The silence was heavy in the room; the team shocked by the gravity of the number and the task at hand. Everyone sunk back in their chairs, shoulders stooped with the weight of the task given to us. We knew that not finding it would result in significant changes for our organization, our team members, and those in the room. It was the definition of crisis: emergency, predicament, plight, calamity, mess. We left the room tasked with finding expenses to cut or ways to generate revenue by the end of the year, and to be prepared to present our results to the team in a week.
I, like everyone else, walked back to my office in silence. On the way I passed many Team Members. The usual friendly greeting avoided. A heavy blanket of dread had been spread over the entire organization. Something had to be done.
A week later my colleagues and I re-entered the room. Like a spreading sickness, the faces of all in the room were ashen and tired. Our leader stood at the front of the room, marker in hand to write down our ideas. The first person volunteered: $25,000 savings could be found here. Then a prolonged silence. A second person volunteered: I think we could get up to $40,000 here, but really probably more like $20,000. Silence again. Our leader looked at us expectantly. My colleague pierced the silence suddenly and blurted out, “Angelica found $2 million dollars.”
Heads snapped and everyone was looking at me. Our leader asked me to begin. Here is what I had done:
- Crisis is a time for big moves – I took on the entire problem and set my goal at the $750,000, not at “my part” of it. Doing that would have limited my vision and my thinking, I needed to broaden my vision to consider all possibilities.
- Crisis is a time to gather inputs – I knew I wouldn’t find $750,000 in my small department without significantly cobbling our ability to perform. Instead, I spent the week walking around, talking to people, asking for their ideas. People in my team and outside my team. As the week progressed and people heard I was gathering ideas, they started coming to me. My task then became to pull the ideas together.
- In crisis every potential must be considered – some of the ideas that people brought me were a little extreme like “eliminate all managers,” but I didn’t screen out ideas in my initial gathering. I didn’t want to stop the flow of creativity and blind myself to any possibility. Further, some of the extreme ideas, if implemented on a smaller scale, were possible.
- Crisis is a time for change, often a change that needed to be made long ago. As people came forward I was astounded by the commonality of the following comment: “I think we should have done this a long time ago.” My response was always, “Why didn’t you bring this up before?” The answers had a similar tone: “No one asked me.” “I did, but no one listened.” “My ideas always get shot down.”
After some initial vetting of the ideas I had received and six days spent analyzing and projecting numbers, I took the findings to my colleague and asked for her input. She and I spent the day working through the entire spreadsheet. We refined the ideas, the numbers, added some additional ideas, and prepared them for presentation at the meeting.
In the meeting we as a team went through the ideas I had gathered. Some savings stayed, and some got taken off the spreadsheet. Tough conversations happened. I had brought up many ideas that impacted other departments, but when the credit was given to their team, some of the disagreement was eliminated. In the end, we had found more than enough savings between all us.
Unfortunately, as the economy continued its downward trend, we as an organization found ourselves in the same situation years later. It was frustrating for me, for our team, and for our shareholders. Eventually we worked our way out and prosperity returned. However, these downturns taught me some good lessons:
- Stop waiting for crisis to act. Constantly encourage people to come up with ways to do things better. That doesn’t mean having a comment/idea box somewhere in the offices. It means creating a culture of continual improvement. Making it the responsibility of managers to constantly encourage their teams to come up with ways to do things better, and rewarding those Team Members who do it.
- You can’t cut your way to prosperity. Companies often respond to financial crisis by beginning to cut expenses, programs, and people; but you can’t cut your way to prosperity. You have to grow top line results. Trim expenses yes, but fix the problem – you need more revenue. That is the only way that the business will grow. Focus your attention on how you can drive sales.
- Crisis is an opportunity for you to act beyond your scope. This wasn’t an HR project. This was an opportunity for me to show my value to the organization, but I had to step up and work outside my usual scope. Look at crisis as an opportunity to do more than what is on your job description and to stretch yourself. Often crisis presents opportunity to do more. Grab it and go for it!
Crisis is a turning point – for you and your career. It is a defining moment. It is a time of truth for you. It is the opportunity that builds resumes, defines you, and helps build careers. It is the stuff that makes the stories we learn from and those we retell. Crisis is where we learn about those around us and about ourselves.
How will you deal with your next crisis? Will you allow it to drag you to a point of no return, or will you stand up, take accountability and take it on?
How have you dealt with crisis?
