How to build a crisis management team until things return to normal? Your best return on investment today may be to redefine what you mean by return.
The word “return” implies going back to something. Its focus—however rosy or bleak—is on the past. Planning on the future requires visionary courage, adaptability, and flexibility in order to make the old new again. No time to pine for the past. This is the moment to reboot, regroup, reorganize, and reconfigure.
Obviously, the big goal during this global crisis is to keep providing goods and services, maintaining customer or client relationships, meeting quotas, and making profits. But how can you navigate through all of the tumultuous changes in your industry, your market share, and your supply chain, without your company imploding? That’s the biggest question.
In order to assess the scope of the crisis and its potential impact on your team—not just your company, but the people who make it work—you have to explore a lot of smaller questions.
Reconfiguration questions
- Can everyone on your staff work remotely? If so how will that affect morale?
- How can you facilitate a sense of work-life balance when their home is also their office?
- How comfortable are you and the other managers with letting staffers set boundaries, e.g. work hours, breaks, and email or text availability?
- How can you help them set up a workstation separated or partitioned from their living space?
Retooling questions
- If yours is a silo-culture, how willing are you to open up access to more information and to certain tools?
- How can you help managers give up some of their “turf” without making them feel their place in the pecking order is threatened?
- What can you do to smooth the transition from territoriality and siloing to open-sourcing and inclusion?
- How can you phase in that process and provide the necessary training to use new tools efficiently?
- What software programs can you invest in, and what “new best practices” can you adopt in order to replicate the positive attributes of the company culture you enjoyed onsite?
- What new skills will your staff need to master now? What should the learning curve be?
- How readily does your staff make decisions collaboratively, on the fly?
- How well supported are your workers when they want to take risks and innovate?
Management consultants at McKinsey & Company recently posited the following:
…we believe that the next step in the response of businesses cannot be thought of as a phase at all. It will be open-ended rather than fixed in time. A better mental model is to think about developing a new “muscle”: an enterprise-wide ability to absorb uncertainty and incorporate lessons into the operating model quickly. The muscle has to be a “fast-twitch” one, characterized by a willingness to change plans and base decisions on hypotheses about the future—supported by continually refreshed microdata about what’s happening, for example, in each retail location. And the muscle also needs some “slow-twitch” fibers to set long-term plans and manage through structural shifts.
How to build a crisis management team? Agility!
Today the word “agile” in the American marketplace has a whole new multi-dimensional meaning. Mom-and-pop businesses as well as global conglomerates must embrace the concept in order to respond quickly and efficiently to constant changes.
DiSC develops agility
When it comes to traumatic fluctuations Magnovo is a veteran at resilience and shock absorbency. How to build a crisis management team? If you need help answering this question, Magnovo can field this and many others.
For starters: Do you know who among your team works best under stress? To build your crisis management team—the people who can help meet the challenges you currently face—you need to know each one personally and to assess their skillset with fresh eyes.
That’s where DiSC personality profile training can help. DiSC stands for Dominant, Influential, Supportive, and Conscientious—the 4 basic personality types we all exhibit. DiSC training can help you:
- Understand what each of your employees is feeling right now and why—based on their specific personality type.
- Identify the ones who are best equipped to help you deal with the crisis.
- Reorganize and then reboot so that everyone feels more fully understood, and more valued than ever before.