Leadership in the Midst of a Crisis

[This reflection is from Steph Wilson, Manager of Client Support Services, Information Technology, The Claremont Colleges Services.  She is a current participant in the SoCal MOR Leaders Program.  Steph may be reached at [email protected].] 

Hi all, 

I’m going to join in with Libby and share my reflection on the same topic: leadership in the midst of crisis. I agree with Libby’s point about the difficulties we’re all dealing with, and the gaps and vulnerabilities that may have exposed in IT architecture. We’re certainly not alone in that (I’m looking at you, Zoom). Like Libby, I’ve also been thinking of the leadership principles we’ve discussed, and how increasingly relevant they’ve become during this crisis. One topic in particular keeps coming up for me: managing stress.

I was talking with Jessica last week, and we were comparing notes on the way our leadership team here at The Claremont Colleges have been handling everything. We both agreed that the level of communication we’ve received has been great. Our leaders have been clear and open with what they know, what they don’t know, and what their priorities are through this crisis. The communication has been quick and frequent, even when they didn’t have all the answers. I observed that the communication has been targeted at the topics that cause the most distress for our staff: questions around pay, job continuity, and dealing with the massive level of upheaval we’re all experiencing in our day-to-day lives. 

In one of the articles we read earlier in the program, Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie stated that one of the things leaders do to enable change is to manage distress (The Work of Leadership, 2001). By dealing with as many of the distressing topics as possible, our leaders here have allowed our staff to harness the remaining eustress to make the changes needed to go remote with only a bare minimum of planning. There is still distress to manage, but their very human approach to the realities of the situation has kept it at a minimum. Managers have been encouraged to help staff find new and different ways to be productive, rather than holding people to standards that were developed under “normal” times. Our CEO himself has spoken about the impact of pet- and kid-driven work environments, and has reassured staff that expectations have been adjusted accordingly. The compassion in all of these communications has made our staff feel as at ease as possible in these very uneasy times, and has pulled our community closer together.

It's been an interesting case study in leading change. This situation has certainly brought a significant amount of change, and I am doing my best to take a page out of my leadership’s book and manage my team’s level of distress. Hope you’re all well, and finding ways to manage your own distress, and even restore and renew yourselves, during this chaotic time!

Cheers,

Steph