How one company’s crisis becomes a crisis in yours
It’s not so much what leaders do that frustrates staff; it’s what leaders don’t do, writes James Adonis.
If you’re yet to experience a crisis in your business, it’s probably only a matter of time.
It’s a phenomenon that afflicts a majority of organisations, usually once every few years.
If you’re lucky, it’ll be relatively easy to overcome. A slump in sales, for example, conquered by a clever marketing strategy, or an IT breakdown fixed by an urgent upgrade.
If you’re less fortunate, the crisis could be debilitating. A natural disaster, for instance, or the accidental contamination of your products, thereby poisoning your customers.
Whatever the crisis, one thing’s a given: It’s contagious. Various recent cases that demonstrate this
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to be true. One is the worldwide movement against acts of sexual harassment, which began in the entertainment industry but has spread to many other sectors.
Another is wage theft, or at least dodgy payroll practices, which have spread from franchise to franchise. A further example is the questionable ethical standard of bankers and brokers breaking wallets and hearts, in finance firm after finance firm.
So yeah, crisis contagion is a real danger that could afflict your business sooner than you expect.
In a study published last month in the Business Horizons journal, scholars identified a combination of two factors that make it easier to predict when contagion is going to occur.
The first factor is known as ‘‘accessibility’’, which means the type of business experiencing the crisis is similar to yours.
The second factor is known as ‘‘diagnosticity’’, which relates not so much to the type of organisation but to the type of crisis. If you look at, say, the humiliation Coca-Cola endured when it released a Life product that contained more sugar than a healthy life would ever allow, it created a snowball effect whereby many other products were scrutinised for their excessive sugar content.
The ultimate question is what you do about it.
My PhD thesis was precisely on this topic. I researched the ways in which leaders influence their employees’ engagement during a crisis – the type of crisis serious enough to threaten an organisation’s survival.
What I discovered (among all but one of the participants) was that employees are most disengaged by passive leadership.
Put differently, it’s not so much what leaders do that frustrates staff; it’s what leaders don’t do. It’s inaction rather than action that angers them most.
At times when employees most desperately want information, they rarely get it. At times when they want their leaders to be present and visible, they’re generally absent. What they end up getting instead is a dispiriting cocktail of indecision, vagueness and avoidance.
And it isn’t only a crisis that’s contagious. Employees’ emotions are just as infectious, probably more so. Any uncertainty or anxiety they’re feeling about a crisis afflicting a similar business, or any concern they have about an unrelated company experiencing a crisis they fear may be replicated in yours, and well…
Well, it ain’t pretty. In my own research, the most common emotions experienced by employees during these turbulent periods were stress, sorrow, anger and exhaustion. Not a pleasant work environment at all. –Sydney Morning Herald
James Adonis is the author of The Motivation Hoax: A smart person’s guide to inspirational nonsense.
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