One of the advantages of electing a person with executive leadership experience – as opposed to, say, the current occupant of the White House – is that such experience usually teaches you how to deal with a crisis. That would be especially helpful now, when the Obama Administration finds itself bogged down by multiple crises and shows no sign whatsoever of understanding how to deal with any of them.
In my business career, I have dealt with various crises, and that experience prompted me to look at how this administration is handling these various crises. I followed some very specific steps in working through a crisis management situation, and they worked. The Obama Administration is not following the steps that I used, or that most executives and managers use when they are trying to deal with a crisis.
And it shows. First, here are the steps:
Recognize there’s a crisis. A crisis is a situation that’s headed for a disaster, so the objective is to avoid a disaster. You may not be able to create total victory, but the definition of a crisis is that if you do not fix it, it will result in a disaster.
Assess all relevant facts and information. It didn’t say assess all the political implications. It didn’t say assess how we’re going to spin the situation. You have to honestly recognize that there’s a crisis and honestly assess all relevant facts and information.
Listen to alternate ideas from everybody involved. Last week we heard the administration had dozens of people aware of the Bergdahl swap within the administration, but nobody picked up the phone to call members of Congress. In a crisis situation, you want have the input and ideas of as many people as you can.
Put together an action plan and execute it. Let me tell you about one of my most challenging, and ultimately most successful, experiences in executing an action plan in the midst of a crisis.
When I was first put in charge of IT for the Pillsbury Corporation, I had the responsibility of helping to plan not only our IT needs for the company but also coordinating it with all the subsidiaries, and I was responsible for all the administrative functions at headquarters in Minneapolis.
When I was first promoted to vice president, the company was in the midst of an effort to coordinate many operations into a singular world headquarters location. I was taking over for another executive who had decided to “retire.” One of the reasons this executive decided to retire – and he was at the time in charge of just the world headquarters project and not IT – was that world headquarters project was behind schedule and over budget.
It was a crisis, and if some changes had not been made the project, it would have been completed very late and way over budget. That was unacceptable to management, so I was asked by the chairman of the board under the recommendation of Dr. John Holland to take over both the IT functions and the world headquarters project.
Two crises. One new vice president. Congratulations on your promotion!
First, I had to recognize there was a crisis. We were about to blow past a $100 million budget without completing the project on time, failing in the process to combine the operations of nine offices under one headquarter location. There was no denying we had a big problem, and it would have done no one any good to try to “spin” or claim otherwise. We had to fix it.
Second, I assessed all relevant facts and information. The first thing I did was to call a staff meeting, with the help of the executive assistant I inherited from my predecessor, since I didn’t yet know a lot of the players. When I walked into that meeting room, I saw 26 people sitting there.
“Who are y’all?” I asked.
One lady replied: “We’re your direct reports on this project.”
What? Twenty-six direct reports? No wonder the project was getting bogged down. You can’t have 26 different people trying to tell the director of the project what to do on a day-to-day basis. There were leaders on everything from legal issues and dealing with the bank to drapes for the windows. What’s more, just about all of these 26 people were afraid to make decisions, as was the executive I succeeded. It was a complete mess.
So I had individual meetings with each one of them to learn what they knew and what they thought was needed to fix the problem. As I did so, I was also getting a sense of who were really going to be my key players. Soon after these meetings, I selected five people to run point on the project, and with their involvement we put together an action plan.
Well, to make a long story short, we finished the project early and without exceeding our budget. I don’t mean to make it sound easy, because it wasn’t, but it was basically a matter of changing the structure of the team and the reporting functions so people could make decisions and take the necessary actions.
If you look at the serious problems this nation faces – whether it’s crises of the moment like Iraq, the VA or the IRS scandal, or longer-term crises like the debt and the entitlement mess – our current leadership has no concept of how to deal with a crisis. They won’t even admit the problem exists, nor do they deal in facts and relevant information, nor do they listen to anyone who is not parroting their pre-conceived ideological notions, nor do they understand how to take action.
Our present-day political system rewards people who are good at politics, without much concern for whether they know how to manage anything. That’s how we ended up with a president like Barack Obama, who can’t run much of anything beyond a campaign.
We’re paying a price for that now. This entire presidency is turning into one big crisis.
