience. All that is written in this text about resilience still applies. However, for a long crisis, thought will have to be given to giving people time off, however brief that may be. For a short crisis, simply helping people to power through may be necessary. Whichever it is, leaders should not forget this aspect. Their people will need help, empathy and leadership to keep going. Opportunities for respite will need to be taken.

In the approach to the second Gulf War, I was leading a small team responsible for the deployment of all the RAF contributions to that war. It was a fast-moving situation, with an uncertain domestic and international political environment, constant changes of plans and an immense amount to do in a short time – all the hallmarks of a crisis. One of my people had a sudden change of location for the force element he was in charge of deploying. To get things done in time, he worked a straight 24-hour shift and just kept going. After about 28 hours, there was a lull in activity, a window for a bit of respite, so I sent him home. It took some persuading as he was set on making sure things were as good as they could be for the deploying people, but I insisted as his performance was likely to drop as time wore on and sheer exhaustion caused him to miss things. The rest of us kept his portfolio ticking over until he returned the next day, fit for the long haul that the whole operation would be.

Lastly, within this section, thought should be given to how opportunities that the crisis offers are going to be grasped. First and foremost, survival is the thing that must be thought about, and all planning initially should be focused on this – if the organisation does not survive then no amount of opportunities are helpful! But it should always be remembered that crises bring opportunity. Indeed, I am told that the Chinese characters for ‘crisis’ are a combination of those for threat and opportunity. This always helps me to remember that in a crisis I should look for opportunity. In preparing for a future crisis, thought should be given to how leaders are going to let their people have the flexibility to grasp opportunities as they arise. Those financial institutions that allowed their people to experiment after the 2008 crash were doing just this. What freedoms will your people need? What communications channels will be needed for your people quickly to tell the decision makers about an opportunity? Who or what group are going to be these decision makers?

PLANNING

Any crisis is going to involve a vastly increased amount of replanning and rethinking. First there, will have to be replanning for survival. By its very nature, if you are in a crisis then current plans and strategies are not working; if they were, there would be no crisis. If your organisation is in crisis it is because of a strategic and planning failure, and that failure is because of unforeseen events. That they were unforeseen may be because of a strategic process failure – that is, they should have been foreseen, but it could also be that the events are so extraordinary that they may have been foreseen but discounted in the strategic process as too unlikely to be included in the planning process. Either way, replanning for survival must be the imperative at the beginning of any crisis.

When doing the planning for immediate actions necessary for survival, they must clearly happen very quickly to get things moving. Contingency plans for various scenarios may help here, as outlined previously – such as the bold-face drills, so-called because they are in bold type on the flight reference cards. However, it is essential that the crisis is understood as best it can be at this moment, which is why a momentary pause taken at the beginning of a crisis is important for leaders to understand the crisis. It is also important for leaders to keep taking a little time to reassess the crisis at every turn, as initial assessments may not have been complete or may not have been right at all. The crisis may develop in ways not at first foreseen and every emerging nuance will have to be accounted for.

When replanning at the start of a crisis, leaders are very much in tactical mode and this is an area that they are often most comfortable with. But it must be remembered that strategy has already failed, and to survive will mean making changes to it. It may well be that much of an organisation’s history will have to be ripped up at the beginning of the replanning for survival. Procedures that have served an organisation well in keeping things going smoothly may be the ones that have to go. In short, the replanning should not be constrained by the easy familiarity of normal rules.

Once survival seems possible, the planning should increasingly consider the ability for people to take opportunities that may arise. Whether this is new avenues that had not been seen before or new methods that had previously been dismissed as too risky is not important. What is important is that leaders are open to unconventional thinking from all sources that could be generated by the crisis. Not only open to that thinking, but actively seeking it and creating communication channels with those who might have those thoughts.

Better understanding of the crisis and the chance to take opportunities thrown up by the crisis also mean yet more replanning. Part of the essence of a crisis is constant replanning – constant dropping of unhelpful plans and picking up of new ones. Returning to my emergency in the Phantom: having shut the faulty engine down, we had to plan to abandon our mission and return to land at our home airfield. There were many things to think about: we had to reduce weight for the approach and landing; inform the rest of our formation; let air traffic control know our flight path intentions and when and how we intended to approach the airfield (which, in turn, was dependent on weather conditions); and continue emergency drills to ensure that those things in the aircraft dependent on electrical or hydraulic power from the starboard engine were switched across to the port engine without overloading it. Lots more planning – and those plans kept changing. For example, weight reduction could be done by dumping fuel from the internal wing tanks through the dump masts, and further reductions could be made by jettisoning the external fuel tanks under the wings. Dumping the fuel has little environmental impact as the fuel evaporates quickly, but jettisoning the external fuel tanks is another matter as they will land somewhere with all their fuel on board. As the emergency unfolded, we decided that we could afford to retain the external tanks and not cause someone a large environmental problem. This was possible because our route back to the airfield meant that we had burnt through sufficient fuel to reduce our overall weight to one suitable for landing.

For some within organisations, the constant change, planning, replanning and replanning again will make it seem as though they have barely begun to get to grips with one plan when it has changed to another. They could feel that the chaos just continues at the strategic level and no one has a grip. This is in the fundamental nature of crises, and emphasises the need for much more internal communication to help people understand what is going on.

At some time, of course, leaders will have to return to strategy. Quite when it is the right time to do so is at the heart of understanding the current crisis – of understanding when survival of the organisation is no longer precarious. It may well be that the constant tactical replanning starts to incorporate elements of the original erstwhile strategy. But what of the strategy as a whole? The COVID 19 crisis, for example, brought much talk of ‘when normality returns’ or ‘finding the new normal’. These are issues that should be addressed by any strategic process started in a crisis. Is the crisis something that will really blow over? What will the new future look like in the wake of the crisis? Whatever the answer to these questions, leaders will need to think about the restoration of strategy. Is it appropriate to restore (some) of the history and processes that were ditched at the beginning of the crisis? What of new opportunities? Were they just things that pertained to the crisis and not the future, or are they the future? All of this will need strategic direction, but simply returning to the original strategy is not good enough.

All the replanning and return to strategy means that leaders need time to reflect. Yet this is the very commodity that leaders will have least of during a crisis. They will have had to throw themselves into the day-to-day tactical running of an organisation, ramped up their communications internally and externally and likely been working much longer hours making decisions and so forth. Leaders have to constantly look to see whom they can pass off effort to among their people. They will need advice as to when their input as leader is really necessary – where they have to make an appearance or where it must be them that makes an announcement. This is important for their own resilience, as I have mentioned previously, but also to allow them the necessary reflection time to understand the crisis and how it is developing, as well as getting the organisation back onto a strategic path.

SUMMARY

All people will face crises during their time in a leadership position, whether those crises are major or minor. Crises are hugely busy, chaotic and confusing times, when demands on leaders rise exponentially. By preparing for crises in a generic manner, leaders can help themselves to get through the experience – making better decisions and getting to better outcomes, as well as easing the burden.

First, it is important to understand the crisis as it hits. Just reacting to it automatically, something that is natural to do, is not the best way forward. Taking a moment to understand that it really is a crisis and what its true nature is, so that the initial actions are more likely to make things better rather than worse, really helps. But do not take too long, as that in itself can make matters worse. The matter of timing is not something that can be set beforehand, it will always be a question of judgement on the day. But knowing who should be involved and who not, externally and internally, makes matters easier.

Preparation always helps. There will always be far more planning, decision making and communication to be done, and at speed. Preparing by knowing who is going to do that planning and decision making sets things up. Smaller groups will make decisions more quickly, and planning groups need to be of sufficient size to cover all the work but not too big as to create their own problems. While survival is paramount, it must be borne in mind that there will be opportunities thrown up by the crisis. Depending on the size of the organisation, it may well be prudent to pre-set a group to deal with the communication load – to think through the sort of generic things that will need to be said and those that should not be said. Practice for speaking in front of the press is immensely helpful to allow you to get your points across. All the team will need to be resilient, especially the leaders, and they must always be aware of this and bolster resilience when possible.

Planning, replanning and more replanning will be needed as the crisis is better understood and as it evolves. Communication of the need for this continual change will be necessary internally, and possibly externally as well. Planning should not be circumscribed by tradition or normal processes, which may well not be appropriate in the light of the crisis. Once survival looks likely, planning should also include the taking of opportunities that will arise. At some point, strategy will need to be re-introduced: the original strategy should be closely examined for continued relevance, with bits no longer suitable dropped and new bits introduced to align with the changed circumstances and altered future.

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. ■Crises will happen: prepare for them and take a moment to ensure you know what each crisis is about.
2. ■Workloads for all will increase – think about resilience.
3. ■Plan for survival and let go of unhelpful strategy, procedures, etc.
4. ■Keep looking at the crisis and replan whenever you need to.
5. ■Take opportunities that arise and reintroduce strategy when possible.